Millions of Cubans woke up this Sunday without electricity, for the second time in less than 48 hours, while they prepared to receive Hurricane Oscar.
The island’s electrical service collapsed again on Saturday night, after having been partially restored following the failure that left around 10 million people in the dark on Friday, the BBC correspondent for Mexico, Central America and Cuba reported. , Will Grant.
President Miguel Díaz-Canel assured that the authorities were “working hard” both “to protect people and economic resources, in the face of the imminent arrival of Hurricane Oscar” and to recover electricity service.
With winds of 140 kilometers per hour, Oscar is forecast to cause flash flooding and landslides, according to the US National Hurricane Center.
In a matter of hours, the phenomenon went from being considered a tropical storm to a category 1 hurricane.
Oscar is expected to hit the northern coast of the Cuban provinces of Holguín and Guantánamo this Sunday afternoon, after passing through the Turks and Caicos Islands, as well as the southeast of the Bahamas.
From crisis to crisis
The arrival of the hurricane occurs when the island has not managed to recover from the massive blackout it suffered on Friday morning, caused by a failure in the Antonio Guiteras power plant in Matanzas, the largest on the island.
The work to restore electrical service was cut short by a “disconnection from the Western subsystem”which occurred after 10 p.m. local time, reported the state media Cubadebate.
The new failure has meant that the recovery process of the electrical system “continues to be complex,” the Ministry of Energy and Mines admitted.
The massive blackout on Friday forced the authorities to take extraordinary measures such as the closure of schools and non-essential industries.
The government said Saturday that it had made some progress in gradually restoring electricity service throughout the island, including hospitals and parts of Havana.
The authorities reported that they were working to progressively restore the service although they warned that there was no certainty as to when they would be able to fully restore it.
“There is no fixed time to reset the entire system”said Lázaro Guerra Hernández, director of Electrical Energy of the Ministry of Energy and Mines in a message published on the Cuban presidential account on Instagram, after noon this Saturday.
Several hours later, authorities reported that service had been restored to a 20% of the island.
It is feared that Oscar will make restoring power even more difficult by damaging Cuba’s already weak power distribution infrastructure.
Protests and the internet
The last 48 hours have forced millions of Cubans to endure high temperatures without air conditioning or fans and watch as the food they had stored starts to decompose in refrigeratorswhile some families have been forced to cook with firewood, Grant reported.
Likewise, the lack of electricity has left thousands without water service since their supply depends on electric pumps.
On the streets of the Cuban capital, the traffic lights were still off this Sunday and most of the businesses were closed.
The blackout also severely affected the internet connection.. According to the NetBlocks digital observatory, much of the island was still disconnected from the network on Saturday.
The patience of Cubans in the face of the crisis seems to be running out. Thus, during Saturday night, protests were reported due to electrical failures.
Protesters in Havana used large stones and garbage containers to block streetswhile they banged pots and pans to demand the prompt restoration of the light. According to Reuters, police officers sent to the scene broke up the protest.
Cuban authorities have attributed the failure to a “significant unavailability of fuel, about 900 megawatts.”
The director of Electrical Energy of the Ministry of Energy and Mines said that since Friday night there was a ship unloading fuel and there was another in Havana that can supply two floating plants, which are capable of generating a combined 256 megawatts.
Total crisis
The massive blackout comes after months of constant power outages throughout Cuba.
The Caribbean country suffers a serious energy crisis attributed, among other problems, to fuel shortage which is used to feed their power plants. Much of the fuel that Cuba consumed came from its ally Venezuela, a country that has seen its hydrocarbon production fall drastically in the last five years.
Furthermore, the seven thermoelectric plants are old and in a precarious state.
“In recent days we spent more hours without electricity than with electricity. People cannot work or live their normal lives,” a woman who was in a rural area of the Cuban province of Matanzas told BBC Mundo on Friday.
The massive blackout occurs one day after the Prime Minister, Manuel Marrero, held a special appearance to talk about this crisis, which he described as “national emergency”.
Marrero announced several measures to deal with the situation, including paralyzing all non-essential state work activity, prioritizing hospitals and food production centers.
A limit situation
On Thursday, 51% of the country was left without electricity and the Electrical Union I expected it to be 49% on Friday.but finally the blackout affected almost 100%.
Blackouts have become very frequent since the end of the pandemic in Cuba, which is going through a very serious economic crisis marked by the shortage of almost all products -including medicines and food- and the inability to pay their foreign debts to continue obtaining credit.
The authorities blame the US embargo of the crisis and have assured that the losses that imply 18 days of it are equivalent to the annual cost of maintaining the electrical network.
“If the embargo is lifted, there will be no blackouts. In this way the United States government could support the Cuban people… if it wanted to,” wrote the Foreign Minister, Bruno Rodríguez, on his X account (former Twitter).
The blackouts and the lack of almost everything have been one of the reasons for the social discontent that exists in Cuban society, reflected in the historic protests of July 11, 2021, the largest since Fidel Castro took power in 1959 and established a system communist in the country.
Many Cubans also compare the current situation with the special period, the period of extreme scarcity that Cuba went through in the 1990s after the fall of the Soviet Union, its main benefactor.
click here to read more stories from BBC News Mundo.
Subscribe here to our new newsletter to receive a selection of our best content of the week every Friday.
You can also follow us on YouTube, instagram, TikTok, x, Facebook and in our new whatsapp channel.
And remember that you can receive notifications in our app. Download the latest version and activate them.