Cuba’s national electricity system was rocked early Wednesday after the country’s largest power plant failed, the government said, the latest in a string of failures that have left the island’s grid in disarray amid fuel shortages, natural disasters and an economic crisis.
The country’s Energy and Mines Ministry said the Antonio Guiteras power plant in Matanzas, the island’s top electricity producer, was shut down around 2 a.m., due to a grid failure.
Cuba’s oil-fired power plants, already obsolete and struggling to keep the lights on, were in full crisis this year as oil imports from Venezuela, Russia and Mexico fell, contributing to several nationwide blackouts in two months.
A system failure left the capital, Havana, in almost total darkness on Wednesday morning, according to a Reuters witness. Before sunrise the lights could only be seen on a few large hotels and government buildings on the city skyline.
Reports of blackouts elsewhere in Cuba on social media suggested that around 10 million people were without power across the island, although the government could not confirm the extent of the outage.
The Ministry of Energy and Mines has said that work is underway to reconnect the electrical system.
Cuba’s grid collapsed several times in October as fuel supplies dwindled and Hurricane Oscar hit the island’s far eastern tip, then again in November with Hurricane Rafael.