Cuba gets some electricity back after major power outage left millions in the dark

WASHINGTON — Cuba's government on Saturday said that some electricity was restored on the island after one of the country's major power plants failed and left millions without electricity in an outage that started two days earlier.

Energy minister Vicente de la O Levy said the country had 500 megawatts of energy in its electrical grid early Saturday. He posted on X that “several substations in the west now have electricity.”

O Levy also said two thermoelectric power plants are back and two more will resume their operations “in the next few hours.”

In addition to the Antonio Guiteras plant, whose failure on Friday affected the entire national system, Cuba has several others and it wasn’t immediately clear whether or not they remained functional.

There is no official estimate for when the blackout will be ended. Even in a country that is used to outages amid a deepening economic crisis, Friday’s supply collapse was unprecedented in modern times, aside from incidents involving intense hurricanes, like one in 2022.

The Cuban government has announced emergency measures to slash electricity demand, including suspending classes, shutting down some state-owned workplaces and canceling nonessential services. Officials said that 1.64 gigawatts went offline during peak hours, about half the total demand at the time.

Local authorities said the outage, which started in a smaller scale on Thursday, stemmed from increased demand from small and medium-sized companies and residences’ air conditioners. Later, the blackout got worse due to breakdowns in old thermoelectric plants that haven’t been properly maintained and the lack of fuel to operate some facilities.

Changes to electricity rates for small- and medium-sized companies, which have proliferated since they were first authorized by the communist government in 2021, are also being considered.