Electricity Restored to Havana and Western Cuba After Grid Failure

Electricity has returned to Havana and western Cuba after a significant failure in the national grid plunged the region into darkness for much of Saturday night. Cuba's state-run electric company announced that service was being restored early Sunday morning after resolving the "partial fall" of the National Electric System (SEN).

The outage affected the capital and four of the island's 15 provinces. This latest disruption comes amid Cuba's severe economic crisis, which has been intensified by U.S. policies, including fuel sanctions. The national grid has become increasingly vulnerable due to fuel shortages, making it difficult to operate emergency generators, which typically run on diesel.

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I spent the whole night awake, I didn't sleep a wink because of the heat, the mosquitoes.

Cubans are enduring frequent and prolonged blackouts, with some outages lasting over 30 hours in Havana and several days in other parts of the country. This summer has seen a particularly high number of national blackouts, with five occurring since the beginning of the year, three of them within a 10-day span in July. Residents like 66-year-old Natalia Mendoza described enduring sleepless nights due to the heat and mosquitoes, expressing exhaustion with the constant interruptions to daily life. The Cuban government blames U.S. "punitive measures" for the deteriorating state of its electrical infrastructure, while the U.S. points to Cuban government mismanagement. The country's seven thermoelectric power plants, the backbone of the grid, are reportedly over 40 years old and in varying states of disrepair.

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This is very hard.