The whole island lost power late on Sunday, Al Jazeera reported.

Cuba's state electricity utility announced the collapse on X. It "did not immediately identify its cause, the extent of the disruption or when electricity would be restored."

So at the time of writing there is no cause, no count of how many people are affected by this particular failure, and no restoration estimate. Those are the three things a reader most wants and none of them exist yet.

How often this is happening

The grid collapsed three times within nine days in July. One of those outages left about 10 million people without power, which is close to the entire population of the country.

Why the system keeps failing

Al Jazeera's description is technical and worth quoting rather than paraphrasing: "Cuba's electricity system has deteriorated amid shortages of fuel and replacement parts, as well as repeated breakdowns at ageing thermoelectric plants."

Some of those plants are more than 30 years old and have had limited maintenance.

That is a description of a physical system, and it is separable from the political argument about why the fuel and parts are short, which is where most coverage of Cuba goes immediately.

The political argument, attributed

The Cuban government blames Washington. Specifically, it blames an oil blockade and restrictions following an order signed by President Trump in January.

Al Jazeera reports two concrete effects the Cuban side points to: Venezuela, Cuba's main oil supplier, has been affected, and Mexico has halted oil shipments to Cuba under US pressure.

That is the Cuban government's account of causation, and we are reporting it as that. We are not endorsing it and we are not dismissing it.

The gap in this story

There is no American response in it.

We could not reach any statement from the US government on the blackout, on the oil restrictions, or on the Cuban government's characterization of them. A story in which one government accuses another and the accused government does not appear is half a story, and we would rather name that than let the silence stand in for a position.

We also want to be clear about what we have not established. We have not verified the number of people without power tonight, whether hospitals or water pumping are affected, when the lights are expected to come back, or what specifically failed. "Grid failure" is a category of event, not an explanation.

One source

Everything above comes from a single report. Other outlets covering Cuba are not reachable from here tonight.

If the utility gives a cause, or the outage runs long, or the United States responds, we will report it.