Cuba's national electricity grid collapsed for the third time in March on Saturday night, plunging the island of 9.6 million people into darkness for the third complete nationwide blackout of the month. The Cuban Electric Union said the cascade failure originated at the Nuevitas thermoelectric plant in Camagüey province, where an unexpected unit shutdown triggered what engineers call a cascade effect: as generating capacity drops suddenly, the remaining online units must compensate, and if they can't, they trip offline too, one after another, until there is nothing left running.
By Sunday morning, partial service had been restored to some 72,000 customers in Havana, priority given to hospitals, water treatment plants, and emergency services. That's roughly 3.5 percent of the capital's approximately 2 million residents. In the interior of the island, recovery was slower. In provinces like Holguín, Santiago de Cuba, and parts of Matanzas, some neighborhoods had been without power for more than 30 of the previous 35 days.
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