Cuba restores power after third nationwide blackout in less than 10 days
Power was restored across Cuba on July 15 after the island suffered its third nationwide blackout in less than 10 days, according to AFP reporting carried by RFI.
The outage began at about 11:05 a.m. local time on July 14, when the state-run UNE electricity company said a problem with a generating unit at a thermoelectric plant triggered a sudden frequency change. By early July 15, UNE said the system had returned to full function at 7 a.m. local time. That restoration does not erase the larger fact: Cuba’s grid has now experienced repeated complete failures in a very short period.
The report says this was the third complete blackout on the Caribbean island since early July and the fifth since the start of 2026. That is a striking indicator of instability. The state’s own explanation points to a fragile system where a single generating problem can cascade into islandwide failure. The excerpt also says fuel shortages have made restoration slower and more complex.
Those shortages sit at the center of the crisis. The report says Cuba was already struggling before U.S. President Donald Trump cut off oil supplies in January, draining the fuel available to power plants. It also says the U.S. has authorized only one Russian tanker carrying 100,000 tons of crude, and that those reserves have since been exhausted. The result, according to the report, is an electricity system that is vulnerable and short of backup options.
Energy and Mines Minister Vicente de la O Levy blamed the situation in part on the state of the electrical system and the decisions of the United States. He said there was a “total absence of fuel” and that the government could not obtain spare parts for its plants. Those are political and operational claims, but they are directly relevant to the scale of the outage and the difficulty of restoring service.
The human impact is plain in the reporting. Residents described spoiled food, exhaustion and frustration after repeated blackouts. The source also says some people have responded by banging pots and pans or burning piles of trash in the streets. Those details show how quickly an infrastructure problem becomes a social one when an entire country is repeatedly left without power.
The blackout was not just a temporary inconvenience. It was another sign that Cuba’s energy crisis is worsening under the combined weight of fuel shortages, old plant infrastructure and limited access to spare parts. Even with power restored, the report suggests the underlying risk remains.
