Blackout in Cuba leaves millions without power amid US oil chokehold

A blackout hit the western half of Cuba on Wednesday, leaving millions of people in Havana and beyond without power in the latest outage to affect an island struggling with dwindling oil reserves and a crumbling electricity grid.The government’s Electric Union confirmed the outage on social platform X, saying it affected people from the eastern town of Pinar del Rio to the central town of Camaguey.The agency said crews were working to restore power and posted a picture of the prime minister, Manuel Marrero Cruz, meeting Vicente de la O Levy, the energy and mines minister, “to specify the details of the … disconnection and the next steps to be taken for its restoration”.“We trust in the experience and effort of the electrical workers to overcome this situation in the shortest possible time,” Marrero wrote on X.Meanwhile, de la O Levy said 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 wrote on X.State media reported that the outage was caused by a shutdown of the Antonio Guiteras thermoelectric power plant east of Havana after a leak in its boiler.The outage caught 63-year-old Odalis Sánchez 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.About 200 people waited at a bus stop near her. But buses were not running, due to 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.It wasn’t immediately clear what caused Wednesday’s outage.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.Cuba is struggling with dwindling oil reserves after the US attacked Venezuela in early January, a move that halted critical petroleum shipments from the South America country. Later that month, Donald Trump threatened to impose tariffs on any country selling or supplying Cuba with oil.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.Before the attack on Venezuela, the island already was struggling with a crumbling electricricity grid, generation deficits and interruptions in fuel supplies.