Widespread power outages in Cuba extended into their fourth day as Hurricane Oscar crossed the island’s east coast, bringing heavy winds and rain.
In Santo Suarez, part of a densely populated neighborhood in southwest Havana, people took to the streets banging pots and pans in protest on Sunday night. The demonstrators, who say they do not have water, blocked the street with garbage.
Energy Minister Vicente de la O Levy said in a press conference that he hopes to restore the power grid on Monday or Tuesday morning.
But he said Oscar, which made landfall on the east coast on Sunday evening, would bring “additional inconvenience” to Cuba’s recovery because it would touch a “strong (electricity) generating area.” Major Cuban power plants, such as Felton in Holguin City and Rente in Santiago de Cuba, are located in the region.
Oscar later weakened into a tropical storm but its effects on the island were expected to persist until Monday.
Power has returned to some neighborhoods in the Cuban capital, where two million people live, but most of Havana remains dark. The impact of power outages goes beyond lighting, as services such as water supply also rely on electricity to operate pumps.
People resorted to cooking with improvised wood stoves in the streets before the food spoiled in the refrigerators.
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Yelenes de la Caridad Napoles, the mother of a 7-year-old girl, said, crying, that she had reached the point of “despair.”
The failure of the Antonio Guiteras plant on Friday, which caused the collapse of the entire island system, was just the latest in a series of problems with power distribution in a country where electricity has been restricted and rotated to different regions at different times of the year. day. The status of other power plants in Cuba was not clear.
People queued for hours on Sunday to buy bread from the few bakeries that could reopen.
Some Cubans, like Rosa Rodriguez, went without power for four days.
“We have millions of problems, and none of them are solved,” Rodriguez said. “We have to come to get bread, because the local bakery is closed, and they bring it from somewhere else.”
The power outage is the worst in Cuba since Hurricane Ian hit the island as a Category 3 storm in 2022 and damaged power facilities. It took days for the government to fix it. This year, some homes spent up to eight hours a day without electricity.
The Cuban government said on Saturday that some electricity had been restored. But the 500 megawatts of power in the island’s electricity grid, far less than the usual 3 gigawatts the island needs, quickly dropped to 370 megawatts.
Even in a country accustomed to power outages as part of a deepening economic crisis, Friday’s collapse was massive.
The Cuban government announced emergency measures to reduce electricity demand, including suspending classes in schools and universities, closing some state-owned workplaces and canceling non-essential services.
Local authorities said the outage was caused by increased demand from small and medium-sized businesses and residential air conditioners. Later, the power outages were exacerbated by breakdowns in old thermal power plants that were not properly maintained, and a lack of fuel to operate some facilities.
Cuba’s energy minister said the country’s grid would be in better shape if two more partial power outages did not occur as authorities tried to restore connectivity on Saturday. De la O Levy also said that Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela and Russia, among others, have offered assistance.
& Edition 2024 The Canadian Press
