Sawt Falasteen - New nationwide blackout hits Cuba, officials say

"At around 8:15 pm tonight, a breakdown... caused the significant loss of power in western Cuba and with it the fall of the national electricity system," the Ministry of Energy and Mines said.

Angelica Caridad Martinez, a resident of the central city of Camaguey, told AFP the outage landed like a shock, plunging her community into darkness.

"I was going to sit down when the power went out. I'm not even hungry anymore, it was suddenly taken away," the 50-year-old told AFP. "This situation is unsustainable, no one can live like this."

With a worn-out electricity system, the island of 9.7 million inhabitants suffered three widespread blackouts in the final three months of 2024, two of them lasting several days each.

The condition adds to the communist-ruled country's deepest economic crisis in 30 years, which has led to shortages of food, medicine, fuel and rampant inflation.

"In light of the unexpected outage of the national electricity system, we are already working tirelessly for its quickest recovery," insisted Prime Minister Manuel Marrero Cruz, in a post on X.

Friday night marked the first general blackout of 2025, but citizens face almost daily outages of four or five hours across much of Havana, while in rural provinces the periods without power can last 20 hours or longer.

Cuba's eight thermal power plants, nearly all of which came online in the 1980s or 1990s, suffer routine failures.

And the Turkish floating power barges that help boost Cuba's national grid are fed with expensive imported fuel which is often in short supply.

Faced with such urgent need, Cuba is working hard to install by a series of at least 55 solar farms with Chinese-technology by the end of this year.

According to authorities, these facilities will generate some 1,200 megawatts of power, about 12 percent of the national total.

B.Mahmoud--SF-PST