Cuba suffers the third general blackout in less than two months

The national electrical system of Cuba fell this Wednesday due to a failure of its main thermoelectric plantwithout “giving respite” to Cubans who are experiencing their third national blackout in less than two months.

President Miguel Díaz-Canel said that he expects “good progress” in the recovery of the service during this day. “The colleagues from the Ministry of Energy and Mines of Cuba and the national electricity company UNE are working tirelessly and with precision on their reconnection.” ”, indicated Díaz-Canel in his account X.

The Ministry of Energy and Mines reported during the early hours of the morning that “the disconnection of the Electrical System occurredSEN, when the Antonio Guiteras thermoelectric plant leaves, the most important in the country, he said in X.

According to the authorities, during the morning independent electricity generation circuits were reestablished in all the country’s provinces, especially those that serve hospitals, but the vast majority of the island’s 10 million inhabitants remained without power in the middle day.

Crisis “gives no respite”

Orlando Matos, a night watchman who was on duty when the blackout began, complains that the energy crisis “gives no respite.” “One lives under anxiety,” he exclaimed.

Osnel Delgado, a 39-year-old dancer, says next to his wife, also a dancer: “You try to overcome this situation all the time, But when the environment doesn’t help you, then you end up like you don’t want to do anything. “You get depressed.”

The failure occurs after another widespread outage on November 6, when Hurricane Rafael caused a system outage that lasted several days. Just a few weeks before, on October 18, another failure in the same thermoelectric plant, located in the province of Matanzas, neighboring Havana, triggered a four-day national blackout.

The Minister of Energy and Mines, Vicente de la O Levy, explained that on this occasion “conditions are more favorable than in the last disconnection”. “There was no damage to the country’s generation units that were online,” so it is expected that during the day there will be “a large percentage of recovery” of the supply, the ministry indicated in X.

In Havana there were few people on the street on Wednesday morning. Many families did not take their children to school and state employees were informed that their businesses would not open.

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