Cuba suffers second island-wide blackout in a week amid Trump fuel blockade

Cuba was plunged into its second nationwide blackout in a single week, deepening an energy crisis that authorities have tied to a US effort to cut off the island's fuel supplies. The repeated failures of the national grid have left millions without power and intensified hardship across the country.

Repeated grid failures

The island-wide outage began in the late afternoon, mirroring a similar collapse of the national grid earlier in the same week. Officials said it was one of several complete blackouts the country has experienced since the start of the year, on top of additional major outages in preceding months.

Cuba's state electricity utility described the scale of the failure. The island produces only a portion of the oil it consumes and depends heavily on imports, leaving its power system acutely vulnerable when supplies are disrupted.

The fuel blockade

Cuban authorities link the crisis to measures by the Trump administration that have effectively cut the island off from foreign oil. Washington reportedly threatened steep tariffs against any country supplying fuel to Cuba, and only a single Russian oil tanker is said to have reached the island since the restrictions tightened.

A senior UN human rights official warned of the risk of harm to ordinary civilians, while the US secretary of state rejected the idea that the measures were punitive and instead pointed to what he described as Cuban mismanagement. Reports also noted a sharp rise in infant mortality in recent months as conditions worsened.

Why it matters

The blackouts show how geopolitical pressure aimed at governments can quickly translate into suffering for ordinary people who depend on electricity for water, refrigeration, medical care and daily life. For a country that sits close to the US yet relies on distant suppliers for fuel, the crisis underscores the human cost of energy insecurity.