HAVANA – Millions of Cuba remained without power after leaving the island in the dark the night before after the country’s electric grid failed on Saturday.
The fourth major blackout in the last six months has been the fourth as a severe economic crisis plagues the Caribbean country. The Energy Mines Ministry said in a statement on social media that the latest outage was attributed to a failure at a substation outside Havana.
Internet and telephone services were intermittent around Saturday evening after it turned off around 8pm local time on Friday.
Cuban leader Miguel Diaz Canel said on his X account that authorities are “working vigorously to restore stability.”
Lazaro Guerra, the head of the ministry’s power department, said on national television that power has already been generated to support important services such as hospitals.
A statement from the Cuban Power Coalition issued on Saturday said the strategy was to create “microsystems” that would connect together and gradually restore electricity across the country. Some of these were already active in the provinces of Guantanamo, Santiago, Las Tuna and Pina del Rio.
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At Sancti Spíritus, Provincial Energy Company reported on the Telegram Channel that over 200,000 customers in the area have electricity thanks to these microsystems.
Many Cuban families use electrical equipment to prepare their meals. Stopping can cause food to thaw in the fridge and rot due to the island’s tropical climate.
“As I was starting to cook and trying to make spaghetti, the power faded. “And what now?” said Cecilia Dukense, a 79-year-old housewife who lives in a working-class neighborhood in central Havana.
In Havana, people bought food on Saturday. The companies were open, but some were operating using batteries and small home generators.
Frank Garcia, a 26-year-old marker worker in Havana, said that he is “very worried about food getting worse” in the fridge if the blackout continues for so long.
The gas station was also open, but the tunnels that ran under Havana Bay and connected the city to the suburbs were dark.
Cuba suffered similar blackouts in October, November and December. The latest was the first of 2025, but in mid-February, authorities suspended classes and work activities for two days due to a lack of more than 50% of the country’s electricity generation shortage.
The suspension comes as Cubans experience a serious economic crisis in which analysts are responsible for the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, programs of domestic measures that have caused inflation and, above all, tightened US sanctions.
