Hurricane Oscar made landfall and millions of Cuban households were left to cope in the dark, without power, due to the largest blackout the island has seen in recent years.
Last Sunday, he hurricane Oscar made landfall Cuba and caused the death of six people in addition to serious flooding and damage in at least three regions of the country. This is what the Cuban president reported Miguel Díaz-Canel Monday.
Fortunately, Oscar lost strength and became a tropical storm that, according to United States National Hurricane Center (NHC) began to move towards the east of the island.
And although Cubans had prepared for the hurricane’s arrival, another tragedy left them in an unfortunate situation: On Friday, a few days before Oscar, 10 million residents were left without power due to system outages.
In other words, they had to face the hurricane without light.
This is the crisis Cuba is going through these days.
How did Hurricane Oscar pass through Cuba?
Hurricane Oscar arrived with winds reaching 130 kilometers per hour. However, once it made landfall, it weakened and fell to 70 mph, then stayed at 60 mph with “occasional stronger gusts,” according to reports. BBC World .
Anyway, The damage on the island was severe.
According to a report from Meteorological Institute (Insmet) from Cuba, at the Punta de Maisí station, 92 liters per square meter of rain, while in Baracoa there were 76.7 liters.
In case of emergency, Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel He wrote on his X account: “Very early on we checked the situation after #Oscar. Strong effects in Baracoa, Maisí and Imías, with unprecedented flooding. “All support is available to begin recovery in Guantanamo municipalities”
As explained by BBC, The island has “a strong history of hurricane management, with effective civil protection and a vast network of shelters.
However, What they didn’t anticipate was that millions of Cubans would face the hurricane without power in their homes.
How Cubans protected themselves from Hurricane Oscar without electricity
Last Friday, October 18, around 11 a.m. local time, The Antonio Guiteras power plant was out of service. It is the largest that Cuba has.
This failure caused The entire electricity system on the island will collapse and that 10 million people – almost the entire population – would be left without electricity at home.
By Saturday, the supply had been partially restored, but at night it collapsed again.
And on Sunday, Hurricane Oscar arrived, surprising Cubans without power in their homes.
Already Monday afternoon, The government reported in the official newspaper grandmother that “electric power service had reached the figure of 37% throughout the country and in the capital, by the end of the afternoon, more than 90% of customers had benefited from the service.
The Cubans’ unease is profound, not only because it This is the worst power outage the island has seen since Hurricane Ian in 2022, when the government was unable to repair the damage for several days.
But also because Electricity supply is intermittent throughout the year due to restrictions and rationing by region and schedule. So much so that thousands of households can go up to eight hours a day without electricity.
Cubans’ dissatisfaction with electricity
From BBC World They reported that the situation is critical: Residents fear hospitals will continue to operate, while schools and businesses are still closed.
This is why they began to demonstrate on social networks and in the streets: In some areas, pot incidents have been reported, while other groups of organized people decided block the streets with garbage.
Faced with this, President Díaz-Canel reacted immediately and declared that He was not going to tolerate “vandalism”.
“We will not accept or allow anyone to act by causing vandalism, and even less by disturbing the tranquility of the citizens of our city. It’s a conviction and it’s a principle of our revolution,” he said in a video shared on X.
At the same time, the lack of electricity caused many refrigerated foods to rot in homes.
“We haven’t had electricity for three nights and our food is rotting. “Four days without electricity is abuse for children” he said to P.A. Mary Karla, a Cuban mother of three children.
Why the electricity was cut in Cuba
According to the authorities’ version, The fault behind the great blackout that plunged the country into darkness amid the arrival of Hurricane Oscar is the American embargo. latent for decades, preventing the arrival of supplies and spare parts needed to resolve power plant problems.
“Sometimes people think no, that it’s inefficiency, that it’s because they don’t want to (fix it), that they want to bother people. Today we have two problems: the first is that we do not have the fuel we need and the second is that we have not been able to carry out the repairs. » declared President Díaz-Canel on the day of the massive outage.
The president added that “All this goes through currencies. Currency we don’t have because of financial persecution, and fuel we don’t have because of energy persecution. And this is the blockade, the intensified blockade of our time.”
“There are people here who don’t want us to talk about the blockade.”
On the other hand, Díaz-Canel described as “admirable” the work carried out by government teams to restore the electrical system. He further announced that they would soon determine “how we will manage the deficit in the coming days”.
Source: Latercera
I am David Jack and I have been working in the news industry for over 10 years. As an experienced journalist, I specialize in covering sports news with a focus on golf. My articles have been published by some of the most respected publications in the world including The New York Times and Sports Illustrated.
