Cuba entered April with its grid producing at approximately 60 percent of national demand. The remaining 40 percent is covered by scheduled outages that are, in practice, unscheduled — the thermal plants that supply the island's power fail on their own timetables, not the government's communication schedule.

The three nationwide collapses of March — on the 16th, the 21st, and a third within days — were each presented by authorities as exceptional events being corrected. The correction did not hold. By April 1, a new round of failures had darkened more than 60 percent of the island, according to reporting from the Spanish-language energy news site Aroma de Cuba. The Cuban government's own communications acknowledged rolling outages lasting up to 20 hours daily in some provinces.

The structural cause is not mysterious. Cuba's thermal plants are old, have been inadequately maintained for years, and run on fuel oil that the country can no longer reliably import. Venezuela, once the supplier of subsidized crude that kept the lights on, is itself under pressure. The U.S. oil embargo has tightened since the conflict began. The ships that would bring replacement fuel are choosing not to.

Havana's hospitals are operating with generator backup where generators exist. Where they do not, staff are managing on contingency protocols that were written for short outages and are now being applied to twenty-hour ones. The accounts coming from ICUs and neonatal wards — shared on X by Cubans with internet access, which is itself intermittent — describe conditions that the official press does not.

The government's public position is that restoration is underway and supply is being secured. The trajectory of the past six weeks does not support this framing. Cuba's grid crisis predates the Hormuz blockade but has been dramatically worsened by it. The island is not a second-order effect of the war. It is a direct one.