‘Can’t live like this’: Cuba hit by second nationwide blackout in a week 

Cuba has been plunged into darkness for the second time in less than a week after its national power network failed again, strained by an energy blockade imposed by the United States.

The Cuban Electric Union, which reports to the Ministry of Energy and Mines, announced a total blackout across the island on Saturday 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 Camaguey province.

“From that moment, a cascading effect occurred in the machines that were online,” said a report from the Energy Ministry, which activated “micro-islands” of generating units to provide power to vital centres, hospitals and water systems.

Authorities said they were working to restore power. The last nationwide blackout occurred on Monday. Saturday’s outage was the second in the past week and the third in March.

As night fell, capital Havana’s streets were mostly pitch black, with people navigating using phone lights or torches, just five days after the previous blackout.

In the touristy old city, some restaurants were able to stay open thanks to generators, with musicians playing music, but the regular blackouts have made life more difficult for Cubans.

Cubans face daily blackouts of up to 15 hours in Havana. In the interior of the island of 9.6 million people, the outages are worse.

“I wonder if we are going to be like this our whole lives. You can’t live like this,” Nilo Lopez, a 36-year-old taxi driver, told the AFP news agency.

No oil has been imported to the island since January 9, hitting the power sector while also forcing airlines to curtail flights to the island, a blow to the all-important tourism sector.

The blackout occurred as an international aid convoy began to arrive in Havana this week, bringing sorely needed medical supplies, food, water and solar panels to the island.

The breakdowns have intensified since Cuba’s main regional ally and oil supplier, Venezuela’s socialist leader Nicolas Maduro, was captured in a US military operation in January.

The Cuban government has also blamed the outages on a US energy blockade after President Donald Trump in January warned of tariffs on any country that sells or provides oil to Cuba.

Trump has for months claimed Cuba’s government is on the verge of collapse. After a previous electric grid collapse in the country, Trump told reporters he believed he would soon have “the honour of taking Cuba”.

“Whether I free it, take it, think I could do anything I want with it, you want to know the truth. They’re a very weakened nation right now,” the US president said.

The next day, Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel warned that “any external aggressor will encounter an unbreakable resistance”.