People waiting at a bus station on Friday in Matanzas, Cuba, following a power outage across the entire country.
Credit...Antonio Levi/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Cuba Suffers Blackout After Power Plant Failure Near Havana

The Cuban government had just announced emergency measures to reduce electricity use — then the power went out across the entire nation.

by · NY Times

Cuba’s power grid failed and the entire nation plunged into darkness Friday, less than a day after the government stressed the need to paralyze the economy to save electricity in the face of major gasoline shortages and large-scale, regular outages.

The electricity went out nationwide Friday morning after a failure at a thermoelectric power plant in Matanzas, east of Havana, Cuba’s Energy Ministry said on X.

The blackout came less than a day after the prime minister, Manuel Marrero Cruz, held a late-night television address with state officials to discuss the ongoing electricity crisis, which experts said was the worst the nation — long accustomed to food and electricity shortages — had ever experienced.

For weeks, the country has lacked the fuel to run the power grid, which has left large parts of the nation without electricity for 15 to 20 hour stretches.

When electricity does return, demand surges, further straining the power grid, Mr. Marrero said on Thursday night as he urged people to cut back on usage.

To ease the stress on the electrical network, officials announced on Thursday night that all schools would be closed until Monday and cultural and nonessential activities such as nightclubs would shutter.

Only essential employees should go to work, according to an announcement posted on some government websites, which said hospitals would remain open. Any energy-sucking service that was not vital would be suspended.

“In other words, we have been paralyzing economic activity,” Mr. Marrero said. Officials said they were investigating what caused the failure at the power plant in Matanzas.

Cuba has long struggled with an aging and poorly maintained infrastructure that is not able to produce the amount of megawatts the nation of nearly 11 million people needs.

Cuba traditionally depended on Venezuela for imports, but in the face of dwindling supplies from that country, it began looking in recent years to Mexico and Russia. A severe economic crisis and the cash crunch it produced made it harder for Cuba to pay for those fuel imports.

For more than a year, that has resulted in major gasoline shortages, leading to long lines at gas stations. The government has warned that it will have to drastically increase fuel and electricity prices to generate funds and get people to cut back on usage.

The crisis was recently made worse because poor weather conditions prevented the unloading of fuel deliveries from oil vessels, Mr. Marrero said. Cuba’s energy infrastructure is in poor condition, but fuel shortages were the biggest factor for the ongoing problem, he said.

President Miguel Díaz-Canel blamed the United States trade embargo against Cuba, which limits the country’s ability to import fuel, for creating the government’s cash shortfalls and imposing hardship on Cubans.

Miriam Leiva, a dissident journalist in Havana, said the lack of electricity was so bad that Mr. Marrero’s own video news conference was delayed by several hours because of technical difficulties, which viewers took as likely the result of problems with the power grid.

The fact that the nation’s normally secretive leaders took to the airways to share detailed updates underscored the severity of the crisis, and showed that government officials were nervous and even desperate, she said.

Faced with an authoritarian government, widespread gasoline shortages and soaring food prices, more than 600,000 Cubans have fled to the United States since 2022, U.S. data shows.

“This is a situation that has never happened before,” Ms. Leiva said, referring to the energy crisis. “What’s worse is that they have no idea when they are going to resolve it, or how.”

The problem was particularly critical outside of Havana, Ms. Leiva said, where people go without electricity for long stretches. (The U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay operates under its own independent power grid, a spokesman there said.)

The Cuban government appeared to be trying to address the challenge by limiting the length of outages in Havana neighborhoods where they feared popular uprisings, Ms. Leiva said. Tens of thousands of people throughout the country took to the streets in protest after a particularly difficult period in 2021, a show of discontent the government seemed anxious to avoid.

Ms. Leiva said she went to a bakery Friday for bread and found none.

“There is no bread, and they don’t know when there will be any,” she said. “Sometimes it’s because there’s no flour. Today’s it’s because there’s no electricity.”

Alfredo López Valdés, the director general of the national electric company, said the country was working on solutions, but added that they would not come quickly.

“We are fighting; we are not sitting on our hands,” Mr. López said. “We recognize that the situation is very hard.”

Carol Rosenberg contributed reporting.

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