Cuba slowly restores power after island-wide outage

Cuba began gradually restoring power in the middle of Friday evening after an island-wide blackout, Reuters reports, citing officials. The outage occurred after the country’s largest power plant went offline. Most of the island’s ten million residents were still in the dark on Friday evening, but lights came back on shortly after nightfall in some parts of the capital, Havana, including at several large city hospitals.

Grid operator UNE hopes to restart at least five oil-fired power plants overnight. It says they could provide enough electricity to begin supplying power to wider areas of the country.

The Cuban government closed schools and non-essential industrial businesses early on Friday morning. It sent most state employees home. Recreational and cultural venues, including nightclubs, also had to close.

Life in Cuba is becoming increasingly unbearable, with residents suffering shortages of food, fuel, water and medicine. Almost all commerce in Havana came to a halt on Friday. Many residents sat sweating on their doorsteps. Tourists desperately sought shelter from the sun. At dusk, the city was almost entirely shrouded in darkness.

„We went to a restaurant and they had no food because the power was out; now we’re still without internet,“ Brazilian tourist Carlos Roberto Julio, who recently arrived in Havana, told the agency. „We’ve already had several problems in two days,“ he added.

Power cuts lasting several hours are common in Cuba and affect the whole country, including the capital, Havana. The cause is an ageing and inadequately maintained energy infrastructure. Oil supplies from Venezuela have also fallen recently. Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel says US sanctions were chiefly responsible for Friday’s outage.

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