HAVANA – Cuba has reconnected its national electric grid and restored power to most of the capital Havana by the end of Sunday, energy officials said two days after an island-wide outage knocked out electricity to 10 million people.
At the end of Sunday, about two-thirds of the city’s clients said power would recover and that number would increase overnight.
Cheers were heard in the neighborhood around town as the lights flashed two days later without electricity.
The Cuban grid collapsed on Friday evening after a transmission line at Havana’s substation shorted, launching a chain reaction that completely shut down power generation across the island.
Most of Havana is a densely populated, major tourist centre, and ever since, it has been powerless, paralyzed, shutting down most restaurants, blacking streets and stoplights into cities of 2 million.
The grid operator said Felton and Antonio Gitera, the nation’s largest oil shooting factories, have returned online and generated electricity by the second half of Sunday.
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And the last time we saw electricity recovered just before the darkness on Sunday was also the arrival of electricity in the westernmost state of Pina del Rio, the country’s officials said.
The grid collapse on Friday marked the first national blackout on Caribbean islands since October.
Already outdated and struggling to maintain the lights, Cuba’s oil power plants reached a complete crisis last year as oil imports from Venezuela, Russia and Mexico fell.
Even before the grid collapse on Friday, much of the entire island had already experienced daily blackouts of more than 20 hours.
Cuba was making progress on Sunday to restore electricity, but authorities said only a third of the typical daily demand has grown, with many residents still remaining in the dark.
The Ministry of Education said schools in Pina del Rio, Artemisa and Western Cuba’s Mayabek state will remain closed until Tuesday.
