Cuba says Havana blackouts can last up to 22 hours a day

Up to 22 hours without electricity has turned daily life in Havana into a race against the clock. Food cannot stay cold, fans and air conditioners go silent in punishing heat, phones lose charge, internet service becomes unstable, and ordinary errands have to be timed around whatever hours the city has power.

Cuba’s government publicly acknowledged the scale of the crisis on May 14, saying the capital’s blackouts can last as long as 22 hours a day. That admission mattered because Havana is the country’s political, economic and logistical center, and because it put into official language what many residents had already been living: conditions once associated with the hardest-hit provinces have now reached the capital itself.

The warning came as the national electricity system was already under severe strain. Energy Minister Vicente de la O Levy said Cuba had run out of diesel and fuel oil and described the grid as critical. In a statement that captured the depth of the breakdown, he said, “We have absolutely no fuel (oil), and absolutely no diesel.” The shortages helped trigger protests in Havana on May 13, when residents took to the streets demanding that power be restored.

The impact in the city reaches far beyond dark apartments. Long outages disrupt transportation, weaken telecommunication services and make neighborhood safety harder to manage after sunset. They also hit government work, retail operations and food distribution, because Cuba’s system is running with almost no reserve cushion. When the lights fail, the damage spreads quickly: EFE reported in April that about half of the country’s telecom antennas can lose service during a blackout, cutting phone and internet access at the same moment electricity disappears.

The Havana emergency is part of a longer collapse that has been building for months. EFE reported in August 2025 that Cuba had already gone through 12 months of full-blown energy crisis, with blackouts lasting up to 20 hours a day and four nationwide outages. By March 2026, Havana was already seeing cuts of about 15 hours a day, while some provinces were going without power for as long as two days. In September 2025, authorities even forecast simultaneous blackouts affecting up to 57% of the country.

The new threshold in Havana is stark: the city that anchors Cuba now faces the same near-total blackout conditions that had defined the worst of the crisis elsewhere on the island. For residents, that means the shutdown is no longer a distant provincial problem. It is the rhythm of the capital itself.