A blackout on Wednesday left millions of people without power in Havana and the rest of western Cuba in the latest outage in the nation, which is struggling with dwindling oil reserves and a crumbling electricity grid.
Cuban government radio station Radio Rebelde quoted an energy official as saying that it could take at least 72 hours to restore operations at one of Cuba’s largest thermoelectric power plants, where a shutdown sparked the outage.
The government’s electric utility on X said that the outage affected people from the western town of Pinar del Rio to the central town of Camaguey.
Photo: EPA
Cuban Minister of Energy and Mines Vicente de la O Levy wrote on X that the government was powering critical infrastructure in the affected region as two power plants came online.
Such infrastructure includes hospitals and medical clinics.
“We are working to restore the National Electric System amid a complex energy situation,” he wrote earlier on X.
Photo: Reuters
The US embassy warned people to “prepare for significant disruptions,” and conserve fuel, water, food and mobile phone batteries.
“Cuba’s national power grid is increasingly unreliable, and scheduled and unscheduled power outages are prolonged and a daily occurrence across the country, including Havana,” it said on X.
By late afternoon, the government said that crews had restored power to 2.5 percent of Havana, or about 21,100 customers, adding that efforts were gradual and tied to what the system’s conditions would allow.
“We trust in the experience and effort of the electrical workers to overcome this situation in the shortest possible time,” Cuban Prime Minister Manuel Marrero Cruz wrote on X.
As night fell, people across Havana lingered on doorsteps and used wood or charcoal to prepare caldosas, a popular soup shared among neighbors who contribute items including vegetables, chicken and meat.
A group of musicians along the city’s seawall played into the night.
Others played dominoes by a rechargeable lightbulb.
“With the power outages, this is the only thing we young people have to distract ourselves,” Jeferson Silvera said.
State media reported that the outage was caused by a shutdown of the Antonio Guiteras thermoelectric power plant east of Havana following a leak in its boiler.
Radio Rebelde quoted the plant’s technical director Roman Perez Castaneda as saying that crews must first locate the fault before repairing it and restarting the unit.
Castaneda said that a pipe burst in the boiler, causing a water leak and subsequent fire that was extinguished without major damage, Radio Rebelde reported.
In other news, more than 150 Cuban medical staff climbed aboard a plane in Honduras on Wednesday, leaving the Central American country after its new government abruptly canceled an agreement that US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has called a “form of human trafficking.”
Cuba describes its practice of deploying doctors as a means of diplomacy, but medical workers departed from an airport in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, on their way to Havana after the Honduran government said the program did not meet the requirements established by internal regulators.
“The agreement was suspended after considering what is in Honduras’ best interest, because this was not a solidarity medical brigade, but a business,” Honduran Medical Association president Samuel Santos told reporters.
Santos said the work of the Cuban medical staff would be taken over by Honduran doctors and that their absence “does not affect the development of healthcare in Honduras in any way.”
Meanwhile, Ecuador on Wednesday ordered the expulsion of Cuba’s ambassador to Quito, telling him and the rest of his embassy staff that they had 48 hours to leave the country.
The Ecuadoran Ministry of Foreign Affairs declared Basilio Gutierrez persona non grata, but did not offer a specific reason for the decision.
The Cuban Ministry of Foreign Affairs called the dismissal an “unfriendly and unprecedented act that seriously damages the history of friendly and cooperative ties between the two countries.”
“It does not seem accidental that this decision was made in a context marked by a strengthening of US aggression against Cuba, and by strong pressure applied by that government on third countries to join this policy,” it added.
Additional reporting by AFP
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