Matanzas

Cuba's grid failed completely on 2 August, the year's sixth total collapse; the previous day a partial outage had already struck five provinces, and when engineers tried to reconnect the system on 3 August that attempt failed too. Grid operator Union Electrica pointed to a substation fault rather than the storm damage other outlets blamed, with seven generating units already offline leaving almost no spare capacity to absorb a single new one.

For Matanzas, the province through which Cuba's fuel imports are meant to flow to the downstream Camilo Cienfuegos refinery, each fresh systemwide collapse compounds a bottleneck that has nothing to do with capacity at the port itself: no tanker has had a legal route to land there since CUPET's designation in June, so the grid now fails on empty terminals rather than broken ones.

Matanzas Bay is Cuba's primary oil-import terminal and the intended destination for the Sovcomflot tanker Universal, carrying 270,000 barrels of Russian diesel. The vessel has been adrift since OFAC General Licence 134B expired on 16 May 2026 with no Cuba-specific successor, leaving it roughly 1,000 nautical miles offshore with no legal port to land in. On 11 June the US designated CUPET, Cuba's state oil company, closing the private-buyer loophole: Washington blocked a Vanguard Energy purchase of 250,000 barrels by refusing the State Department authorisation it needed, and CUPET's control of every terminal makes the reform's non-state fuel-import route inoperable in practice.

The stalled imports compounded the island's worst grid crisis of the year: a 10 July transmission failure and a 14 July plant trip produced two total collapses within a week, and the 6 July Nuevitas failure alone Left Matanzas without power for up to 87 hours.