Cuba’s national electrical grid collapsed late on Friday, as announced by the country’s Energy and Mines ministry, causing widespread blackouts in Havana and across the island nation.
Energy officials stated that a substation failure in Havana around 8:15 pm (0015 GMT) led to power outages across much of western Cuba, including the capital.
A Reuters witness noted that the entire Havana waterfront skyline went dark, with only a few tourist hotels running on fuel-powered generators.
Social media reports from provinces both to the east and west of Havana indicated that much of the country’s 10 million residents were affected by the outage.
This grid failure comes after a series of nationwide blackouts late last year, which further stressed Cuba’s aging power infrastructure, already weakened by fuel shortages, natural disasters, and the ongoing economic crisis.
Long hours of rolling blackouts have become routine, while shortages of food, medicine, and water have made life increasingly difficult for many Cubans, with record numbers fleeing the country in recent years.
