Homes have been thrown into blackout and business operations paralyzed after Cuba’s largest power plant failed to serve the other lesser plants across the country.
The national grid collapse was the latest of several such failures being experienced in the country amid fuel shortages, natural disasters, and economic crises.
The country’s energy and mines ministry said the Antonio Guiteras power plant in Matanzas, the island’s top electricity producer, had shut down at about 2am, prompting the grid collapse.
Cuba’s oil-fired power plants, already obsolete and struggling to keep the lights on, reached a full crisis this year as oil imports from Venezuela, Russia, and Mexico dwindled, contributing to multiple nationwide blackouts in the last two months.
The system failure on Wednesday morning left the capital, Havana, almost completely in the dark. Before sunrise, lights could be seen only in a handful of large hotels and government buildings on the city’s skyline.
Reports on social media of blackouts elsewhere in Cuba suggested the entire island of more than 10 million people was without power, though the government had yet to confirm the extent of the outage.
After the collapse, the Energy and Mines Ministry said it was working to reconnect the electrical system.
Cuba’s grid collapsed multiple times in October as fuel supplies dwindled and Hurricane Oscar struck the far-eastern end of the island, then again in November with the passage of Hurricane Rafael.
