The Cuba Study Group organized this webinar to present and discuss the findings of the special report Without Power, There Is No Country. Cuba’s Electricity Generation Crisis, prepared by economist Ricardo Torres. The panel included Ricardo Torres, Jorge Piñón from the University of Texas at Austin Energy Institute, and Ricardo Herrero from the Cuba Study Group, who took questions from the audience in real time. The event took place at a particularly critical moment: Cuba was experiencing one of the worst episodes of its energy crisis in decades.
The central focus of the webinar was a structural diagnosis of Cuba’s electricity crisis. Torres’s report reveals that electricity generation in Cuba dropped from over 21,000 GWh in 2019 to less than 16,000 GWh in 2025, a reduction of nearly 25%. This decline is not the result of an isolated accident, but of decades of accumulated underinvestment. Most of Cuba’s thermoelectric plants have been in operation for over 30 years, with deferred maintenance, chronic shortages of spare parts, and cascading breakdowns. In March 2026, nine out of the 16 thermoelectric units in the country were out of service.
Torres presented the cost figures for recovery and was unequivocal about what it would take to get out of the crisis. The report estimates that closing the energy gap would require at least $6.612 billion just for new generating capacity, not counting the modernization of the distribution network. According to the report, recovery of the system depends not only on technical improvements, but also on economic and institutional conditions that allow sustained investment.
There will be no sustainable solution to Cuba’s power problem without reforms that restore the country’s economic viability.
A key point of discussion was the role of renewable energy. Cuba has bet on solar park installations with Chinese support, adding nearly 800 MW of new solar capacity in 2025. However, experts warn that without storage batteries, the panels do not address the nighttime deficit. Jorge Piñón described the government’s strategy as a “shotgun” model — parks scattered across the country — that only works during daylight hours and does not tackle the underlying structural problem.
The webinar also addressed the political debate around the causes of the crisis. Torres rejects the official arguments that attribute the crisis solely to the U.S. blockade, describing that explanation as “simplistic and counterproductive”. In his view, the government failed to allocate long-term investment to guarantee electricity generation and distribution, instead allowing the grid to age until it became fragile. This does not mean dismissing the impact of external sanctions, but rather acknowledging that decades of domestic policy decisions have critically compounded the system’s vulnerability.
Finally, both Torres and Piñón agreed that the crisis carries consequences far beyond domestic inconvenience. The report describes the crisis as “chronic” and “systemic,” characterized by recurring outages and progressive deterioration of the system. Hospitals have been forced to cancel surgeries, tourism — one of the country’s main sources of foreign currency — has collapsed, and emigration has accelerated. In Torres’s own words, “only Cubans can build a New Cuba by rebuilding a state that deserves trust and an economy that finally gives people a reason to stay, invest, and live with dignity”. The webinar closed with a call to understand the energy crisis not as an isolated technical problem, but as the most visible symptom of an exhausted economic model in need of deep structural reform.
