A few things to know after millions of people in Cuba were left without electricity for two days when the nation’s electrical grid collapsed
Millions of people in Cuba were left without electricity for two days after the nation’s energy grid went down when of the island’s major power plants failed. The widespread blackout that swept across the county was the worst in years.
Authorities were able to restore power to some people by Saturday, but it was unclear when the power would be fully restored across the country.
Here are a few things to know:
About half of Cuba was plunged into darkness on Thursday evening, followed by the entire island on Friday morning after the failure of the Antonio Guiteras thermoelectric plant in Matanzas Province east of Havana.
Even in a country that for decades has been accustomed to frequent outages amid a series of economic crises, the grid failure was unprecedented in modern times, aside from incidents involving powerful hurricanes, such as one in 2022.
Even as Cuba worked to fix the power problems Saturday, the country issued hurricane watches for the far eastern Guantanamo, Holguin and Las Tunas provinces as a tropical storm developed into Hurricane Oscar, the 10th hurricane of the 2024 Atlantic hurricane season.
Authorities said the outage that began Thursday stemmed from increased demand from small- and medium-sized companies and residences’ air conditioners — as many as 100,000 additional ones this year alone.
