HAVANA — Cuba’s power grid collapsed Saturday, leaving the country without electricity for a third time in March as the government contends with a decaying infrastructure and a U.S.-imposed oil blockade.
The state-owned National Electric Union reported a total blackout across the island, which it said was caused by an unexpected failure of a generating unit at the Nuevitas thermoelectric plant in Camaguey province.
“From that moment, a cascading effect occurred in the machines that were online,” said a report from the Ministry of Energy and Mines, which activated “micro-islands” of generating units to provide power to vital centers, hospitals and water systems.
Authorities said they were working to restore power more widely.
Power outages, whether nationwide or regional, have become relatively common in the last two years due to breakdowns in the aging infrastructure. The breakdowns are compounded by daily blackouts of up to 12 hours caused by fuel shortages, which further destabilize the system.
The last nationwide blackout occurred on Monday. Saturday’s outage was the second in the last week and the third this month.
The blackouts have a significant effect on the population, whose lives are disrupted by reduced work hours, lack of electricity for cooking, and food spoilage when refrigerators stop working, among many other consequences.
President Miguel Díaz-Canel has said the island has not received oil from foreign suppliers for three months. Cuba produces barely 40% of the fuel it needs to power its economy.
Cuba’s aging grid has drastically eroded in recent years. But the government also has blamed the outages on a U.S. energy blockade after President Trump in January warned of tariffs on any country that sells or provides oil to Cuba.
The Trump administration is demanding that Cuba release political prisoners and move toward political and economic liberalization in return for a lifting of sanctions. Trump also has raised the possibility of a “friendly takeover of Cuba,” which has riled Cubans’ resistance to U.S. threats and interference dating to the Cold War.
Rodríguez writes for the Associated Press.
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