Cubans struggle with an extended power outage and a new tropical storm

[October 21, 2024]  By ANDREA RODRIGUEZ and MILEXSY DURAN

HAVANA (AP) — Many Cubans waited in anguish and some took to the streets in protest as widespread blackouts stretched into their third day. Their concerns were heightened as a Hurricane Oscar hit Cuba’s eastern coast with winds and heavy rain.

In Santo Suárez, part of a populous neighborhood in southwestern Havana, people went into the streets banging pots and pans in protest Sunday night.

“We haven’t had electricity for three nights, and our food is rotting. Four days without electricity is an abuse to the children,” resident Mary Karla, a mother of three children, told The Associated Press. She didn't give her surname.

The protesters, who say they have no water either, blocked the street with garbage.

Energy Minister Vicente de la O Levy said in a news conference he hopes the electricity grid will be restored on Monday or Tuesday morning.

But he said that Oscar, which made landfall on the eastern coast Sunday evening, will bring “an additional inconvenience” to Cuba's recovery since it will touch a “region of strong (electricity) generation.” Key Cuban power plants, such as Felton in the city of Holguín, and Renté in Santiago de Cuba, are located in the area.

Oscar later weakened to a tropical storm but its effects were forecast to linger in the island through Monday.

Some neighborhoods had electricity restored in Cuba’s capital, where 2 million people live, but most of Havana remained dark. The impact of the blackout goes beyond lighting, as services like water supply also depend on electricity to run pumps.

People resorted to cooking with improvised wood stoves on the streets before the food went bad in refrigerators.

In tears, Ylenis de la Caridad Napoles, mother of a 7-year-old girl, says she is reaching a point of “desperation.”

The failure of the Antonio Guiteras plant on Friday, which caused the collapse of the island's whole system, was just the latest in a series of problems with energy distribution in a country where electricity has been restricted and rotated to different regions at different times of the day. The status of Cuba's other power plants was unclear.

Residents protest by banging pots and pans in Havana, Cuba, Sunday, Oct. 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Ramon Espinosa)

People lined up for hours on Sunday to buy bread in the few bakeries that could reopen.

Some Cubans like Rosa Rodríguez have been without electricity for four days.

“We have millions of problems, and none of them are solved,” said Rodríguez. “We must come to get bread, because the local bakery is closed, and they bring it from somewhere else.”

The blackout was considered to be Cuba’s worst since Hurricane Ian hit the island as a Category 3 storm in 2022 and damaged power installations. It took days for the government to fix them. This year, some homes have spent up to eight hours a day without electricity.

Cuba’s government had said Saturday that some electricity had been restored. But the 500 megawatts of energy in the island’s electricity grid, far short of the usual 3 gigawatts it needs, had quickly decreased to 370 megawatts.

Even in a country that is used to outages as part of a deepening economic crisis, Friday’s collapse was massive.

The Cuban government has announced emergency measures to slash electricity demand, including suspending school and university classes, shutting down some state-owned workplaces and canceling nonessential services.

Local authorities said the outage stemmed from increased demand from small- and medium-sized companies and residential air conditioners. Later, the blackout got worse because of breakdowns in old thermoelectric plants that haven’t been properly maintained, and the lack of fuel to operate some facilities.

Cuba's energy minister said the country's grid would be in better shape if there had not been two more partial blackouts as authorities tried to reconnect on Saturday. De la O Levy also said Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela and Russia, among other nations, had offered to help.

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