Hurricane Oscar made landfall in Cuba this Sunday afternoonreported the United States National Hurricane Center (NHC, for its acronym in English).
The tropical storm gained momentum and became category 1 hurricane before reaching the coast of the Cuban province of Guantanamonear the city of Baracoa (southeast of the country), at 5:50 p.m. local time (9:50 p.m. GMT).
The meteorological phenomenon reached the island with maximum sustained winds of 130 kilometers per hour and was moving northwest at 11 kilometers per hour, the NHC said.
“We checked the actions to face the passage of Hurricane Oscar in the east of the country. Precise instructions were given to ensure the care of our people. Support for the provinces is strengthened and brigades are being prepared for recovery in the shortest possible time,” the president of Cuba wrote this Sunday, Miguel Diaz-Canelon the social network X.
The island has a solid history of dealing with hurricanes, with an effective civil defense and an extensive network of shelters.
Oscar was reduced to the category of tropical storm on Sunday night (23:00 local time, 03:00 GMT), according to the NHC, with winds of up to 110 kilometers per hour.
The NHC predicts that this Monday Hurricane Oscar will change its course and head northeast, leaving the island’s territory at night or early Tuesday.
“Until midweek, heavy rainfall from Oscar will lead to areas of significant and potentially life-threatening flash flooding along with landslides across portions of eastern Cuba, especially in the Sierra Maestra. Additionally, localized flash flooding is possible across the southeastern Bahamas,” the NHC forecast.
Hurricane without electricity
The arrival of Hurricane Oscar occurs in the middle of a strong electrical crisis on the island, which left most of its inhabitants without electricity due to successive failures in the system in the last three days.
The Cuban government said that the electrical service will return to normal mostly on Monday night, although there will be users who will not have electricity until Tuesday.
The island’s main power plant failed on Friday, leaving 10 million people – almost the entire Cuban population – without electricity.
Supply was partially restored on Saturday, before collapsing again overnight.
Díaz-Canel said on Sunday that they will not tolerate “vandalism” on the electrical grid.
“We are not going to accept nor allow anyone to act causing vandalism, much less altering the citizen tranquility of our town. That is a conviction and it is a principle of our revolution,” he said, according to fragments of a statement published on video by the Presidency of Cuba in X.
The communist president recently blamed the US embargowhich has been going on for decades, of preventing much-needed supplies and spare parts from reaching Cuba.
“Sometimes people think no, that this is inefficiency, that this is because they don’t want to (repair), that they want to bother people. Today we have two problems: one, that we do not have the fuel we need, and another, that we have not been able to make the repairs,” Díaz-Canel said on Friday.
“All of this goes through currencies. Currency that we do not have due to financial persecution, and fuel that we do not have due to energy persecution. And it is the blockade, the intensified blockade of these times,” he added.
“There are people here who don’t want people to talk about the blockade,” he said.
Díaz-Canel added that even after the electrical system is repaired these days, the country will continue to be in an energy emergency.
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