In mid-October, a massive four-day blackout hit the nation of 10 million people, leaving life in the capital Havana at a virtual standstill. The cause of that outage, like Wednesday's, was a failure at the Guiteras plant, the biggest of Cuba's eight aging thermoelectric power plants.

Cuba`s national electric grid collapsed early on Wednesday morning after the country's largest power plant failed, the energy and mines ministry said, plunging millions of people into darkness. Several such failures have hit the country over the past two months as Cuba`s power generation systems have fallen into disarray amid fuel shortages,