Cuba power outage leaves millions without electricity

Millions of people in Cuba remain without power after a failure of the nation's electric grid left the island in the dark.

An electrical substation in Havana failed on Friday night, knocking out power to a large swathe of western Cuba, including the capital.

The massive blackout is the fourth in the last six months as a severe economic crisis plagues the Caribbean country.

The Ministry of Energy and Mines, in a statement on social media, attributed the latest outage to a failure at a substation in the suburbs of Havana, the capital.

Internet and telephone service were intermittent on Saturday evening after power went out around 8pm local time on Friday.

Lázaro Guerra, director of electricity at the ministry, said on national television that power was already being generated to support vital services such as hospitals.

A statement from the Cuban Electricity Union released on Saturday said the strategy was to create "microsystems" that will connect to each other to gradually restore electricity across the country.

Several of these were already operating in the provinces of Guantánamo, Santiago, Las Tunas and Pinar del Río.

In Sancti Spíritus, the provincial energy company reported on its Telegram channel that more than 200,000 customers in that area had electricity thanks to these microsystems.

Many Cuban families use electric equipment to prepare their meals. The outage could cause food to thaw in refrigerators and possibly spoil due to the island's tropical climate.

In Havana, people were shopping for food on Saturday. Businesses were open, although some were operating using batteries or small home generators.

Gas stations were also open, but the tunnel that runs under Havana Bay and connects the city to the outskirts was dark.

Cuba suffered similar blackouts in October, November and December.

Experts have said the electricity disruptions are a result of fuel shortages at power plants and aging infrastructure. Most plants have been in operation for more than 30 years.

The outages come as Cubans are experiencing a severe economic crisis that analysts have blamed on the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, a program of domestic measures that triggered inflation and, above all, the tightening of sanctions by the US.