Cuba suffers a new national blackout hours after electricity began to be restored

() – Cuba suffered a second national blackout on Saturday morning, hours after authorities said electricity was slowly being restored.

“At 6:15 am a new total blackout of the national electrical system occurred,” said a publication on the official Telegram channel of the Electrical Union of Cuba. “The Electrical Union is working to restore it.”

Previously, Cuban authorities said small pockets of electricity had been restored across the island, although no immediate figures were provided for how many people had their service restored.

Some Cubans complained on social media that their electricity returned briefly before going out again.

The blackouts threatened to plunge the Communist Party-ruled nation into a deeper crisis, as without electricity people would also have no running water and food would quickly begin to spoil.

Millions of people have been left without electricity in recent days due to the repeated collapse of Cuba’s aging electrical grid.

Saturday’s blackout follows an island-wide blackout on Friday after one of the island’s main power plants failed, according to its energy ministry.

Cuban officials have blamed a confluence of events, from increased U.S. economic sanctions to disruptions caused by recent hurricanes and the impoverished state of the island’s infrastructure.

In a televised speech Thursday that was delayed by technical difficulties, Cuban Prime Minister Manuel Marrero Cruz said much of the country’s limited production was halted to avoid leaving people completely without electricity.

“We have been paralyzing economic activity to generate (energy) for the population,” he said.

The country’s Health Minister, José Ángel Portal Miranda, said in X that the country’s health facilities were running on generators and that health workers continued to provide vital services.

In Havana, motorists on Friday tried to navigate a city where no traffic lights appeared to be working and only a handful of police officers directed traffic. Generators are a luxury for most Cubans and only a few could be heard running in the city.

School classes were canceled from Friday until the weekend, nightclubs and recreation centers were ordered to close, and only “essential workers” were required to report to work, according to a list of energy-saving measures published by the state-run Cubadebate website earlier on Friday.

‘s Mia Alberti and en Español’s Verónica Calderón and Gerardo Lemos contributed to this report.