Cubans in Havana are organising their daily lives around when the electricity comes back on, not the clock. That is according to Sky News, which spent a week reporting from the Cuban capital.
The broadcaster's lead world news presenter, Yalda Hakim, found empty petrol stations, uncollected rubbish and hospital wards short of medicine during her time there. She also found a population that, despite everything, had not given up.
Blackouts Now Dictate Daily Routines
Hakim reported that people she met in Havana described the current period as the hardest they have lived through in decades. Some said it was harder even than the Special Period that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union.
One woman told her she no longer sets an alarm, because the power supply now decides when she wakes. Washing, cooking and charging phones happen whenever electricity briefly returns, sometimes as late as three in the morning.
The severity of the outages has been documented by other outlets too. Residents in parts of Havana are enduring outages lasting more than nineteen hours a day, with some provinces losing power for entire days at a stretch.
Government Blames the Blockade
Cuban officials have attributed the collapse to the long-standing US embargo, worsened by the Trump administration's renewed pressure campaign. Fuel and trade have both become harder to secure as a result.
When Hakim questioned President Miguel Diaz-Canel directly about economic mismanagement and the case for reform, he rejected the suggestion that Cuba's system had failed. He told her the country wanted dialogue rather than submission, and would negotiate but not capitulate.
Cuban dissident José Daniel Ferrer, exiled leader of the Patriotic Union of Cuba (UNPACU), told the European Parliament that Cuba is going through 'the worst crisis in its modern history', pointing to the energy crisis, food shortages and healthcare failures as driving daily hardship for most Cubans.
Cuba's own officials have acknowledged the scale of the shortfall separately. Cuba produces barely 40 per cent of the fuel it needs to power its economy.
Cuba's economy is forecast to contract by 6.5 percent in 2026, with annual inflation reaching 13.42 per cent in March, according to the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean. The crisis extends well beyond fuel, with close to 89 percent of Cubans living in extreme poverty and 70 percent reporting they have skipped meals due to lack of resources.
Cuban economist Pedro Monreal has warned that Cuba's economy could shrink by as much as 15 per cent in 2026, roughly double the official regional forecast, and that the combination of collapsing output and rising prices risks tipping the island into what he calls 'uncontrollable stagflation'.
Medicine Shortages Turn Critical
Cuba's Ministry of Public Health reported in February that fuel shortages had disrupted obstetric ultrasounds and delayed infant vaccinations for tens of thousands of pregnant women. All 46 of the country's blood banks are also operating at reduced capacity due to shortages of reagents and medicines, affecting transfusion support for surgical patients and children on chemotherapy.
The shortages have had fatal consequences in specific cases. A ten-month-old boy in Camagüey died in March after spending four months in intensive care with a severe congenital condition, with his mother saying that doctors said the surgery needed to save his life could not be performed on the island due to a lack of resources and specialists.
Trump Pressure Continues to Escalate
President Donald Trump has continued to raise the pressure on Havana. He has sanctioned Diaz-Canel and said the US could one day 'take' Cuba.
The pressure campaign includes specific measures beyond general sanctions. Secretary of State Marco Rubio notified Congress on 31 January that he was withdrawing the suspension on lawsuits under Title III of the LIBERTAD Act, a mechanism allowing Americans to sue over property seized after Cuba's 1959 revolution. The administration has also tightened remittance limits and restricted US travel to the island.
In May, the US Department of Justice unsealed an indictment against former president Raul Castro over the 1996 downing of two civilian aircraft, according to acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. Castro, 94, faces charges including conspiracy to kill US nationals and four counts of murder.
For the people Hakim met, the argument over blame matters less than the daily reality of shortages. Many young Cubans are leaving the island in search of opportunity elsewhere, taking skills and ambition with them.
A Nation Exhausted but Not Defeated
Hakim described Revolution Square, once the site of Fidel Castro's hours-long addresses, as now almost silent. The steel outlines of Che Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos still overlook the square, but the conversations beneath them have shifted from revolution to survival.
Those who remain in Cuba often do so because they cannot leave or because they still believe the country is worth staying for. Hakim said she found a nation that was exhausted, proud and deeply uncertain, but not one that had given up.
Cuba's crisis carries consequences beyond its shores, from renewed migration pressure on the United States to the risk of instability just ninety miles from Florida. As Washington maintains its sanctions campaign and Havana resists deeper reform, ordinary Cubans remain the ones absorbing the daily cost, a dynamic likely to keep shaping US-Cuba relations through the rest of 2026.
