Cuba

Cuba Begins Restoring Power After New Nationwide Blackout

Are U.S. sanctions to blame for the blackout crisis in Cuba or decades of socialist mismanagement?

Published JUL 7

Cuba Begins Restoring Power After New Nationwide Blackout

Story

Above: A street vendor in Havana uses a portable lamp to sell goods during blackout on July 6. Image credit: Adalberto Roque/AFP/Getty Images

The Facts

Local authorities and Cuba's state-run grid operator Unión Eléctrica de Cuba said on Monday that power had started to be restored across the country to guarantee vital services, including hospital and food production centers, with at least generating units resuming stable output.
FOX News
La Prensa Latina Media
Reuters
Unión Eléctrica de Cuba on X
This comes after an island-wide blackout, the third so far this year, following the collapse of the national electrical grid, leaving roughly 10 million people without power. The causes are still under investigation.
Bloomberg
CNN
Florida's Voice
Voz
Nearly two-thirds of Cuba had already been experiencing scheduled outages in recent days due to a generation deficit exceeding 2,000 megawatts during peak hours, usually at night. At least nine of the country's 16 thermoelectric units were offline at the time of the collapse.
CiberCuba
Reuters
The Miami Herald
The communist-run Caribbean nation has for months dealt with an energy crisis that has worsened since the U.S. President Donald Trump's administration cut off oil shipments from Venezuela to Cuba and imposed an effective oil blockade on the island in January.
The Associated Press
La Prensa Latina Media
Voz
Reuters
Cuba's National Assembly last month approved a broad set of economic reforms, which Havana said were urgent and necessary changes, but not a response to external pressure. A spokesperson for the U.S. Department of State called them "modest, long overdue and ultimately superficial smoke signals."
Bloomberg
CNN
Breitbart
Meanwhile, Cuba's Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez said in a post on X that he will attend a U.N. General Assembly session on the necessity of ending the U.S. economic, commercial and financial embargo against Cuba in New York on Tuesday.
Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla on X
General Assembly of the United Nations

Sources Split

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RIGHT

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ESTAB

The Spin

Establishment-critical narrative

Cuba's power grid is being strangled. The six-decade-long U.S. embargo on the island and the recent tightening under Trump have cut off fuel and spare parts, turning basic upkeep into sabotage-by-policy. This is manufactured collapse: a deliberate squeeze on public health, food and daily life, while Cuban workers fight against an economic war designed to break them.

Sky News

teleSUR English

Miguel Díaz-Canel on X

Pro-establishment narrative

Cuba's grid has been dying for decades due to socialist mismanagement, not U.S. sanctions. Soviet subsidies built a bloated, centralized system with no market logic; when Moscow's money vanished, Havana borrowed the same crutch from a new patron — Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro's Venezuela — instead of fixing inefficiencies in its energy system.

Forbes

Havana Times