Hurricane Oscar has dumped heavy rain across the eastern end of Cuba, adding to a list of woes already besetting the Caribbean’s biggest island, which was hit over the weekend by a huge power cut.
The deluge caused landslides, and winds of 75mph tore the roofs off houses, making work even more difficult for the engineers trying to get Cuba’s electricity grid up and running again, after a weekend when the entire country of about 10 million people was plunged into darkness.
“The winds have been very high,” said a resident of the eastern city of Baracoa. “The sea is very dangerous and tiles have been ripped from the roof.”
As Hurricane Oscar was reduced to a tropical storm and began to turn north towards the Bahamas on Monday, the focus returned to the collapse of Cuba’s electrical grid, caused by the country’s antiquated electricity plants.
In recent months blackouts have become so severe that people have been losing the food they store, a disaster in a country with soaring inflation and prices.
Over the weekend Miguel Díaz-Canel, Cuba’s president, appeared in the military style uniform of the National Defence Council, which only happens in times of national emergency and usually due to severe weather.
The latest crisis began last week when all non-essential workers in the vast bureaucracy were ordered home, in the forlorn hope of saving power and keeping the grid operating.
On Sunday it was announced that schools would be closed until Thursday, another very unusual event on an island that prides itself on keeping children in class.
Electricity was restored across much of the centre of the island on Monday, but reports suggest the lights are out in both the far eastern reaches – where Oscar hit – and Pinar del Río in the far west.
In Havana, the electricity began returning in the early hours of Monday, with neighbourhoods gradually coming back online one after another. By lunchtime, the government said 56% of the city had power.
But Habaneros remained suspicious whether the antiquated electricity system would hold and there was grumbling that the government was giving information via Twitter/X, rather than by radio, even as phones have been dying from lack of charge.
In July 2021, blackouts sparked unprecedented street protests involving thousands of people. This time, expressions of discontent have been muted, with residents in several Havana neighbourhoods banging pots.
Díaz-Canel on Monday blamed Cuba’s trouble on the United States’ “financial war” against Cuba, aiming his comments at online activists in Miami urging Cubans onto the streets. “We will not allow anyone to act by provoking acts of vandalism and much less by disturbing the civil tranquility of our people,” he said.
