Cuban officials reported on Monday that the country of about 11 million people across the island as its energy and economic crises deepen and its power grid continues to collapse.
The Ministry of Energy and Mines said there was a “complete disconnection” of the country’s electricity system at X and it was investigating whether there were any failures in the units that were operating when the grid went down.
This is the third major blackout in Cuba in the past four months.
Tomás David Velázquez Felipe, a 61-year-old resident of Havana, said the relentless stops make Cubans think they should just pack up and leave the island. “The less we eat the perishables,” he said. “Our people are too old to sustain grief.”
Cuba’s aging grid has been severely eroded in recent years, leading to daily outages and an increase in blackouts across the island. But the government has blamed its woes on the US energy embargo after President Donald Trump warned in January of tariffs on any country that sells or supplies oil to Cuba. The Trump administration is demanding the release of Cuban political prisoners and moves toward political and economic liberalization in exchange for the lifting of sanctions. Trump has also raised the possibility of a “friendly annexation of Cuba”.
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On Monday, he said he believed he would have the “honor of taking Cuba.”
“I mean, let me free it, take it. I think I can do whatever I want with it,” Trump said of Cuba, calling it a “very weak country.”
The US Embassy in Cuba wrote on Monday X that there is “no information on when power will be restored.”
“Cuba’s national electricity grid is highly unstable and long-term scheduled and unscheduled power outages are a daily occurrence across the country,” it wrote. “Take precautions by conserving fuel, water, food and mobile phone charge and be prepared for significant disruption.”
William Leogrande, an American University professor who has tracked Cuba for years, said the country’s power grid was poorly maintained and its infrastructure was “exceeding its normal useful life.”
“The technicians who work on the grid are the wizards who keep it running when it’s given the shape it’s in,” Leogrande said.
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Leogrande said that if the island drastically reduced consumption and expanded renewables, it could struggle without oil shipments for a while. “But it’s constant misery for the common people, and eventually the economy may collapse completely, and then you’ll have social chaos and possibly mass immigration,” he said.
Leogrande said that in order to ramp up solar power faster than Cuba did last year, other countries, notably China, should be willing to double or provide more such equipment.
President Miguel Díaz-Canel said on Friday that the island had not received oil shipments for three months and was operating on solar, natural gas and thermoelectric plants, and the government had to postpone surgeries for dozens of people.
Yaimisel Sánchez Pena, 48, is upset that the food she buys with her son’s remittances in the US continues to spoil, adding that the outages also affect her 72-year-old mother: “Every day she suffers.”
71-year-old Cuban resident Mercedes Velazquez lamented another gloom. “We’re just waiting here to see what happens,” she said, as she gave away a portion of the soup she had recently made while it was still fresh. “Everything goes bad.”
Read moreCuba was hit by a massive blackout, leaving millions without power in Havana and the western provinces
A week ago a massive outage affected the west of the island, leaving millions without power. Another major blackout affected western Cuba in early December.
Crucial oil shipments from Venezuela were halted after the US attacked the South American country in early January and arrested its then-president Nicolas Maduro.
While Cuba produces 40% of its petroleum and produces its own energy, it is insufficient to meet demand as its electricity grid is crumbling.
“And on top of that, the Cuban government doesn’t have the hard currency to import spare parts or to upgrade the plant or the grid itself. It’s a perfect storm of collapse,” Leogrande said.
He noted that thermoelectric plants were using heavy oil whose sulfur content was corroding the equipment.
On Friday, Díaz-Canel confirmed that Cuba is in talks with the US government as the problems continue to intensify.
(AP with France 24)
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