PROTECT YOURSELF with Orgo-Life® QUANTUM TECHNOLOGY
Orgo-Life the new way to the future Advertising by AdpathwayIn Cuba, on July 14, 2026, the entire power grid went down for the third time in less than two weeks.
Blackouts there often last more than 20 hours, leaving more than 10 million people without power. Hospitals struggle to keep life-saving equipment running, and homes are forced to use wood or charcoal to cook.
Cuba’s electricity grid has all but collapsed since the Trump administration imposed an oil blockade in late January. Adding to the island’s economic woes, Washington this week placed additional sanctions on Cuba’s Ministry of Tourism.
The World’s Carolyn Beeler spoke with Havana-based journalist Ed Augustin to understand what it’s like on the ground at the moment.
Carolyn Beeler: Ed Augustin, has power been restored across the entire island?
Ed Augustin: The lights are never back on everywhere in Cuba and haven’t been for a good few years now, but according to the latest update from the state energy company, 66% of Havana’s circuits have now been reestablished. So, whenever this happens in Cuba, and it’s happening more and more, it does take the state some time to get the systems up and running. Two-thirds of the systems are now working. That doesn’t mean that two-thirds of people in Havana have power. That means that when there is oil enough to burn and get that power to those people, that is now a possibility.
So, it takes some time. I jumped on an electric scooter earlier on. I spoke to the person who was giving me a lift, and his wife called him, and he was happy. The power had just come back for the first time in 50 hours. Because what you have got to remember is that most Cubans, for years now, have been living most of the day every day without power.
One more thing: I was out this morning just speaking to people in Havana, and I asked one person, whose power still hasn’t come back, how he was feeling, and here’s what he said, and I quote it to you verbatim because it stuck with me: “I have to be a little hopeful; otherwise I’d just kill myself.” This is really getting to people psychologically, the amount of stress, the amount of anxiety.
Edinector Vazquez prepares to eat dinner at his home lit by a gas lamp during a blackout in Minas, Havana province, Cuba, May 26, 2025. Ramon Espinosa/AP/File photo
And that is everyday Cubans, not even those who might be most impacted, like people in hospitals or people who run businesses that would be dependent on power. Are there people who are feeling this most acutely?
Well, by definition, it’s the weakest, it’s the most vulnerable, it’s the poorest. In terms of hospitals, they’ve got backup generators that tend to work, and those backup generators do have diesel. So, when the power system collapses nationally, it takes a couple of minutes, but the power comes back. So, hospitals are more or less protected. I say more or less because I’ve spoken to an anesthesiologist who was operating on a 3-week-old child and the power went out during that operation. And he said it’s out for a minute, but it feels like an eternity. So, that’s that.
In terms of business owners, richer parts of society, including business owners, are buying generators. The new thing is either solar panels, which are very expensive, well beyond the reach of regular Cubans, but also gas generators. There’s still piped gas that comes into about 200,000 people in Havana. So, lots of people, as a backup when the power goes out, they just turn on their gas generator. But those gas generators cost about $1,000, and the average Cuban salary is less than $20 a month. So, that is the stuff of dreams for most people, regular people on state jobs, on pensions, elderly people, particularly the Black population that are less likely to have family in Miami who can send them money to start a business. They’re the ones that are being hit hardest by this.
What about the water supply? In a lot of places, electricity is needed to pump and filter water. Is there good and enough drinking water there?
It’s a disaster. Last year, around 1 million people didn’t have running water in their homes. According to the United Nations, that’s now gone up to nearly 3 million people in less than a year. Eighty percent of the water in Cuba is pumped from aquifers to where people live by electricity. So, when the power goes out, that water cannot be pumped. And I’ve spoken to public health experts, and they say that it is almost inevitable that that’s leading to a rise in infectious diseases, because when you don’t have running water, you go to the toilet, you can’t wash your hands, it’s more difficult to clean food. And so, there’s a very, very strong correlation between a lack of drinking water and a rise in disease and death. Now Cubans find workarounds; they’re used to hardship, and it’s amazing if you go into some of the more urban areas to see the amount of people in the mornings just carrying water from houses where water has arrived to houses where it doesn’t. So, people find a way, people find workarounds, but it’s tough.
People catch the cool air from the street at their home’s window during a blackout in Havana, Cuba, July 10, 2026.Ramon Espinosa/AP
You spent time recently with a four-generation Cuban family on the island’s southern tip in Santiago de Cuba. What has their life looked like amid all of these blackouts?
Very, very difficult. This family has three adults who work: the grandfather, who’s a primary school teacher, the grandmother, who sells bread, and the father, who is an electricity repairman, Adrian is his name. He was getting up in the dead of night, 2, 3, 4 in the morning. Whenever the light comes on, he leaves the fan on; he leaves the light on so that he wakes up. And if that’s the only power he gets in the day, that’s when he does the work. And so, he looked haggard. He was very, very anxious when there wasn’t electricity and happy and relaxed when there was because finally he was earning money to try and put some food on the table.
