Cuba’s national electricity system collapsed early Wednesday morning after the country’s largest power plant failed, the government said, the latest in a series of outages that have plunged the island into turmoil amid fuel shortages, a natural disaster and an economic crisis.
The country’s energy and mining ministry said Antonio Guiteras’ power plant in Matanzas, the island’s top electricity producer, was shut down around 2am, suggesting a grid failure.
Cuba’s oil-fired power plants, already obsolete and struggling to keep the lights on, have reached a full crisis this year as oil imports from Venezuela, Russia and Mexico have dwindled, contributing to many of the country’s blackouts in the last two months.
The system’s failure on Wednesday morning left the capital, Havana, almost completely in darkness, according to a Reuters witness. Before sunrise, the lights could only be seen on a few large hotels and government buildings on the city skyline.
Reports on social media of blackouts elsewhere in Cuba suggested that the entire island of more than 10 million people were without power, although the government had yet to confirm the extent of the outage.
The power and ministry said they would reconnect to the electrical system.
Cuba’s needs collapsed manifold in October as fuel supplies ran out and Hurricane Oscar hit the island’s far eastern tip, followed by Hurricane Rafael in November.