“We are on the verge of collapse”: Cubans at the end of their nerves in the face of the power outage affecting the island

They took out their flashlights. Since Friday October 18, in Cuba, this is the only way to light up homes. The fault is a giant power outage which impacts the 10 million inhabitants of the island. “It’s too hard. We are in decline and power cuts are increasing. We are on the verge of total collapse,” castigates one of them in the report on TF1’s 1 p.m. at the top of this article. Because for three months, this type of incident has become more and more frequent. On Thursday, the national energy deficit, which hovered around 30%, reached 50%, reinforcing the exasperation of the population.

“Before, they cut the power for two or three hours, but now it’s a long time, another habitat in Cuba gets impatient. I can tolerate it, but it is a problem for children, those who are one year old, one month old, the sick, the elderly. That’s the problem.”. This time, the power outage is due to the shutdown of the Antonio Guiteras thermal power plant, in the center-west of the country. A shutdown that led to the collapse of the entire system.

More fuel for power plants

Because in Cuba, electricity is produced from eight dilapidated thermal power plants, most of them dating from the 1950s, sometimes broken down or under maintenance, as well as several floating power plants, which the government rents to Turkish companies, and groups electrogeners. The first electricity restrictions on the island date back to March, with the government’s increasing difficulties in sourcing fuel and parts needed to operate and repair aging thermoelectric plants. Infrastructures which, for the most part, require fuel to operate.

In recent weeks, in several provinces, outages have lasted more than 20 hours per day. On Thursday, the president even announced that Cuba was in a situation of“energy emergency” and announced the suspension of all non-essential public services to prioritize the supply of electricity to hospitals, businesses and homes. Difficulties that he attributed, Friday, to the strengthening of the embargo that Washington imposes on the island (new window) communist since 1962. A strengthening of the sanctions decided under Donald Trump and which has had a major impact on the economy since then. “It is yet another demonstration of all the problems that the blockade is causing us,” insisted President Miguel Díaz-Canel.

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Cuba is currently experiencing its worst crisis in three decades, with shortages of food and medicine and chronic power cuts. The latter had been one of the triggers of the unprecedented anti-government demonstrations of July 11, 2021. In September 2022, the island had already experienced a widespread blackout after the passage of Hurricane Ian which had struck the west of the island.