HAVANA — The Cuban government said on Saturday that some power had been restored on the island after one of the country's largest power plants failed, leaving millions of people without power after a blackout began two days earlier.

Energy Minister Vicente de la O Levy said early Saturday the country had 500 megawatts of energy on its grid. He posted on X that “several substations in the West now have power.”

O Levy also said two thermoelectric power plants had returned and two more would resume operations “in the next few hours.”

In addition to the Antonio Guiteras power plant, whose failure Friday affected the entire national system, there are several others in Cuba, and it was not immediately clear whether they remained operational or not.

There is no official estimate as to when the blackout will end. Even in a country accustomed to outages amid a deepening economic crisis, Friday's supply collapse was unprecedented in modern times, aside from incidents involving strong hurricanes like one in 2022.

The Cuban government has announced emergency measures to reduce electricity demand, including suspending classes, closing some government workplaces and cutting non-essential services. Officials said 1.64 gigawatts went offline during the peak, about half of the total demand at the time.

Local authorities said the outage, which began on a smaller scale on Thursday, was due to increased demand from small and medium-sized businesses and residential air conditioning. Later, the blackout worsened due to failures in old thermal power plants that were not properly maintained and a lack of fuel to operate some plants.

Changes to electricity tariffs for small and medium-sized businesses are also being considered, which have increased sharply since they were first approved by the communist government in 2021.

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