Cuba suffered a complete power outage on Friday, the Ministry of Energy and Mines (Minem) in Havana reported. The power failure at the country’s largest power plant left its approximately 10 million inhabitants without electricity.
“Following the unexpected departure of the Antonio Guiteras CTE, at 11 a.m. today the total disconnection of the National Electricity System occurred ,” Minem posted on the social network X.
The Cuban government announced the closure of schools and non-essential industries as part of an energy emergency plan.
The ministry said that Unión Eléctrica, the state-owned company responsible, is “working on restoring the connection,” without specifying when the connection might be restored.
Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel said his government is prioritizing “the attention and solution to this energy contingency” and is working to restore electricity to the island.
The massive blackout comes after months of constant power outages across Cuba. The Caribbean country is suffering from a serious energy crisis attributed, among other problems, to the shortage of fuel used to keep power plants running.
In addition, the seven thermal power plants are old and in a precarious state. “In the last few days we have spent more hours without electricity than with electricity. People cannot work or go about their normal lives,” a woman who was in a rural area of the Cuban province of Matanzas told BBC Mundo.
The massive blackout came just one day after Prime Minister Manuel Marrero made a special appearance to discuss the crisis, which he described as a “national emergency . ”
Marrero announced several measures to deal with the situation, including paralyzing all non-essential state labor activity, prioritizing hospitals and food production centers.
On Thursday, 51% of the country was left without electricity and the Electric Union predicted that this Friday it would be 49% , but in the end the blackout affected almost 100%.
The director of electricity of the Ministry of Energy and Mines, Lázaro Guerra, declared in state media that the causes of the shutdown of the Antonio Guiteras thermoelectric plant, which was the trigger for the total collapse, are being investigated.
“At this moment, each of the thermoelectric units is being reviewed for restoration,” he said, according to the state-run Cubadebate website.
He said the restoration process has already begun at one of the country’s natural gas plants, although the largest ones run on oil. “There is no set time for full restoration, but work is underway to connect the electrical system as soon as possible,” he said.
Power outages have become very frequent since the end of the pandemic in Cuba, which is experiencing a very serious economic crisis marked by shortages of almost all products – including medicines and food – and the inability to pay its foreign debts to continue obtaining credit.
Power outages and the lack of almost everything have been one of the reasons for the social discontent in Cuban society, reflected in the historic protests of July 11, 2021, the largest since Fidel Castro took power in 1959 and established a communist system in the country.
Many Cubans also compare the current situation to the special period, the period of extreme scarcity that Cuba went through in the 1990s after the fall of the Soviet Union, its main benefactor.