By AFP - Agence France Presse
Cuba suffers third national blackout in two months
Jordane BERTRAND
On Wednesday, cash-strapped Cuba was struggling to restore its electricity grid after fixing a fault at the country's largest power plant caused yet another nationwide blackout.
Roman Perez Castaneda, deputy technical director of the Guiteras thermal power plant in central Cuba, said the problem had been solved, but most of the country was still in the dark.
Perez Castaneda, quoted by government media, said that the Guiteras plant could resume power generation at 8 pm local time on Thursday.
According to the authorities, 22% of the population, especially hospitals, were able to obtain power from sources independent of the national grid, while the rest had none.
The blackout, the third in less than two months, was yet another blow for the communist-run island of 10 million inhabitants, which is suffering from the effects of two hurricanes, repeated power outages, and a serious economic crisis.
In mid-October, a massive four-day blackout hit the nation of 10 million people, bringing life in the capital, Havana, to a virtual standstill.
The cause of that blackout, like Wednesday's, was a failure at the Guiteras plant, the largest of Cuba's eight aging thermoelectric plants.
Power was restored to most of the country the following week before Hurricane Rafael hit the island at the beginning of November, knocking out the national grid once again.
The Ministry of Energy sought to downplay the severity of the latest blackout, saying in X that a “large percentage” of the system would be back up and running by the end of Wednesday.
Also writing in X, Energy Minister Vicente de la O Levy said that the Antonio Guiteras plant had suffered an “automatic collapse.”
He was also quoted by state media as saying that there was no damage to the plants that were operating at the time of the blackout.
Havana's schools were closed, and non-essential state services were suspended on Wednesday, in now-familiar scenes that have caused growing frustration among Cubans.
“We live in fear of power cuts and blackouts,” complained Orlando Matos, a 56-year-old night watchman from the Vedado district in central Havana.
- 'Depressed' -
The communist authorities attributed the previous outages to difficulties in acquiring fuel for the country's power plants - attributed to the tightening of a six-decade-old US trade embargo that intensified during Donald Trump's first presidency.
But the island is also experiencing a wider economic malaise, with what experts call its worst economic crisis since the collapse of the Soviet Union, which heavily subsidized the one-party state.
The island gets its energy from eight decrepit oil-fired power plants that are constantly being patched up, as well as from a fleet of generators and floating power plants rented from Turkey.
The Turkish generators and power plants run on imported fuel.
The repeated power cuts sparked protests last month - a rare occurrence on the island.
Osnel Delgado, a 39-year-old contemporary dancer, complained on Wednesday that the situation was making him “depressed.”
“You constantly try to overcome the situation, but when the environment doesn't help you, you end up not wanting to do anything,” he said.
Thousands of Cubans took to the streets across the island on July 11, 2021, shouting “We're hungry!” and “Freedom!” in what was the biggest challenge to the government in years.
According to the Mexico-based NGO Justicia 11J, which focuses on human rights in Cuba, more than 1,500 people were arrested following these protests, 600 of whom are still in prison.
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