CNN —
Cuba suffered its second nationwide power outage on Saturday morning, hours after authorities said power was slowly being restored.
“At 6:15 a.m., there was another complete outage of the country's electrical energy system,” a post on the official Telegram channel of the Cuban Electricity Union said. “The electric cooperative is working to rebuild it.”
Earlier, Cuban officials said small-scale power supplies had been restored across the island, although there were no immediate figures on how many people had power reconnected.
Some Cubans complained on social media that power was briefly restored before it was restored.
The power outage threatened to plunge the communist country into an even more serious crisis. Without power, people would have no running water, and refrigerated food would quickly start to spoil.
Cuba’s aging power grid has repeatedly collapsed, leaving millions of people without power in recent days.
Saturday’s power outage came after the country’s power grid was shut down across the country on Friday after one of the island’s main power plants failed, Cuba’s Energy Ministry said.
Cuban officials blame a confluence of events, from tightening U.S. economic sanctions to recent hurricane disruptions and deteriorating infrastructure on the island.
Cuban Prime Minister Manuel Marrero Cruz said in a televised address Thursday delayed by technical issues that much of the country’s limited production had been halted to avoid leaving the country completely without power. Ta.
“We have paralyzed economic activity to provide electricity to our people,” he said.
The country’s Health Minister José Angel Portal Miranda said on the X program that the country’s medical facilities are running on generators and medical workers continue to provide essential services.
In Havana on Friday, only a small number of police officers were directing traffic as motorists tried to navigate the city, where street lights appeared to be off. Generators are a luxury for most Cubans, and only a few of them could be heard in the city.
School classes will be canceled from Friday through the weekend, nightclubs and recreation centers will be ordered to close, and only “essential workers” will be allowed to return to work, according to a list of energy-saving measures published earlier by the state-run website Cubadebate. He was ordered to report to work. on friday.
CNN’s Mia Alberti and CNN en Español’s Veronica Calderon and Gerardo Lemos contributed to this report.
