Western Cuba has been hit by a massive blackout that the power official said could last 72 hours
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A power outage hit western Cuba on Wednesday, leaving millions of people in Havana and beyond without power in the latest outage to hit an island struggling with dwindling oil reserves and a crumbling power grid.
State radio station Radio Rebelde quoted an energy official as saying it could take 72 hours to restore operation of Cuba’s main power plant, which was shut down earlier and caused an outage.
The state electricity company said on social media X that the outage affected people from the west of the city of Pinar del Rio to the center of the city of Camaguey.
The agency said workers are working to restore power and posted a photo of Cuban Prime Minister Manuel Marrero Cruz meeting with Minister of Energy and Mines Vicente de la O Levy “to clarify the details …
“We rely on the experience and efforts of the electricians to overcome this situation in the shortest possible time,” Marrero wrote in X.
Meanwhile, de la O Levy said another power plant affected by the outage is now operational. “We are working to restore the National Electric System in the midst of a complicated energy situation,” he wrote in X.
State media reported that the blackout was caused by the shutdown of the Antonio Guiteras thermoelectric power plant in eastern Havana following a leak in its boiler.
Repairs will not be possible until the error is detected
Radio Rebelde quoted the plant’s technical director Román Pérez Castañeda as saying that the workers must first find the fault, decide how to fix it, fix it and start and synchronize the unit.
Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand and Liberal MP Randeep Sarai, the secretary of state for international development, announced that Canada will deliver $8 million in humanitarian aid to Cuba, where people are facing power outages and shortages of food, fuel and medicine.
Pérez Castañeda said a pipe burst in the boiler, causing a water leak and a fire that firefighters extinguished without major damage, according to Radio Rebelde.
This outage caught Odalis Sánchez, 63, out on the street with his grandson. He couldn’t walk because of a recent operation, so he called someone to give him a ride home.
About 200 people waited at the bus stop near him, but the buses were not running due to lack of fuel, so they tried to get on by any means available, including hitchhiking.
“I need to be able to get home to see what I can do,” said Sánchez. “Without power, you can’t do anything. My grandson is also studying. I have to make food for him. Public transportation is useless.”
This is the second such outage that has affected the western region of Cuba in the past three months.
In early December, the outage that hit the western region of the island lasted for about 12 hours. Officials said a fault in the power line connecting the two power plants caused an overload that led to the collapse of the western sector of the power system.
‘We must keep fighting’
Cuba is struggling with dwindling oil reserves after the United States attacked Venezuela in early January, a move that halted vital petroleum exports to the South American country. Later that month, US President Donald Trump threatened to impose tariffs on any country that would sell or supply oil to Cuba.
Ernesto Couto Martínez, 76, was trying to get a fare home and said he would deal with the latest outage “with the spirit that all Cubans have.”
“We have to keep fighting. There is no other way,” he said. “We have to go forward, to block or not to block.”
Last month, the Cuban government implemented fuel-saving measures and warned that jet fuel would not be available at nine airports across the island until mid-March.
Before the attack on Venezuela, the island was already suffering from the collapse of the electricity grid, power shortages and fuel supply disruptions.
