Cuba has run out of diesel and fuel oil, energy minister says, as US blockade pushes island to brink
Minister Vicente de la O Levy says ‘Cuba is open to anyone that wants to sell us fuel’ as rolling power blackouts increase
Protests have erupted across Havana after Cuba’s energy minister revealed that the country had completely run out of diesel and fuel oil amid a US blockade that has strangled the island of fuel.
Residents took to the city’s streets late on Wednesday shouting “turn on the lights”, banging pots and pans, and setting fire to piles of rubbish to express their misery in the face of blackouts which can last 22 hours or more.
Rodolfo Alonso, a resident of the Havana neighbourhood of Playa, told Reuters, “We started banging pots to see if they would give us just three hours of electricity. That’s all we want.”
Cuba is enduring the worst rolling blackouts in decades due to the US blockade.
“We have absolutely no fuel [oil] and absolutely no diesel,” the energy minister, Vicente de la O Levy, said on state media, adding that the national grid was in a “critical” state, and admitting “we have no reserves”. Fuel oil is a product derived from crude oil distillation used to generate heat or power.
By 4am, the lights were back on and the protests had dissipated, leaving only a haze of smoke from the fires. But on Thursday, the situation in the country more generally remained parlous, with much of Cuba’s eastern reaches still without power.
The national grid, De la O Levy said, was operating entirely on domestic crude oil, natural gas and renewable energy, after the fuel from a Russian tanker that arrived in April had run out.
Cuba has installed 1,300 megawatts of solar power over the past two years, but much of that capacity is lost to grid instability amid the fuel shortages, reducing efficiency and output, he said. While panels may have been installed, Cuba is short of the batteries that allow it to keep supplying homes through the night.
He said Cuba continued negotiations to import fuel despite the blockade, but said rising global oil and transportation prices amid the US-Israeli war with Iran were further complicating that effort.
“Cuba is open to anyone that wants to sell us fuel,” he said.
Few are willing to take up that offer. Neither Mexico nor Venezuela, once top suppliers of oil to Cuba, has sent fuel to the island since the US president, Donald Trump’s January 2026 executive order threatening to slap tariffs on any country shipping fuel to the communist-run nation.
Only a single large oil tanker, the Russian-flagged Anatoly Kolodkin, has delivered crude oil to Cuba since December. The US said it allowed it through the blockade for humanitarian reasons. Shortly afterwards, over 2,000 prisoners were released from Cuba’s jails.
The renewed power cuts come as the US blockade on fuel imports to Cuba enters its fourth month, crippling public services across the Caribbean island of nearly 10 million people.
The UN last week called Trump’s fuel blockade unlawful, saying it had obstructed the “Cuban people’s right to development while undermining their rights to food, education, health and water and sanitation”.
Lately there have been reports that Trump has been growing frustrated by the lack of progress in US negotiations with the island’s government. Over the last few weeks, tracking sites have reported numerous US military surveillance flights near and over the island, as plans for a possible intervention are being drawn up.
In March, Trump said that he expects to have “the honour of taking Cuba”, amid US negotiations with Havana over the country’s future.
The US has sought to intensify pressure on Cuba, its longtime foe, since seizing Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro in January. Trump has since cut off Venezuelan oil shipments to Cuba and threatened to impose tariffs on any country selling oil to the country, stating that Cuba would receive “no more oil or money” as a result of his actions.
But Trump appeared to relax his blockade by allowing the Anatoly Kolodkin to dock and off-load its oil. “If a country wants to send some oil into Cuba right now, I have no problem, whether it’s Russia or not,” the US president told reporters on Air Force One, on 30 March.
Critics say Trump’s blockade has resulted in a deepening humanitarian crisis on the already economically troubled island, which has forced schools and universities to shut, thrown the health care system into chaos and ravaged the tourism industry.
As smoke from the fires cleared on Thursday morning, it appeared that the return of the electricity had calmed the situation for the moment, but as one veteran observer said: “They’re not going to be able to keep doing that.”
With reporting by Reuters