WASHINGTON, United States (AFP)— Cuba’s power grid failed overnight Wednesday, the government said, triggering a nationwide blackout that plunged the country into darkness for the third time in two months.

At 2:08 am, “the electrical system… was disconnected when the Antonio Guiteras thermal power plant went out”, the energy and mines ministry said in a post on social media.

It was working to restore power, the statement added.

In mid-October, a massive blackout hit the cash-strapped island nation after weeks of extended outages, leaving life in the capital Havana at a virtual standstill. Schools closed, public transport ground to a halt and traffic lights stopped functioning.

The cause of that outage, like Wednesday’s, was a failure at the Antonio Guiteras plant, the biggest of Cuba’s eight coal-fired power plants.

Power was restored to most of the country in the following week, before Hurricane Rafael slammed into the island in early November, knocking out the grid nationwide once again.

Communist authorities have blamed previous outages on difficulties in acquiring fuel for the country’s power plants — attributed to the tightening, during Donald Trump’s first presidency, of a six-decade-long US trade embargo.

But the island is also in the throes of a broader economic malaise — its worst economic crisis, according to experts, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, which heavily subsidised the one-party state.