Cuba restores power after 29-hour blackout amid US oil blockade

The national power grid comes back on after Cuba’s 10 million people were plunged into darkness overnight.Cuba has reconnected its power grid and brought online its largest oil-fired power plant, energy officials said, putting an end to a nationwide blackout that lasted more than 29 hours amid a United States move to choke off the island’s fuel supply.After the country’s 10 million people had been plunged into darkness overnight, the Caribbean island’s national power grid had fully come back online by 6:11pm (22:11 GMT) on Tuesday. However, officials said power shortages may continue because not enough electricity is being generated.Recommended Stories list of 4 itemslist 1 of 4Ukraine sends 201 military experts to counter Iranian drones in the Gulflist 2 of 4Xi Jinping’s anticorruption drive sweeps up senior Chinese military chiefslist 3 of 4Iran allowing more ships through Strait of Hormuz, data suggestlist 4 of 4Trump administration defends Anthropic blacklisting in US courtend of listIn addition to cutting off oil sales to Cuba, US President Donald Trump has escalated his rhetoric against the Communist-run island, saying on Monday he could do anything he wanted with the country.A US State Department official blamed the Cuban government for the grid collapse, calling blackouts a “symptom of the failing regime’s incompetence”.Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel fired back at Washington, criticising its “almost daily public threats against Cuba”.“They intend to and announce plans to take over the country, its resources, its properties, and even the very economy they seek to suffocate in order to force us to surrender,” Diaz-Canel wrote on social media on Tuesday night, shortly after power returned nationwide.Cuba has yet to say what caused Monday’s nationwide grid failure, the first such collapse since the US cut off the island’s oil supply from Venezuela and threatened to slap tariffs on countries that ship fuel to the nation.By midday on Tuesday, grid workers successfully fired up the Antonio Guiteras power plant, a decades-old behemoth that underpins the country’s power grid.