Hurricane Oscar makes landfall in Cuba, still without power

Hurricane Oscar made landfall on Sunday evening in eastern Cuba, which has been facing a giant power outage for three days that authorities are struggling to resolve. Oscar made landfall on Sunday in eastern Cuba, with winds approaching 130 km/h, the US Hurricane Center (NHC) announced.

According to this source, Oscar fell on the Cuban coast in the Guantanamo province, near the town of Baracoa, on the far eastern tip of the island, at 11:50 p.m. (Swiss time). “Hurricane Oscar made landfall near Baracao,” the Cuban Meteorological Institute (Insmet) confirmed on its Facebook page. “The Pointe Maisi weather station reports sustained winds of 80 km/h and a gust of 116 km/h at 5:25 p.m. local time (11:25 p.m. Swiss).”

Oscar hits Cuba in the midst of an energy crisis as the island prepares to spend a third night without power due to an outage on Friday at the main thermoelectric plant in the west of the country that brought the grid to a complete halt .

The authorities in the east of the island “are already working hard to protect the population and economic resources, given the imminence of Hurricane Oscar,” assured President Miguel Díaz-Canel in a message published Saturday evening on X.

The government, for its part, estimated that electricity would be mostly restored Monday evening. “We can talk about the fact that between tomorrow Monday morning, afternoon, or evening,” service will be restored for the majority of Cubans, indicated the Minister of Energy and Mines, Vicente de la O Levy.

The Cuban presidency had previously reported a restoration of 500 megawatts. “The system will continue to increase its load in the coming hours,” she said. For comparison, the country had consumed 3,300 megawatts on Thursday, the day before the total electricity blackout linked to the shutdown of the island’s main thermal power plant, located in Matanzas (west).

On Thursday, the Cuban president announced that the island was in a situation of “energy emergency” faced with difficulties in purchasing the fuel necessary to power its power stations, due to the strengthening of the embargo that Washington imposes on the island since 1962.

By Saturday evening, most neighborhoods in Havana were in the dark, except for hotels and hospitals equipped with emergency generators and the few private homes that have this type of equipment.

“The situation is very difficult, but I try to stay calm, because there is already too much stress in this country,” Yaima Valladares, a 28-year-old dancer, told AFP.

“Without electricity, it is almost impossible to study,” explains a young man of 18, on condition of anonymity. “My phone is out of battery, we have no internet, the connection has also disappeared and I can’t call my loved ones because there is no coverage on the landline at home “.

For three months, Cubans have suffered from power cuts that have become more and more frequent, with a national energy deficit of 30%. On Thursday, this deficit had reached 50%. In recent weeks, in several provinces, outages have lasted more than twenty hours a day.

In Cuba, electricity is produced by eight dilapidated thermoelectric power plants, sometimes broken down or under maintenance, as well as several floating power plants leased to Turkish companies, and generators.

Power outages were one of the triggers for the historic demonstrations of July 11, 2021. In September 2022, the island had already experienced a widespread “blackout” after the passage of Hurricane Ian which hit the west of the island. Completely restoring electricity took several days in the capital and several weeks across the island.