Emergency crews were working to restore power to 10 million people on Wednesday as Cuba suffered its fifth nationwide blackout in under a year, the energy ministry announced.
“There has been a total disconnection of the electric system,” the energy ministry and National Electric Union said early on Wednesday.
The grid failure follows a string of nationwide blackouts since late last year that plunged Cuba’s frail and antiquated power generation system into near-total disarray.
Earlier this week, an outage hit Cuba’s eastern region, leaving people from Las Tunas to Guantánamo in the dark for several hours.
In February, the government suspended classes and work activities for two days given a shortage in electricity generation.
“This is crazy for everything,” Raúl Ernesto Gutiérrez said in Havana.
Gutiérrez, who said he was visiting the capital, said that back home in the countryside, “we will have to cook with charcoal, with firewood. It’s stressful and also frustrating.”
The country has also being facing fuel, food and other shortages amid its worst economic crisis in decades.
Havana state worker Danai Hernández, said she was on the way home from work which had just shut down.
“I’m going home to organize everything in the household and … now we have to wait. We don’t have any other choice,” she said, visibly upset.
Cuba’s oil-fired power plants, already obsolete and struggling to keep the lights on, reached a full crisis last year as oil imports from Venezuela, Russia and Mexico dwindled.
In October 2024, the island, which is suffering its worst economic crisis in three decades, was plunged into darkness for several days following a shutdown of the Antonio Guiteras thermoelectric power plant, the island’s biggest.
Cuba’s energy crisis has worsened in recent years due to US sanctions intended to put pressure on the island to change its political model.
The sanctions have prevented the Caribbean country from having sufficient foreign currency to buy fuel or repair its ageing thermoelectric plants, many of which have been operating for more than 30 years.
The blackouts have led to rare anti-government protests.
