HAVANA (AP) — A blackout hit the western half of Cuba on Wednesday, leaving millions of people in Havana and beyond without power in the latest outage to affect an island struggling with dwindling oil reserves and a crumbling electric grid.
Government radio station Radio Rebelde quoted an energy official as saying that it could take up to 72 hours to restore operations at Cuba's largest thermoelectric power plant, which shut down earlier and sparked the outage.
The government’s electric utility said on social platform X that the outage affected people from the western town of Pinar del Rio to the central town of Camaguey.
The agency said crews were working to restore power and posted a picture of Prime Minister Manuel Marrero Cruz meeting with Energy and Mines Minister Vicente de la O Levy “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 electrical workers to overcome this situation in the shortest possible time,” Marrero wrote on X.
Meanwhile, de la O Levy said one power plant affected by the outage was up and running. “We are working to restore the National Electric System amid a complex energy situation,” he wrote on X.
State media reported that the outage was caused by a shutdown of the Antonio Guiteras thermoelectric power plant east of Havana following a leak in its boiler.
Radio Rebelde quoted the plant's technical director Román Pérez Castañeda as saying that crews must first locate the fault, determine the repair method, repair it and then start up and synchronize the unit.
Pérez Castañeda said that a pipe burst in the boiler, causing a water leak and subsequent fire that firefighters extinguished without major damage, according to Radio Rebelde.
The outage caught 63-year-old Odalis Sánchez out on the street with her grandson. She was unable to walk because of a recent operation, so she called someone for a ride home.
Some 200 people waited at a bus stop near her, but buses were not running given a lack of fuel, so they tried to get a ride via any means available, including hitchhiking.
“I need to be able to get home to see what I can do,” Sánchez said. “Without power, you can’t do anything. My grandson also is studying and I have to make him food. Public transportation isn’t helping.”
It is the second such outage to affect Cuba’s western region in the past three months.
It wasn’t immediately clear what caused Wednesday’s outage.
In early December, an outage that hit the island's western region lasted nearly 12 hours. Officials said a fault in a transmission line linking two power plants caused an overload and led to the collapse of the energy system's western sector.
Cuba is struggling with dwindling oil reserves after the U.S. attacked Venezuela in early January, a move that halted critical petroleum shipments from the South America country. Later that month, U.S. President Donald Trump threatened to impose tariffs on any country that would sell or supply Cuba with oil.
Ernesto Couto Martínez, 76, was trying to find a ride home and said he would confront the latest outage “with the spirit that all Cubans have.”
“We must keep fighting. There’s no other way,” he said. “We have to move forward, blockade or no blockade.”
Last month, Cuba’s government implemented austere fuel-saving measures and warned that jet fuel wouldn’t be available at nine airports across the island until mid-March.
Prior to the attack on Venezuela, the island already was struggling with a crumbling electric grid, generation deficits and interruptions in fuel supplies.
Coto reported from San José, Costa Rica.
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