Millions without power as Cuba hit by another nationwide blackout

Authorities say Antonio Guiteras power plant shut down overnight, prompting collapse of national power grid.

Cuba’s national power grid has collapsed again, leaving millions of people across the Caribbean island without electricity in the latest such failure in recent months.

Authorities said the Antonio Guiteras power plant in Matanzas, the country’s top electricity producer, shut down about 2am (07:00 GMT) on Wednesday, prompting the grid collapse.

The Ministry of Energy and Mines said in a post on social media that it was working to restore power.

Cuba’s oil-fired power plants, obsolete and struggling to operate, reached a full crisis this year as oil imports from Venezuela, Russia and Mexico dwindled.

The system failure on Wednesday morning left the capital, Havana, almost completely in the dark, the Reuters news agency reported, quoting a witness.

Lights before sunrise could be seen only in a handful of large hotels and government buildings across the city’s skyline.

Reports of blackouts elsewhere in Cuba on social media suggested the entire island of 10 million people was without power although the government had yet to confirm the extent of the outage.

Cuba’s power grid collapsed multiple times in October as fuel supplies dwindled and Hurricane Oscar struck the far-eastern end of the island, prompting authorities to close schools and nonessential workplaces.

In November, Hurricane Raphael knocked out the grid again as it made landfall on the island as a Category 3 storm.

The storm tore across Cuba with winds hitting 185km/h (115mph), damaging homes, uprooting trees and toppling telephone poles.

The Cuban authorities have blamed previous outages on difficulties in acquiring fuel for power plants, which they have attributed to the tightening, during Donald Trump’s first presidency, of a six-decade-long United States trade embargo.

But the country has also experienced a broader economic crisis marked by soaring inflation and shortages of medicine, food and water.