10 million people without power as Cuba's grid collapses

Cuba's national electric grid has collapsed, the country's grid operator said, leaving around ‌10 million ‌people without power amid ⁠a US-imposed ‌oil blockade that has ⁠crippled the ⁠island's already ailing generation system.

The island's of 9.6m inhabitants, under a US trade embargo since 1962, has for years been mired in a severe economic crisis marked by extended power cuts and shortages of fuel, medicine and food.

It has now also been cut off from critical oil supplies from Venezuela and from Mexico under the threat of US tariffs.

President Donald Trump's administration has imposed the oil blockade on the Cuban government as Washington presses for regime change, making life harder for people already enduring food shortages and frequent blackouts.

Cuba's communist authorities acknowledged that talks were underway with the United States amid the intense pressure from Mr Trump, who said this month that Cuba was next on his agenda after Iran, predicting that the communist-run island was "gonna fall pretty soon".

At least 14 people were detained after protesters stormed a provincial office of the Cuban Communist Party over the weekend, a local official said today, a rare outburst of discontent as economic conditions worsen on the island.

The state-run newspaper Invasor had originally said five people were arrested in what it called an incident of vandalism in the town of Moron, around 500 kilometers (300 miles) east of Havana.

But today the regional party chief Julio Heriberto Gomez told the paper that 14 people had been arrested after the unrest, which saw rocks thrown at the office and furniture seized and set on fire.

"Once again they used a group of delinquents who do not represent the people of Moron," Gomez alleged, without further detail.

After the incident, President Miguel Diaz-Canel acknowledged in an X post "the discontent our people feel because of the prolonged blackouts" while warning that violence would "never be comprehensible, justified or admitted."

Mr Trump, for his part, vowed today to "take" Cuba as the communist island plunged into darkness in the latest power blackout linked to a crippling US oil embargo.

"Whether I free it, take it - think I could do anything I want with it, you want to know the truth," he said. "They're a very weakened nation right now."