Network breakdowns compounded by daily blackouts of up to 12 hours caused by fuel shortages
Cuba’s power grid collapsed on Saturday leaving the country without electricity for a third time in March as the communist government battles with a decaying infrastructure and a US-imposed oil blockade.
The Cuban Electric Union, which reports to the Ministry of Energy and Mines, announced a total blackout across the island without initially giving a cause for the outage.
The union later said the blackout was caused by an unexpected failure of a generating unit at the Nuevitas thermoelectric plant in Camagüey province.
“From that moment, a cascading effect occurred in the machines that were online,” said a report from the Ministry of Energy and Mines, which activated “micro-islands” of generating units to provide power to vital centres, hospitals and water systems.
