Massive Blackout Plunges Eastern Cuba Into Darkness: 3.4 Million People Left Without Power

Key Points

• A substation failure in Holguín triggered a cascading blackout across four eastern provinces on February 4, cutting power to 3.4 million people, including Santiago de Cuba, the country’s second-largest city.
• The collapse comes as Cuba’s oil reserves have dwindled to an estimated 15–20 days of supply, with Venezuelan crude cut to zero since Maduro’s capture and Mexico pausing shipments under U.S. pressure.
• The crisis has deepened a political fault line: Washington frames maximum pressure as a path to democratic transition, while Havana and its allies call it economic warfare against civilians already enduring 20-hour daily blackouts.

At 8:54 PM on Wednesday, a fault at the Holguín 220-kilovolt substation sent Cuba’s eastern grid into freefall.

The trip knocked offline the Felton thermoelectric plant, the Moa generation engines, and two units at the Renté plant in Santiago de Cuba, plunging Holguín, Granma, Santiago de Cuba, and Guantánamo into total or partial darkness.

Unión Eléctrica confirmed the blackout on X but offered no timeline for restoration. By Thursday morning, power had returned only to a handful of Holguín municipalities.

The event was not an anomaly. Cuba’s grid has collapsed four times in six months. The day before this blackout, the national deficit stood at 1,510 megawatts — the system could supply barely half the country’s demand.

Some communities endure over 20 hours without power daily. Seven of 16 operational thermoelectric units were already offline.

Cuba plunges into energy crisis

On January 31, a separate failure had left 63 percent of the country dark, the worst recorded since Cuba began publishing energy statistics in 2022.

The infrastructure crisis, rooted in 35 years of deferred maintenance on Soviet-era plants corroded by high-sulfur domestic crude, has been pushed to a breaking point by geopolitics.

Venezuela’s subsidized oil — once 100,000 barrels per day, more recently around 35,000 — stopped entirely after U.S. forces captured Nicolás Maduro on January 3.

Mexico’s Pemex, which had been shipping roughly 20,000 barrels daily, cut volumes to about 7,000 following a visit by Secretary of State Rubio, then paused shipments altogether.

On January 29, President Trump signed an executive order threatening tariffs on any country supplying oil to Cuba, effectively sealing the squeeze.

The Cuban government calls this an “oil siege.” Brazil’s CTB labor federation labeled the embargo “genocidal.”

Trump, asked if he intended to “choke off” the island, replied: “I’m not trying to, but it looks like it’s something that’s just not going to be able to survive.” Florida’s Cuban-American legislators argue the pressure is necessary to force democratic change.

Independent economists see intertwined causes. Ricardo Torres of American University attributes the crisis to “years of neglect, constrained access to foreign capital, and a failure to adapt.”

Pavel Vidal, a former Cuban central bank economist, warned that without oil, “the Cuban economy would grind to a halt.” The economy has contracted over 15 percent since 2020. Ten percent of the population emigrated in just two years.

On the ground, citizens sentenced to up to eight years in prison for chanting “we want electricity” capture the contradiction at the heart of this crisis: a government that cannot keep the lights on, yet punishes those who say so out loud.

Related coverage: Brazil’s Morning Call | Brazil’s Trade Surplus Doubles in January as Economic Slowdo This is part of The Rio Times’ daily coverage of Cuba affairs and Latin American financial news.

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