Cuba runs out of diesel, blackouts spark protests in Havana

The collapse of Cuba’s power system has turned into a daily-life emergency, disrupting food storage, hospital care, water access and transportation as the island runs out of the fuels that keep the grid alive. In Havana, the worst rolling blackouts in decades have left neighborhoods scrambling through long hours without electricity, while families and institutions alike try to stretch every liter of diesel that remains.

On May 13, Energy Minister Vicente de la O Levy said Cuba had completely run out of diesel and fuel oil, the key fuels used to keep power plants running. The next day, the National Electric System, known as SEN, suffered a major failure that cut power to eastern Cuba, underscoring how fragile the grid had become as authorities tried to stabilize it. Cuba’s power system still depends heavily on aging Soviet-era thermal plants, and years of chronic underinvestment have left the network unable to absorb repeated shocks.

The humanitarian strain is deepening alongside the technical collapse. The U.S. Embassy in Cuba warned that the national electrical grid is increasingly unstable. The United Nations said in April that humanitarian needs remained acute and persistent, and that the impact of the energy shock had worsened since the end of March. Those pressures intensified after Washington moved at the end of January to block oil supplies into Cuba, even as a limited Russian shipment reached the island.

The scale of the shortage is stark. Some reporting says Cuba normally needs about 100,000 barrels of oil a day for essential services, a demand the country can no longer meet. In parts of Havana, blackouts have reportedly lasted more than 20 hours a day, leaving residents to plan their lives around power cuts that now shape everything from cooking to clinic schedules to public transportation.

The crisis has also spilled into the streets. Protests broke out in Havana amid the worsening outages, with residents blocking roads and demanding that electricity be restored. For Cuba, the crisis is no longer just a matter of lights going out. It is a wider breakdown in the systems that keep a city functioning, driven by fuel shortages, a strained grid, sanctions pressure and state mismanagement all at once.