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The experts had warned for years: Cuba’s power grid was on the verge of collapse, relying on plants nearly a half-century old and importing fuel that the strapped Communist government could barely afford.
On Friday morning their dire predictions came true, as the entire island plunged into the most prolonged blackout it has suffered in the three decades since its former benefactor and steady fuel supplier, the Soviet Union, collapsed.
Cuban energy officials managed to get power back up briefly to some parts of the island on Friday night. But early Saturday the state’s utility company reported another “total disconnection” of the system, the second in less than 24 hours.
Government officials tried to reassure the public that power would be broadly restored over the weekend but acknowledged they could not be sure.
“We are estimating there should be important progress today,” Lazaro Guerra, the electricity director for the Ministry of Energy and Mines, said in an interview on state television.
“But I cannot assure you that we will be able to have the system fully connected today,” he added.
For years, Cuba has been plagued by rolling blackouts that last a few hours a day, often longer in the countryside.
But this time is different, residents say, recalling the nightmare of the so-called “Special Period” in the early 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Havana residents described total darkness across the city late Friday, with lights twinkling only from hospitals and modern hotels that had their own generators.
“We are an island of zombies, staggering around with no idea where to go,” said Giovanny Fardales, a 51-year-old unemployed translator in Havana, who sent messages as his cellphone battery steadily ran down.
“Maybe I won’t be able to communicate much longer. We’re on the Titanic and it’s slowly sinking,” he added.
Adding to residents’ worries, Hurricane Oscar, a Category 1 storm, is expected to bring heavy rains to eastern Cuba by Sunday.
‘Prehistoric’ power plants
Cuban economists and foreign analysts blamed the crisis on several factors: the government’s failure to tackle the island’s aging infrastructure; the decline in fuel supplies from Venezuela, Mexico and Russia; and a lack of capital investment in badly needed renewable systems, such as wind and solar.
Jorge Piñon, a Cuban-born energy expert at the University of Texas at Austin, highlighted that Cuba’s electricity grid relies on eight very large power plants that are close to 50 years old. “They have not received any operational maintenance, much less capital maintenance, in the last 12 to 15 years,” he said, adding that they have a lifetime of only 25 to 30 years.
“So, No. 1, it’s a structural problem; they are breaking down all the time, and that has a domino effect,” he said.
Compounding the problems, Cuba burns crude oil as a fuel for its plants. Experts said Cuba’s own crude oil production is very heavy in sulfur and metals that can impair the thermoelectric combustion process. “So they have to be constantly repairing them, and they’re repairing them with Band-Aids,” said Mr. Piñon.
In the 1970s, Cuba dabbled in nuclear power, and the former Cuban leader Fidel Castro sent one of his sons to study nuclear physics in Moscow. Work began on a nuclear plant on Cuba’s south coast, but only the concrete outer shell was built and the project was mothballed in the 1990s.
In 2006 after Cuba began having power shortages because of hurricanes in the sweltering summer months, Castro imported thousands of huge diesel-powered generators, each capable of providing enough power for rural towns and villages across the country.
“Thermoelectric plants are prehistoric,” Castro said in a TV broadcast at the time.
Since then, diesel prices have skyrocketed, in part because of the increased consumption by the trucking industry, putting a strain on Cuba’s finances.
Power ships and help from abroad
More recently, Cuba has turned to leasing half a dozen massive ships that operate as mobile power stations, capable of generating 20 percent of Cuba’s electricity.
The Turkish-owned ships have become a familiar sight in the Bay of Havana, but the lease agreement requires that Cuba supply the fuel.
Cuba produces about 40,000 barrels of fuel a day, analysts estimate, but consumes about 120,000 barrels a day.
Until about a year ago, the deficit of some 80,000 barrels was covered by shipments, mostly from Venezuela, plus smaller amounts from Mexico and sometimes from Russia.
Those imports appear to have fallen significantly.
Venezuela’s shipments fell to 25,000 or 30,000 barrels a day, about a third of Cuba’s import needs, costing about $600-700 million a year, according to Francisco J. Monaldi, director of the Latin America Energy Program at Rice University.
“Venezuela continues to export to Cuba. It varies a little bit,” he said. “Of course, it’s much less than the humongous subsidies that Venezuela used to send,” he added, noting that at its peak a decade ago, Cuba received 130,000 barrels a day from its socialist ally, at a hefty subsidy.
After the Biden administration temporarily relaxed Venezuelan oil sanctions earlier this year to encourage its government to allow free and fair elections, the South American country began selling more of its supply to foreign oil companies, including Chevron, for cash to help with its own economic crisis.
That left Cuba in the lurch. Russia has not made up the shortfall, as some had speculated it might, and Mexico’s oil production fell to a 45-year low this year, one of the steepest output declines anywhere in the world this century.
“Cuba is just nowhere near as much a priority for a resource-constrained Russia as it historically was,” said Maximilian Hess, a Russia expert with the Foreign Policy Research Institute, a Philadelphia-based research group.
An economic tailspin
Cuba’s economy enjoyed a brief honeymoon with the United States during the Obama administration, which sought to normalize relations after decades of hostility, while keeping a longstanding economic embargo in place. President Donald J. Trump reversed course, leading to renewed restrictions on tourism, visas, remittances, investments and commerce. The coronavirus pandemic devastated Cuba’s once-booming tourist industry, closing off a valuable source of foreign currency to pay for fuel.
“The government is bankrupt,” said Pavel Vidal, a Cuban economist at the Javeriana University in Cali, Colombia.
Nor has major emigration — Cuba’s population has fallen by one million over the last three years — lessened the problem, possibly because families abroad are sending electrical goods to relatives in Cuba.
So far this year, Cubans have imported more than $200,000 in generators from the United States and more than $1 million in air-conditioners and parts, according to John Kavulich with the U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council in New York.
Officials in the United States are monitoring Cuba closely for any signs of civil unrest. During blackouts in July 2021, thousands of Cubans took to the streets demanding electricity, food and political change.
“If they can’t turn these plants back on, there is a concern that this could turn into another mass exodus,” said Ricardo Herrero, the director of the Cuba Study Group in Washington.
“They are really short on options,” he added.
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