Life in the dark, Havana residents endure Cuba's grid collapse

Frank Alfonso slept on a mattress on the roof of his Havana building to catch a little air when the power failed, but the collapse of Cuba’s grid on Friday afternoon took away even that relief as rain moved in over the city. In the cramped tenement where Alfonso lives, the blackout was not an isolated shock. It was another turn in a months-long pattern of darkness, heat and uncertainty that has turned basic routines into an hourly calculation.

Alfonso, 39, lives in one of Havana’s solares, the subdivided apartment blocks that hold dozens of families in rooms carved from older structures. In those buildings, residents already juggle limited space, heat and unreliable water. When electricity disappears, the strain spreads quickly: fans stop, food spoils and water can go days without flowing, leaving people unable to cook, wash or cool their homes in the dense urban heat.

The outage left around 10 million people without power and marked the second total blackout in a week and the fourth nationwide outage of 2026. Cuba was generating less than one-third of current electricity demand when the grid failed. The shutdown was part of a broader energy emergency that has stretched through much of the year and exposed the fragility of an aging generation system that struggles to keep pace even when fuel is available.

By Saturday, restoration was still partial and slow, with millions remaining in the dark. The blackout also deepened public anger in Havana, where residents banged pots, honked horns and shouted for the lights to be turned back on.

Cuba has been dealing with severe fuel shortages, medicine shortages and an obsolete power network that has failed repeatedly as supply tightened. Solar power is growing, but it still makes up only a minority of the island’s energy mix and cannot offset the size of the electricity gap on its own. During the blackout, people in Havana used solar panels to charge batteries, carried fans from place to place and poured water at home.