By Deutsche Welle
19 Oct 2024, 7:51 PM EDT
Cuba woke up in darkness this Saturday, a day after a breakdown in the island’s main thermoelectric plant caused the electrical system to collapse, which the authorities are trying to revive at all costs.
The head of electricity in the country, Lázaro Guerra, said in a television news program that another breakdown in the electrical grid in western Cuba had forced technicians to start connecting three important power plants again, which which temporarily paralyzed progress.
Díaz-Canel: Cuba is going through an “energy emergency”
“I cannot assure you that we will be able to finish connecting the system today, but we estimate that there will be important progress,” he said.
On Friday night, the National Electrical Union (UNE) indicated that it had managed to achieve with attached “microsystems” a minimum level of electrical energy generation, which would be used to start thermoelectric plants and floating plants in several regions of the country.
President Miguel Díaz-Canel, who assures that Cuba is going through an “energy emergency,” held a supervision meeting on Friday in which he promised that “there will be no rest” until service is “completely” restored on the island, of 10 million population.
Cuban regime blames US embargo
Earlier, the authorities of the Ministry of Energy and Mines had announced that the entire country had been left without power, after the unexpected shutdown of the Antonio Guiteras thermoelectric plant, the main one on the island and located in the western province of Matanzas.
At dawn, most of the neighborhoods in the Cuban capital, with two million inhabitants, were still without electricity service, the AFP news agency reported. Only hotels, hospitals and some private homes that have their own small generation plants had electricity.
On Thursday, Díaz-Canel assured that the crisis is due to the difficulty in purchasing the fuel that Cuba’s electrical system needs due to the embargo that Washington has applied against the island since 1962.