By Marc Frank and Nelson Acosta
HAVANA (Reuters) - Communist Cuba's National Electric Union said power was slowly being restored Wednesday evening on the Caribbean Island after the grid collapsed at 9:14 a.m. local time.
State-run media reported airports and essential services such as hospitals and water pumps were up and running thanks to backup systems. The vast majority of the country's 9.7 million residents remained in the dark.
In Havana, home to 2 million residents, authorities said they were working to start major power plants.
This was the fourth time in less than a year that the national grid collapsed. In the past, it has taken two to three days for service to be fully restored.
"There has been a total disconnection of the Electric System," the Energy Ministry and National Electric Union said Wednesday morning.
The ministry said causes are being investigated.
Even before Wednesday's grid collapse, the vast majority of residents had already been experiencing daily blackouts of 16 hours or more.
The grid failure follows a string of nationwide blackouts since late last year that plunged Cuba's frail and antiquated power generation system into near-total disarray.
The country has also been facing fuel, food and other shortages, along with its worst economic crisis in decades.
"This is crazy for everybody," Raúl Ernesto Gutierrez said in Havana.
Gutierrez said he was visiting the capital and that back home in the countryside, "we will have to cook with charcoal, with firewood. It’s stressful and also frustrating."
Havana state worker Danai Hernandez, said she was on the way home from work which had just shut down.
"I’m going home to organize everything in the household and ... now we have to wait. We don't have any other choice," she said, visibly upset.
Cuba's oil-fired power plants, already obsolete and struggling to keep the lights on, reached a full crisis last year as oil imports from Venezuela, Russia and Mexico dwindled.
(Reporting by Marc Frank; Additional reporting by Alien Fernandez; Writing by Aida Pelaez-Fernandez; Editing by Lisa Shumaker, Nick Zieminski and David Gregorio)
