A blackout hit the western half of Cuba on Wednesday, leaving millions of people in Havana and beyond without power in the latest outage to affect an island struggling with dwindling oil reserves and a crumbling electric grid. At the same time, another critical international airline said it was suspending service to the beleaguered island.
Blackout
Government radio station Radio Rebelde quoted an energy official as saying that it could take up to 72 hours to restore operations at Cuba’s largest thermoelectric power plant, which shut down earlier and sparked the outage.
The government’s electric utility said on social platform X that the outage affected people from the western town of Pinar del Rio to the central town of Camaguey.
The agency said crews were working to restore power and posted a picture of Prime Minister Manuel Marrero Cruz meeting with Energy and Mines Minister Vicente de la O Levy “to specify the details of the … disconnection and the next steps to be taken for its restoration.”
“We trust in the experience and effort of the electrical workers to overcome this situation in the shortest possible time,” Marrero wrote on X.
It is the second such outage to affect Cuba’s western region in the past three months.
It wasn’t immediately clear what caused Wednesday’s outage. In early December, an outage that hit the island’s western region lasted nearly 12 hours.
Cuba is struggling with dwindling oil reserves after the U.S. attacked Venezuela in early January, a move that halted critical petroleum shipments from the South America country. Later that month, U.S. President Donald Trump threatened to impose tariffs on any country that would sell or supply Cuba with oil.
Air France
In other Wednesday woes, Air France said it will suspend flights for several weeks between Paris and Havana given Cuba’s fuel shortage and its impact on tourism and other economic activity.
The airline said flights leaving from Paris-Charles de Gaulle airport to Cuba’s capital will be suspended starting March 28 and should resume June 15.
Those flights are currently stopping in the Bahamas on return trips to refuel, according to Air France.
The suspension hits Cubans on the Caribbean island especially hard. They relied on such flights to reach Europe since they are unable to go via the United States.
Cuba’s government notified airlines and pilots on Feb. 8 that jet fuel would not be available at nine airports across the island, including José Martí International Airport in Havana, until March 11.
Other airlines have halted service to Cuba, including WestJet, Transat and Air Canada. The latter announced Feb. 9 that it was suspending service until further notice. It operated on average 16 weekly flights to four destinations across Cuba from Toronto and Montreal, according to the airline.
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