A hurricane named Oscar must imminently hit the island of Cuba, risking further affecting the population who spend their second night without electricity, due to a giant blackout.
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Cuba is facing its worst crisis in thirty years. For its approximately 10 million inhabitants, the arrival of this hurricane, coupled with the giant power outage underway since Friday – which follows chronic outages – adds to shortages of food, medicine and inflation. galloping.
Authorities in the east of the island are “already working hard to protect the population and economic resources, given the imminent hurricane Oscar», assured President Miguel Díaz-Canel in a message published Saturday evening on the social network X.
Accompanied by winds of 139 km/h, Oscar is expected to reach eastern Cuba during the day on Sunday where heavy rains are expected, according to the American National Hurricane Center (NHC).
Photo d’archives. AFP
In another message on X, the Cuban presidency reported the beginning of progress in restoring the electricity system.
“16% of consumers already have electricity and around 500 megawatts are being generated. 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).
“Too much stress”
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.
As of 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.
AFP
“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.
Isabel Rodriguez, 72, like many of her compatriots, has difficulty sleeping, not being able to use fans when it was 27 degrees on Saturday evening, but with very high humidity, making it feel like 32 degrees.
President Díaz-Canel held a supervisory meeting on Friday evening, during which he promised that there would be no rest for state services until electricity is fully restored on the island.
“People are a little upset because the power has been out for a long time and God knows when it will be restored,” said Rafael Carrillo, a 41-year-old mechanic, who said he walked for almost five kilometers due to the lack of means of transportation. transportation.
“We spend four or five hours waiting for the guagua [l’autobus] and when it passes, it is full and does not stop,” he says wearily.
AFP
“No more internet”
“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 20 hours a day.
In Cuba, electricity is produced by eight dilapidated thermoelectric plants, sometimes broken down or undergoing maintenance, as well as several floating plants – which the government leases to Turkish companies – and generators.
Most of this infrastructure requires fuel to operate.
Power outages were one of the triggers for the historic protests of July 11, 2021.
In September 2022, the island had already experienced a blackout widespread after the passage of the hurricane Ian which had struck the west of the island. Completely restoring electricity took several days in the capital and several weeks across the island.
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