Cuba power outage: Entire island goes dark, 10 million affected after electrical grid fails
Cubans expressed alarm at the situation and one resident said they felt the country had reached the “bottom of the barrel.”
HAVANA — The electricity went out Friday in Cuba, affecting the entire island's population of 10 million after one of its main power plants failed, according to Cuba’s energy ministry.
On Friday evening, authorities announced power had been restored to about 20,000 residents of the capital, Havana, which has a population of 2 million.
Power outages have been chronic in Cuba for years and have worsened in recent months. But the situation was so critical in the past three days that the government took measures to keep the lights on.
On Thursday night, it announced schools would close and most state workers would stay home Friday in an effort to conserve energy. But it wasn’t enough and by 11 a.m. Friday, Antonio Guiteras thermoelectric, the largest power plant, went offline causing a grid failure.
The communist-run country’s aging and decrepit infrastructure has frequent outages because of difficulties with maintenance and lack of fuel. In some provinces outside Havana, many people have been facing blackouts that last up to 20 hours at a time.
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