Cuba gradually turning lights back on after island-wide blackout

HAVANA: Power was slowly being restored across most of Cuba on Sunday, after nearly 40 hours without electricity, in the island’s fourth major blackout in six months.

Lazaro Guerra, director of the island’s Energia Electrica utility, said the Cuban power grid was now again “interconnected” from the western port of Mariel, some 30 miles (50 kilometers) from Havana, to Guantanamo province in the far east.

Power had yet to be restored, however, in part of western Cuba.

The authorities said the system was generating 935 megawatts of power nationwide on Sunday, well below the normal daily demand of 3,000 MW.

In Havana, a city of 2.1 million, just 19 percent of homes had regained power.

Some Cubans were awakened early Sunday by the sounds attending a restoration of power.

“At 5 am, there was a tremendous rush, charging phones, lamps, pumping water into tanks -- a tremendous uproar waking up the neighbours,” Alex Picart, a 60-year-old resident of Guanabacoa, just east of Havana, said.

Cubans have grown resigned to frequent outages -- including blackouts ranging anywhere from four hours to 20 hours or more. But the constant disruptions are exhausting, they say, as outages cut off water and gas supplies as well as phone communications, and can virtually paralyse public transit.

“No elevator, no water, it’s awful. I feel cornered, very annoyed,” said Ruben Borroto, 69, who has to walk up seven floors to his Havana apartment.

The latest blackout began Friday with a failure at a substation in a Havana suburb, then spread across the island.

Cuba had seen three other major outages in the past half-year.

The island is suffering through its fourth year of economic crisis, and its eight thermal power plants, nearly all dating to the 1980s or 1990s, regularly fail.

Floating power barges and a series of generators shore up the national power system, but the US embargo makes it difficult to import fuel.

The government is rushing to install at least 55 solar parks this year -- enough, it says, to supply 12 percent of national demand.