Cuba can make about 1,000 megawatts of power. It needs 3,100. On Monday the whole national grid collapsed and all 10 million people lost power. When a country makes only a third of the power it uses, a blackout is close to inevitable. This was the third full collapse of 2026.
The plants are old. More than 90% of Cuba's power comes from oil-burning stations built between the 1960s and 1980s, and they run at about a third of what they were built to make. The biggest, in Matanzas, has broken down 17 times this year and hasn't had a proper overhaul in over a decade. The fuel is nearly gone too. Cuba pumps only about half the oil it burns and buys the rest, and those shipments dropped roughly 90% over the past year, hitting near-zero in January after US sanctions cut off its main suppliers. On Monday, 106 smaller generators sat idle for lack of fuel, taking almost 900 megawatts offline on their own.
The grid also has a weak spot by design. It is heavily centralized, so when one big plant fails, the shock spreads across the whole network and safety switches shut everything down at once. A single failure in one province can black out the entire island in seconds. The worst stretch this year, in March, left the country dark for 29 hours straight.
Cuba has also been building solar faster than almost anyone. With Chinese money it opened around 50 new parks in a single year, adding about 1,000 megawatts, and panel imports from China jumped from roughly 3 million dollars in 2023 to 117 million in 2025. Solar now covers close to 10% of the island's power, up from 3% two years ago.
Solar has one big limit: timing. Panels make the most power at midday and none after dark. Cuba's demand peaks in the evening, when people get home, run fans in the heat, and open the fridge. Batteries could save the daytime power for those hours, but only a few parks have them, because storage is the expensive part. On Sunday, solar hit about 709 megawatts at noon, then dropped to zero right as the evening gap reached a record 2,201 megawatts, most of what the whole country needs. Monday's collapse hit in that gap.
After a full shutdown, the grid takes days to rebuild, one region at a time, and officials haven't said when. Until the fuel comes back or the batteries get built, a grid that covers a third of demand at the busiest hour will keep going dark.