The Cuban government said Saturday that some electricity had been restored to the island. after the breakdown of one of the country’s main power plants and left millions without power during an outage that began two days earlier.
Energy Minister Vicente de la O Levy said Saturday morning that the country has 500 megawatts of energy in its electricity grid. He posted on X that “several substations in the west now have electricity.”
O Levy also indicated that two thermoelectric plants were back and that two others would resume operations “in the coming hours”.
In addition to the Antonio Guiteras plant, whose breakdown on Friday affected the entire national system, Cuba has several others, of which it is not yet clear whether they remain functional or not.
There is no official estimate of when the outage will end. Even in a country accustomed to outages amid a deepening economic crisis, Friday’s supply collapse was unprecedented in modern times, aside from incidents involving intense hurricanes, like the one in 2022 .
The Cuban government announced emergency measures to reduce electricity demand, including suspending classes, closing some public workplaces and cutting non-essential services. Officials said 1.64 gigawatts were out of service during peak hours, about half of the total demand at the time.
Local authorities said the outage, which began on a smaller scale Thursday, was due to increased demand from small and medium-sized businesses and residential air conditioners. Later, the blackout worsened due to breakdowns in old, poorly maintained thermoelectric plants and lack of fuel to operate some facilities.
Changes to electricity rates for small and medium-sized businesses, which have increased since they were first authorized by the communist government in 2021, are also being considered.
