Cuba plunged into darkness early Wednesday after a failure at the Antonio Guiteras thermal power plant caused the national power grid to collapse. The blackout, reported at 2:08 am by the Ministry of Energy and Mines, marks the third nationwide outage in two months. Efforts are underway to restore power.
The Antonio Guiteras plant, Cuba’s largest coal-fired power facility, has been at the center of previous outages, including a massive blackout in mid-October that brought Havana to a standstill and another following Hurricane Rafael in November.
The Cuban government attributes the grid’s instability to fuel shortages, exacerbated by the tightened U.S. trade embargo during Donald Trump’s administration. Experts also cite the country’s deepening economic crisis—its worst since the Soviet Union’s collapse—as a contributing factor.
