The Cuban government estimated this Sunday, October 20, 2024, that electricity would be restored in the country Monday evening for the vast majority of the population, reportsAFP. That is to say after the imminent arrival of Hurricane Oscar, which is due to hit the east of the island during the day.
“We can talk about the fact that between tomorrow Monday morning, afternoon, or evening,” the 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).
Read also: “It’s a terrible situation”: Cuba plunged into darkness after a giant power outage
Winds at 130 km/h
Hurricane Oscar is moving west-southwest across the Caribbean at a speed of approximately 19 km/h, with winds of up to 130 km/h. At 12 p.m. GMT (2 p.m. French time), it was about 185 km from Guantanamo Bay, according to the latest report from the American National Hurricane Center (NHC).
Oscar will hit Cuba in the midst of an energy crisis, the island having spent its second night without power due to a breakdown on Friday in the main thermoelectric power plant, which caused the complete shutdown of the network.
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 hurricane warning remains in effect for the southeastern Bahamas and the northern coast of the Cuban provinces of Holguin and Guantanamo.
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.
Energy emergency
On Thursday, the Cuban president announced that the island was in a situation of“energy emergency” faced with the difficulties in purchasing the fuel necessary to power its power stations, due to the strengthening of the embargo that Washington has imposed on the island since 1962.
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.
In September 2022, the island had already experienced a blackout widespread 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. Power outages were one of the triggers for the historic protests of July 11, 2021.
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