Nationwide Blackout Plunges Cuba into Darkness
Cuba was plunged into a nationwide blackout after its ageing electricity grid collapsed, leaving the entire island of some ten million people without power. The failure followed a weekend of intermittent outages and came amid acute fuel shortages that have crippled the country’s power stations. Engineers were working to restore supply.
Cuba’s grid has grown increasingly fragile, its oil-fired plants starved of fuel by economic crisis and tightened US sanctions, and total collapses have become alarmingly frequent. Blackouts leave hospitals reliant on generators, spoil food in the tropical heat and have fuelled rare public protests. The government blames the American embargo; critics point to decades of underinvestment. Restoring power to the whole island can take days, and each failure deepens the hardship. Watch how quickly the grid is brought back and whether the outages stir unrest.