A power grid failure in eastern Cuba plunged three entire provinces into darkness on Wednesday, utility officials said, leaving hundreds of thousands of people without electricity.
After six decades under US embargo, the communist island’s electricity system is in shambles, with frequent and prolonged outages.
To make matters worse, President Donald Trump threatened last month to cut off Cuba’s heavily subsidized oil supplies from Venezuela.
The provinces of Granma, Santiago de Cuba and Guantanamo in eastern Cuba were “completely” without power, while parts of Holguin province were also hit, the state-owned Union Electrica de Cuba (UNE) posted Wednesday on X.
The agency said a fault at a substation in Holguin caused an electrical system disconnect that impacted the four provinces.
Cuba’s second-largest city, Santiago de Cuba — which is home to more than 400,000 people — was hit by the blackout.
One resident of the city said that her power went out about 5:00 pm (2200 GMT).
“Since it goes out all the time, I didn’t even realize it was a widespread outage,” Isabel, 28, who did not want to give her last name, told AFP.
Cuba has endured several national blackouts since late 2024, some of them lasting days.
An AFP analysis of official statistics found that the island generated only half of the electricity it needed last year.
Along with food and medicine shortages, the country is experiencing a mass exodus.
Officials blame tight US sanctions for the crisis, but poor economic management and the collapse of tourism following the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic contributed to the island’s woes.
Despite the imposition of the US trade embargo in 1962, Cuba’s eight power plants were built in the 1980s and 1990s. Thirty solar plants built with help from China have failed to help prevent blackouts.
Since toppling Venezuela leader Nicolas Maduro last month, Trump has threatened to slap tariffs on countries that give oil to Cuba — even as the United Nations chief warned Wednesday that an oil shortage could lead to a humanitarian “collapse” on the island.
Trump has said he wants to “make a deal” with Cuba’s leadership, without saying what that deal might look like.
In December, a massive power outage in western Cuba left millions of people without electricity — including in the capital Havana, a city of 1.7 million residents.
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