Cuba was plunged into darkness on Wednesday as its national power grid collapsed for the fifth time in less than a year, leaving around 10 million people without electricity.
Cuba faced a total grid failure on Wednesday morning, its fifth nationwide blackout in under a year, authorities confirmed. The Ministry of Energy and the National Electric Union said the outage began at 9:14 a.m. local time and restoration efforts were underway.
The collapse underscores the fragility of Cuba’s antiquated oil-fired power plants, which have long struggled to meet demand. The crisis has been compounded by dwindling fuel imports from allies Venezuela, Russia and Mexico, as well as tightening US sanctions that have left the island with limited resources to buy fuel or repair its aging infrastructure.
Residents, already enduring daily outages lasting up to 16 hours, voiced their frustration. “Back home in the countryside, we will have to cook with charcoal, with firewood. It’s stressful and also frustrating,” said visitor Raúl Ernesto Gutiérrez in Havana.
Havana state worker Danai Hernández said workplaces were forced to shut down as power vanished: “I’m going home to organize everything … now we have to wait. We don’t have any other choice.”
The outages have sparked rare anti-government protests in recent years, highlighting rising public anger over Cuba’s worsening economic crisis, which has also triggered shortages of food, fuel and medicine.
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Disruption in the Strait of Hormuz has increased the strategic importance of Bab al-Mandab, raising fears that instability in both waterways could trigger a wider global energy and trade crisis.
Flights at Catania airport in Sicily will remain suspended until early Friday as ash from Mount Etna continues to disrupt air travel, following hundreds of cancellations and diversions over the past week.
Iran says the Strait of Hormuz remains under its control, rejecting U.S. President Donald Trump’s claim of “total control” over the strategic waterway and insisting it will not reopen until Washington fulfils its commitments under an interim deal.
Iran and the United States remain at loggerheads over efforts to agree a permanent end to the war in the Gulf, according to a senior Iranian source who said there had been no progress in talks to revive the interim deal agreed in June and define a timeframe to implement it.
Russia has accused Ukraine of threatening global grain supplies after recent strikes on Black Sea agricultural infrastructure, while Moscow carried out a new overnight attack on Ukraine’s major Danube port of Izmail.
At least 437 civilians were killed and 2,610 injured in Ukraine in July, according to UN investigators, marking the highest monthly civilian casualty toll since March 2022.
Record rainfall in Japan killed eight people and stranded thousands of travellers at Tokyo's Narita Airport on Friday, as flooding disrupted transport and cut power to 20,000 homes.
Start your day informed with AnewZ Morning Brief. Here are the top news stories for the 14th of August, covering the latest developments.
Hundreds of flights have been cancelled or rerouted at Catania Airport over the past week as ash from Mount Etna’s ongoing eruption continues to disrupt air travel in Sicily.
The Democratic Republic of the Congo’s (DRC) Ebola outbreak has spread to a sixth province. A man died of the virus in Bas-Uélé in the north, the African Union’s health agency said.
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