It’s 3 am in Havana, and a 72-year-old grandmother is racing to cook a pot of beans.
Not because she’s hungry right now. Because the power just came back on, and no one knows how long it will last. In homes across the city, this is how meals happen now…in stolen 20-minute windows, whatever hour they arrive, day or night. Neighbors have started shouting through open windows and doorways the moment the lights flicker on, so everyone can rush to cook, charge a phone, or pump water while they still can. A burst of electricity has become something close to a small miracle.
This is daily life in Cuba right now.
A Nation Running on 20-Minute Miracles
For most of us, electricity is background noise. It’s something we never think about until it’s gone for an hour during a storm. In Cuba, the opposite has become true: the power being on is the surprise.
The island’s national grid has suffered repeated total collapses over the past two years, some of them lasting days, plunging all ten million residents into darkness simultaneously. Even when the whole grid isn’t down, rolling blackouts stretch 10, 20, even 30+ hours at a stretch, with no predictable pattern. Reporting from Havana this August described outages that could now last anywhere from twelve hours to well over a day, with the most recent full national grid collapse marking the sixth of the year.
The reasons are layered: aging, Soviet-era power plants that are decades past their intended lifespan. A chronic shortage of spare parts to fix them. And a fuel crisis that has left Cuba’s oil-fired plants unable to run at anything close to capacity…with a U.S. fuel blockade imposed earlier this year compounding shortages that were already severe.
Whatever the tangle of causes, the effect on ordinary people is the same: a country improvising its way through every single day.
When the Power Goes, Everything Else Goes With It
Here’s what most people outside Cuba don’t realize. Losing electricity doesn’t just mean sitting in the dark. It means losing nearly everything else that depends on it.
No power means no water. Cuba’s water system relies on electric pumps to move water into household tanks. When the grid goes down, the taps go dry along with it. Families are back to hauling buckets of water by hand for drinking, cooking, bathing, and everything else. And most homes don’t have a personal well to draw water from.
No power means spoiled food and medicine. Refrigerators sit warm. Meat, milk, and insulin that families waited in line and spent scarce money to buy are ruined within hours. One Havana grandmother described using a small rechargeable lamp, purchased with money her children, now living abroad, send home. Just to see well enough to feed her family and her cat after dark.
No power means canceled ordinary life. Schools have shortened hours or closed outright. Workdays have been cut short across the country. Tourism has stalled with thousands of hospitality jobs sitting empty as visitors stay away. Flights are being canceled. Public transportation slows or stops. Even small joys, like watching an evening show or gathering for a neighborhood event, have quietly disappeared from people’s lives.
No power means real medical danger. Hospitals and clinics are leaning on backup generators just to keep patients on life support and medicine refrigerated…when there’s fuel available to run them at all. Yes, even hospitals are now unable to operate.
Layer all of this on top of Cuba’s collapsing currency. As the peso keeps devaluing, the cost of basic goods keeps climbing out of reach. Families now spend hours in line for bread, for gas, for whatever medicine happens to be in stock that day, only to go home to a blackout that might spoil whatever they managed to buy.
It’s no wonder residents in Havana have described their day-to-day reality in words like “harsh” and “exhausting”. They’ve described a life reorganized entirely around the unpredictable on-and-off of a light switch. In some neighborhoods, prolonged blackouts lasting more than 48 hours have driven residents into the streets in frustration, banging pots and pans in protest. Families have taken to sleeping outdoors along Havana’s seaside Malecón wall just to escape the heat trapped inside powerless homes.
The Church That Won’t Go Dark
Here’s what we keep hearing from our partners on the ground, and what should not surprise anyone who knows the Cuban Church: even in the middle of all of this, the lights of faith and love have not gone out.
Pastors are still finding ways to lead their congregations, even without electricity to light a sanctuary or charge the phone they’d use to check on a sick member. Believers are still showing up for one another by sharing food, water, and whatever they have because that’s what the Church does in hard seasons. Neighbors who have nothing are still finding ways to care for neighbors who have even less. In a country where nearly everything modern has become unreliable, our Lighthouses of Love’s commitment to loving God and loving people has not wavered.
That resilience is exactly why Global Mission Awareness has committed to standing with the Cuban Church in a tangible way: by helping churches gain independent power through solar energy systems, so that no blackout can shut down a ministry’s ability to serve its community.
We’ve already funded and delivered our first complete solar system to our main church and resource center in Cuba.
Now we’re asking you to help us reach the next church and the one after that. Because a nation can lose its power. But it doesn’t have to lose its light.
Help bring solar power to a church in Cuba HERE.