Cuba faced a nationwide blackout on Friday following yet another failure in its national electricity grid, officials confirmed. The ministry of energy and mines announced the outage on social media, “At around 8:15 p.m. tonight, a failure at the Diezmero substation caused a significant loss of generation in the west of Cuba and with it the failure of the National Electric System, SEN, and the recovery process is already underway.”
Authorities have yet to confirm when full power will be restored.
This marked the third major grid collapse in just two months, dragging attention towards the country’s energy and economic crisis.
Before this, Cuba faced power outages last year as well. One was reported last year in October , after the Antonio Guiteras thermoelectric plant, one of Cuba’s key power stations, shut down, leaving millions without electricity. The grid failure forced the government to implement emergency measures.
Another severe blackout struck in December 2024 when the same plant failed again in the early hours of the morning. The shutdown at around 2 am disconnected the national grid, plunging more than 10 million residents into darkness.