Cuba's national electricity system failed completely around midday on Monday 6 July, cutting power to roughly 10 million people. Unión Eléctrica (UNE), the state grid operator, blamed the shutdown of Unit 6 at the Nuevitas thermoelectric plant in Camagüey. It was the fourth total collapse of the Sistema Eléctrico Nacional (SEN), Cuba's national grid, in 2026, a clear step up from the 21 June outage that darkened 64 per cent of the country.
Engineers restored power in stages over three days, closing the national circuit in the early hours of Wednesday 8 July. Recovery did not mean supply. UNE put the post-restoration peak deficit above 2,000 megawatts, with units at the Mariel, Antonio Guiteras, Cienfuegos, Diez de Octubre and Felton plants all still offline1. Parts of Matanzas, already among the worst-hit provinces, had gone as long as 87 consecutive hours without power across the early-July outage that ran into Monday's collapse2; Havana averaged about 15 hours a day dark even after reconnection.
The blackout has two causes, and Havana's diplomacy at the UN this week named only one. Fuel supply has been starved since Venezuela's crude cut-off in November 2025 and the June US designation of Cuba Petróleo (CUPET), the state oil company, with no tanker reaching the island since. The thermal fleet is failing on its own account too: the Nuevitas and Guiteras boilers that keep tripping are Soviet-era units run decades past their design life, and each cold restart under load shortens what is left of them. Sanctions withhold the fuel; the ageing machinery that would burn it breaks regardless.
