Sawt Falasteen - Lights back on in eastern Cuba after widespread blackout

In the early hours of Thursday, the provinces of Holguin, Granma, Santiago de Cuba, and Guantanamo "were synchronized to the national power grid," said Felix Estrada of the ministry of energy and mines said on state television.

He added that scheduled power cuts however remain in place in the four provinces despite the reconnection, due to the country's "capacity deficit" beyond the latest outage, which left hundreds of thousands of people without electricity.

After six decades under a US trade embargo, the communist island's electricity system is in shambles, with frequent and prolonged outages.

To make matters worse, US President Donald Trump threatened last month to cut off Cuba's heavily subsidized oil supplies from Venezuela.

The state-owned Union Electrica de Cuba said on X that a problem at a substation in Holguin Wednesday night caused an electrical system disconnect that impacted the four provinces.

Cuba's second-largest city, Santiago de Cuba, home to more than 400,000 people, was hit by the blackout.

One resident said her power went out about 5:00 pm (2200 GMT).

"Since it goes out all the time, I didn't even realize it was a widespread outage," Isabel, 28, who did not want to give her last name, told AFP.

Cuba has endured several national blackouts since late 2024, some of them lasting days.

An AFP analysis of official statistics found that the island generated only half the electricity it needed last year.

Officials blame tight US sanctions for the crisis, which includes food and medicine shortages. But poor economic management and a tourism collapse following the Covid-19 pandemic contributed to the island's woes.

Despite imposition of the US trade embargo in 1962, Cuba had eight power plants built in the 1980s and 1990s. Thirty solar plants constructed with help from China have failed to stem the blackouts.

Since toppling Venezuela's autocratic leader Nicolas Maduro last month, Trump has threatened to slap tariffs on countries that give oil to Cuba -- even as the United Nations chief warned Wednesday that an oil shortage could lead to a humanitarian "collapse" on the island.

Trump has said he wants to "make a deal" with leaders in Cuba -- an island barely 90 miles (145 kilometers) from Florida -- without saying what that deal might look like.

In December, a massive outage in western Cuba left millions of people without electricity -- including in the capital Havana, a city of 1.7 million.

E.AbuRizq--SF-PST