This Friday, Cuba suffered a total disconnection of its electrical system, reported the Ministry of Energy and Mines (Minem) of Havana.
The service failure of the country’s most important power plant left its approximately 10 million inhabitants without electricity.
“After the unforeseen departure of the CTE Antonio Guiteras, at 11 a.m. today there was the total disconnection of the National Electroenergy System”, Minem published on the social network X.
The Cuban government announced the closure of schools and non-essential industries as part of an energy emergency plan.
The Ministry assured that Unión Eléctrica, the state company responsible, “is working on its reestablishment,” without specifying when the connection could return.
The president of Cuba, Miguel Diaz-Canelindicated that his government is prioritizing the “attention and solution of this energy contingency” and is working to restore electricity on the island.
Total crisis
The massive blackout comes after months of constant electrical disconnections throughout Cuba.
The Caribbean country suffers a serious energy crisis attributed, among other problems, to fuel shortage which is used to keep power plants running.
Furthermore, the seven thermoelectric plants are old and in a precarious state.
“In recent days we spent more hours without electricity than with electricity. People cannot work or live their normal lives,” a woman who was in a rural area of the Cuban province of Matanzas told BBC Mundo.
The massive blackout came just one day after the Prime Minister, Manuel Marrero, held a special appearance to talk about this crisis, which he described as “national emergency”.
Marrero announced several measures to address the situation, including paralyzing all non-essential state labor activity, prioritizing hospitals and food production centers.
A limit situation
On Thursday, 51% of the country was left without electricity and the Electrical Union I expected this Friday to be 49%but finally the blackout affected almost 100%.
The electricity director of the Ministry of Energy and Mines, Lázaro Guerra, declared in state media that the causes of the shutdown of the Antonio Guiteras thermoelectric plant, which was the trigger for the total collapse, are being investigated.
“At this moment, each of the thermoelectric units is being reviewed for its restoration,” he stated, according to the state portal Cubadebate.
He assured that the restoration process has already begun in one of the country’s natural gas plants, although the most important ones run on oil.
“There is no defined time for total restoration, but work is being done to connect the electrical system as soon as possible,” he stated.
Blackouts have become very frequent since the end of the pandemic in Cuba, which is going through a very serious economic crisis marked by the shortage of almost all products -including medicines and food- and the inability to pay their foreign debts to continue obtaining credit.
The blackouts and the lack of almost everything have been one of the reasons for the social discontent that exists in Cuban society, reflected in the historic protests of July 11, 2021, the largest since Fidel Castro took power in 1959 and established a system communist in the country.
Many Cubans also compare the current situation with the special period, the period of extreme scarcity that Cuba went through in the 1990s after the fall of the Soviet Union, its main benefactor.
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