Cuba’s power grid failed overnight on Wednesday, triggering a nationwide blackout that left the country in darkness for the third time in two months, according to the government.
At 2:08 a.m., “the electrical system… was disconnected when the Antonio Guiteras thermal power plant went offline,” the Ministry of Energy and Mines announced on social media. Efforts to restore power were underway, the statement added.
In mid-October, a massive blackout struck the cash-strapped island after weeks of prolonged outages, bringing life in Havana to a standstill. Schools closed, public transportation stopped, and traffic lights went dark. That outage, like Wednesday’s, was caused by a failure at the Antonio Guiteras plant, the largest of Cuba’s eight coal-fired power stations.
Most of the country regained power within a week, but Hurricane Rafael, which hit the island in early November, caused another nationwide blackout.
The government has blamed previous outages on challenges in securing fuel for power plants, citing the tightened U.S. trade embargo under Donald Trump’s administration. However, experts say Cuba is also grappling with its worst economic crisis since the collapse of the Soviet Union, which once heavily subsidized the island’s economy.