Dear Commons Community,

Cuba’s power grid failed and the entire nation plunged into darkness yesterday, less than a day after the government stressed the need to save electricity in the face of major gasoline shortages and large-scale, local outages.

The electricity went out nationwide yesterday morning after a failure at a thermoelectric power plant in Matanzas, east of Havana, Cuba’s Energy Ministry said on X.  As reported by The New York Times.

The blackout came less than a day after the prime minister, Manuel Marrero Cruz, held a late-night television address with state officials to discuss the ongoing electricity crisis, which experts said was the worst the nation — long accustomed to food and electricity shortages — had ever experienced.

For weeks, the country has lacked the fuel to run the power grid, which has left large parts of the nation without electricity for 15- to 20-hour stretches.

When electricity does return, demand surges, further straining the power grid, Mr. Marrero said on Thursday night as he urged people to cut back on usage.

To ease the stress on the electrical network, officials announced on Thursday night that all schools would be closed until Monday and that cultural and nonessential activities such as nightclubs would be shuttered.

Only essential employees should go to work, according to an announcement posted on government websites, which said hospitals would remain open. Any energy-demanding service that was not vital would be suspended.

Alfredo López Valdés, the director general of the national electric company, said the country was working on solutions but added that they would not come quickly.

“We are fighting; we are not sitting on our hands,” Mr. López said. “We recognize that the situation is very hard.”

Tony

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.