This incident marks the third major power outage this month, as a majority of the system went down on March 4 when a major thermoelectric generating plant failed. The power grid also went completely offline on Monday for unexplained reasons. Cuba has experienced a series of major or total outages in recent years, but two total failures in the space of a week is exceptional. Mexico, the most important oil supplier to Cuba along with Venezuela, has halted its oil shipments, while also providing humanitarian aid. Cuba has long blamed the US trade embargo for economic failures including its failing power grid, while Washington in turn has attributed the failures to Cuba's Soviet-style command economy.

Source: The Edge Markets March 22, 2026 01:00 UTC