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(Bloomberg) — Cuba was struggling to restore electricity nationwide on Saturday, more than 24 hours after the failure of one of its largest power plants knocked the entire grid off-line.
Writing Saturday on X, the Ministry of Energy and Mines said power should be gradually restored throughout the day but said a substation in western Cuba had gone down again and warned that sporadic blackouts were likely to occur because of the “technical complexity of the restoration process.”
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President Miguel Diaz-Canel is blaming the crisis on US economic sanctions.
“We don’t have the fuel we need and we haven’t been able to make the repairs that are needed because we don’t have access to hard currency,” he told the state-run Granma newspaper Friday, saying that US “financial” and “energy persecution” had caused the problems.
The communist island hasn’t had stable energy for decades, but the number and duration of blackouts has been on the rise recently, leading to rare protests on an island where public dissent is illegal.
Social media reported a few gatherings of angry mobs overnight, which couldn’t be immediately verified.
The total blackout occurred around 11 a.m. local time on Friday when the 330-megawatt capacity CTE Antonio Guiteras plant went down. The failure happened just hours after the government had said it was “paralyzing” some economic activities and canceling events in order to save fuel and privatize power to residential areas.
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