The Associated Press

· Posted: Mar 04, 2026 4:54 PM EST | Last Updated: 9 minutes ago

A blackout hit the western half of Cuba on Wednesday, leaving millions of people in the capital Havana and beyond without power in the latest outage to affect an island struggling with dwindling oil reserves and a crumbling electrical grid.

Government radio station Radio Rebelde quoted an energy official as saying that it could take up to 72 hours to restore operations at Cuba's largest thermoelectric power plant, which shut down earlier and sparked the outage.

The government's electric utility said on social media platform X that the outage affected people from the western town of Pinar del Río to the central town of Camaguey.

By late Wednesday afternoon, the government said crews had restored power to 2.5 per cent of Havana, or some 21,100 customers, noting that efforts were gradual and tied to what the system's conditions would allow.

"We trust in the experience and effort of the electrical workers to overcome this situation in the shortest possible time," Prime Minister Manuel Marrero Cruz wrote on X.

Meanwhile, Energy and Mines Minister Vicente de la O Levy said earlier that one power plant affected by the outage was up and running. "We are working to restore the National Electric System amid a complex energy situation," he posted on X.

State media reported that the outage was caused by a shutdown of the Antonio Guiteras thermoelectric power plant east of Havana following a leak in its boiler.

Repair can't occur before fault located

Radio Rebelde quoted the plant's technical director, Román Pérez Castañeda, as saying that crews must first locate the fault, determine the repair method, repair it and then start up and synchronize the unit.

Pérez Castañeda said that a pipe burst in the boiler, causing a water leak and subsequent fire that firefighters extinguished without major damage, according to Radio Rebelde.

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The outage caught Odalis Sánchez, 63, out on the street with her grandson. She was unable to walk because of a recent operation, so she called someone for a ride home.

Some 200 people waited at a bus stop near her, but buses were not running given a lack of fuel, so they tried to get a ride via any means available, including hitchhiking.

"I need to be able to get home to see what I can do," Sánchez said. "Without power, you can't do anything. My grandson also is studying and I have to make him food. Public transportation isn't helping."

It is the second such outage to affect Cuba's western region in the past three months. In early December, an outage that hit the island's western region lasted nearly 12 hours.

Officials said a fault in a transmission line linking two power plants caused an overload and led to the collapse of the energy system's western sector.

'We must keep fighting'

Cuba is struggling with dwindling oil reserves after the U.S. attacked Venezuela in early January, a move that halted critical petroleum shipments from the South America country.

Later that month, U.S. President Donald Trump threatened to impose tariffs on any country that sold or supplied Cuba with oil.

A pedicab moves past a traffic light that is out during a power outage in Havana on Wednesday. It's the latest outage to affect an island struggling with dwindling oil reserves and a crumbling electric grid. (Yamil Lage/AFP/Getty Images)

Ernesto Couto Martínez, 76, was trying to find a ride home and said he would confront the latest outage "with the spirit that all Cubans have."

"We must keep fighting. There's no other way," he said. "We have to move forward, blockade or no blockade."

Last month, Cuba's government implemented austere fuel-saving measures and warned that jet fuel wouldn't be available at nine airports across the island until mid-March.

Prior to the attack on Venezuela, the island was already struggling with a crumbling electrical grid, generation deficits and interruptions in fuel supplies.