His mother, Sucel, she lines up in the morning or in the evening when the private sector bakeries are producing bread, and she resells it. The ovens of those private sector bakeries in Santiago [de Cuba] rely on electricity. The grandfather Luis, is a very [beloved] math teacher in a primary school on the other side of town. His salary in real terms is going down because the Cuban peso is depreciating as this economic crisis wears on and the local currency is worth less and less. So, their income is going down as the months tick by, but their costs are going up because food inflation in Cuba is rising. It’s rising because agricultural production is collapsing, because there’s no diesel for tractors. The land is now being tilled with oxen and donkeys and sickles and scythes, instead of tractors. And so, there’s less rice and beans and vegetables being produced. So, that causes is inflation.
This May, the Trump administration hit Cuba with new so-called secondary sanctions, sanctions that effectively kick out non-US international firms. And as a result of that, the two main shipping firms that serviced Cuba — a French one and a German one — that together provided an estimated 60% of the food that Cuba imported, they’re now gone. And so, whether it’s food being grown in Cuba or whether it’s food imported to Cuba, there’s less of both as a result of these sanctions. And so, this family is just trying really, really hard to get food on the table. They’re not eating very well. Lots of refined white bread and sugar, not very many meats and vegetables. And so, what happens is that the adults are losing a lot of weight.
A woman holds up a cell phone flashlight as she chats with a friend during a scheduled power outage as part of energy rationing in Santa Cruz del Norte, home to one of Cuba’s largest thermoelectric plants, Feb. 3, 2026. Ramon Espinosa/AP Photo
What a harrowing story of just that one family in Cuba. And that’s replaying all over the island, I’m sure. You mentioned the new sanctions in May. This week, the US Treasury Department added more sanctions on Cuba’s Ministry of Tourism. Can you tell me about those sanctions and then also how Cubans will feel their impact?
Yeah, for sure. So, this will hit people indirectly. Tourism is one of the two main motors of the Cuban economy. It used to bring in billions a year, and now the Trump administration, the current one, is really going after tourism. Until now, they’ve been talking about GAESA, which is this military holding company that’s controlled by the military, and the successive US administrations have been saying that the Cuban military has got too much power in the Cuban economy, and so that has to be sanctioned. What’s new about the sanctions this week is that they hit all of tourism that has nothing to do with the military. So, it hits the Ministry of Tourism, and it hits even importers that are importing oil for the private sector. And that’s one of the only arms of the economy that’s still kind of working. Even oil’s gonna be more difficult. And round about 300,000 people are employed by tourism in Cuba, but more indirectly, because Cuba used to rely on tourism to bring in billions of dollars for the state — yes, some of that money went on the police and army, I’m sure some of it was siphoned off, I don’t have any evidence of that — but what I know is that an awful lot of that money was spent on importing food and petroleum. The latest statistics I’ve got is that just over half of all Cuban state money, hard currency, went on importing just those two things, petroleum and food. And so, when that goes, that’s going to hit people with more power cuts, and people are going to have less food.
You, yourself, in this conversation have a few times mentioned that the Trump administration’s policies are responsible for these blackouts. Administration officials say this is the fault of the Cuban government and letting the grid crumble, among other things, I believe. How do Cubans themselves explain the causes of what is happening there?
Most Cubans I speak to do blame the Cuban government. I was out this morning speaking to, I think, five people, and three of the people I spoke to blamed it squarely and uniquely on the Cuban government. Two people said, “Well, you know, the sanctions also play a very, very important role.” I think that it’s kind of a normal situation, right? When there’s a problem in a country you live in, you look to the government that runs the country to sort it out. And in Cuba, people are very tired, very bored of the government talking about the blockade, as they call it, the sanctions. The irony is that they’ve been talking about it for two-thirds of a century, but it’s never been as potent. And so, you’ve got this really paradoxical situation in which the US economic war on Cuba has never been more fierce and has never been more brazenly and obviously causing power cuts. And yet, at the same time, you have perhaps fewer Cubans than ever believing that that’s the fundamental cause. And of course, the Cuban economy is incredibly inefficient, and the ruling Communist Party has failed to reform it. And it’s anachronistic and produces very, very little. But a child could work out that any country in the world relies on energy. And if you have a superpower stopping oil, which is still the lifeblood of all economies in the world, getting into a medium-sized country, a small country, then that’s going to create power cuts.
People prepare solar panels set up on the street to charge batteries during a power outage in Old Havana, Cuba, June 19, 2026. Ramon Espinosa/AP
So Ed, just briefly before I let you go, what does the endgame look like right now from there?
I think that is the most difficult and the most harrowing question. From the conversations I’m having, the Trump administration seems buoyant. They seem to think that the underlying dynamics are going in their direction. Cuba does look isolated internationally. At the United Nations, it has lots of countries every year voting and condemning the US sanctions on Cuba, which are not compatible with international law. But in terms of having allies that are willing to stick their head out and break this oil blockade, so far, they’ve only had Russia send one tanker in six months. And the sense I get is that the Trump administration is perfectly happy to keep on cranking up these sanctions. There’s very little political cost of that in the United States because [there are] no boots on the ground, no invasion. And on the Cuban side, the Cuban government sees this as fundamentally an affront to its sovereignty. And I think they’re willing to dig in as well if a deal, so to speak, is not struck. And the crisis of this, of course, is that the people who suffer like they always are, are the Cuban people.
Parts of this interview have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
English (US) · 
French (CA) · 
French (FR) ·