Cuba hit by second nationwide blackout in a week

HAVANA

People walk on a street without electricity during a nation wide blackout in Havana on March 21, 2026.

Cuba plunged into darkness for the second time in less than a week on March 21 after its national power network failed again, strained by aging infrastructure and a U.S. oil blockade.

As night fell, Havana's streets were mostly pitch black, with people navigating using phone lights or flashlights, just five days after the previous blackout.

In the touristy old city, some restaurants were able to stay open thanks to generators, with musicians playing music, but the regular blackouts have made life more difficult for Cubans.

"This is becoming unbearable," Ofelia Oliva, a 64-year-old Havana resident, told AFP.

"It hasn't even been a week since we experienced a similar situation. It is getting tiresome," Oliva said as she returned home after giving up on plans to visit her daughter.

The "total disconnection" of the national electricity system was due to an outage in a power unit at one of the country's thermoelectric plants, causing a "cascading effect," the state-owned Cuban Electric Union said.

It said it was activating micro-grids to provide power to critical facilities, including hospitals and water treatment plants.

"I wonder if we're going to be like this our whole lives. You can't live like this," Nilo Lopez, a 36-year-old taxi driver, told AFP.

The country's electricity generation is sustained by a network of eight aging thermoelectric plants, some in operation for over 40 years, that suffer frequent breakdowns or must be shut down for maintenance cycles.

Cubans face daily blackouts of up to 15 hours in Havana. In the interior of the island, these outages can exceed 40 hours.