A blackout hit the western half of Cuba on Wednesday, leaving millions of people in Havana and beyond without power in the latest blackout to hit an island struggling with dwindling oil reserves and a crumbling power grid.
The governmental Unión Eléctrica confirmed the blackout on social platform X and said it affected people from the eastern town of Pinar del Río to the central town of Camagüey.
The agency said teams were working to restore power and published a photo of Prime Minister Manuel Marrero Cruz meeting with Vicente de la O Levy, Minister of Energy and Mines, “to specify the details of the…disconnection and the next steps to be taken for its restoration.”
“We trust in the experience and effort of the electricians to overcome this situation in the shortest time possible,” Marrero wrote in X.
Meanwhile, de la O Levy said a power plant affected by the outage was operational.
“We are working to restore the National Electrical System in the midst of a complex energy situation,” he wrote in X.
State media reported that the outage was caused by the closure of the Antonio Guiteras thermoelectric plant east of Havana after a leak in its boiler.
The blackout surprised Odalis Sánchez, 63, on the street with her grandson.
She couldn’t walk due to a recent operation, so she called someone to take her home.
About 200 people were waiting at a nearby bus stop. But the buses were not running due to lack of fuel, so they tried to get transportation by any means available, including hitchhiking.
“I need to be able to get home to see what I can do,” Sanchez said. “Without electricity you can’t do anything. My grandson is also studying and I have to prepare food for him. Public transportation doesn’t help.”
It is the second blackout of this type that affects the western region of Cuba in the last three months.
It was not immediately clear what caused Wednesday’s outage.
In early December, a blackout that affected the western region of the island lasted almost 12 hours. Officials said a fault in a transmission line linking two power plants caused an overload and caused the western sector of the power system to collapse.
Cuba is struggling with dwindling oil reserves after the United States attacked Venezuela in early January, a move that halted critical oil shipments from the South American country. Later that month, Donald Trump threatened to impose tariffs on any country that sells or supplies oil to Cuba.
Ernesto Couto Martínez, 76, was trying to find transportation home and said he would face the latest blackout “with the spirit that all Cubans have.”
“We must continue fighting. There is no other way,” he said. “We have to move forward, lockdown or no lockdown.”
Last month, Cuba’s government implemented austere fuel-saving measures and warned that jet fuel would not be available at nine airports on the island until mid-March.
Before the attack on Venezuela, the island was already struggling with a crumbling power grid, generation shortfalls and fuel supply disruptions.
