Government radio station Radio Rebelde quoted an energy official as saying that it could take at least 72 hours to restore operations at one of Cuba’s largest thermoelectric power plants, which shut down earlier and sparked the outage.
A blackout hit the western half of Cuba on Wednesday, leaving millions of people in Havana and beyond without power in the latest outage to affect an island struggling with dwindling oil reserves and a crumbling electric grid.
Government radio station Radio Rebelde quoted an energy official as saying that it could take at least 72 hours to restore operations at one of Cuba’s largest thermoelectric power plants, which shut down earlier and sparked the outage.
The government’s electric utility said on social platform X that the outage affected people from the western town of Pinar del Rio to the central town of Camaguey.
The US Embassy in Cuba issued a security alert and warned people to “prepare for significant disruptions” and conserve fuel, water, food and mobile phone batteries.
“Cuba’s national power grid is increasingly unreliable, and scheduled and unscheduled power outages are prolonged and a daily occurrence across the country, including Havana,” it said on X.
By late Thursday afternoon, the government said crews had restored power to 2.5% of Havana, or some 21,100 customers, noting that efforts were gradual and tied to what the system’s conditions would allow.
“We trust in the experience and effort of the electrical workers to overcome this situation in the shortest possible time,” Prime Minister Manuel Marrero Cruz wrote on X.
Meanwhile, Energy and Mines Minister Vicente de la O Levy said earlier that one power plant affected by the outage was up and running. “We are working to restore the National Electric System amid a complex energy situation,” he wrote on X.
State media reported that the outage was caused by a shutdown of the Antonio Guiteras thermoelectric power plant east of Havana following a leak in its boiler.
Radio Rebelde quoted the plant’s technical director Romn Prez Castaeda as saying that crews must first locate the fault, determine the repair method, repair it and then start up and synchronise the unit.
Prez Castaeda said that a pipe burst in the boiler, causing a water leak and subsequent fire that firefighters extinguished without major damage, according to Radio Rebelde.
The outage caught 63-year-old Odalis Snchez out on the street with her grandson. She was unable to walk because of a recent operation, so she called someone for a ride home.
Some 200 people waited at a bus stop near her, but buses were not running given a lack of fuel, so they tried to get a ride via any means available, including hitchhiking.
“I need to be able to get home to see what I can do,” Snchez said. “Without power, you can’t do anything. My grandson also is studying and I have to make him food. Public transportation isn’t helping.”
It is the second such outage to affect Cuba’s western region in the past three months.
In early December, an outage that hit the island’s western region lasted nearly 12 hours. Officials said a fault in a transmission line linking two power plants caused an overload and led to the collapse of the energy system’s western sector.
Authorities have noted that some thermoelectric plants have been operating for over 30 years and receive little maintenance given the high cost. US sanctions also have prevented the government from buying new equipment and specialised parts, officials say.
Cuba also is struggling with dwindling oil reserves after the US attacked Venezuela in early January, a move that halted critical petroleum shipments from the South American country. Later that month, US President Donald Trump threatened to impose tariffs on any country that would sell or supply Cuba with oil.
Ernesto Couto Martnez, 76, was trying to find a ride home and said he would confront the latest outage “with the spirit that all Cubans have.”
“We must keep fighting. There’s no other way,” he said. “We have to move forward, blockade or no blockade.”
Last month, Cuba’s government implemented austere fuel-saving measures and warned that jet fuel wouldn’t be available at nine airports across the island until mid-March.
Prior to the attack on Venezuela, the island was already struggling with a crumbling electric grid, generation deficits and interruptions in fuel supplies.
