A hurricane named Oscar will hit the island of Cuba this Sunday, October 20, with the risk of affecting the population even more, after a second night without electricity due to a gigantic blackout.
Cuba faces its worst crisis in thirty years. For its approximately 10 million inhabitants, the arrival of this hurricane, together with the gigantic electrical blackout that has occurred since Friday and which follows chronic outages, aggravates the shortage of food, medicine and rampant inflation.
The authorities in the east of the island “are already working intensely to protect the population and economic resources, given the imminence of Hurricane Oscar,” said President Miguel Díaz-Canel in a message published Saturday night on the social network. .
Winds up to 139 km/h
Accompanied by winds of 139 kilometers per hour, Oscar is expected to reach eastern Cuba during the day on Sunday where heavy rains are expected, according to the US National Hurricane Center (NHC).
In another message from X, the Cuban presidency reported the beginning of progress in reestablishing the electrical 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,” he stated.
In comparison, the country had consumed 3,300 megawatts on Thursday, the eve of the total blackout linked to the closure of the island’s main thermal power plant, located in Matanzas.
The island in “energy emergency”
On Thursday, the Cuban president announced that the island was in a situation of “energy emergency” due to difficulties in acquiring the fuel necessary to power its power plants, due to the strengthening of the embargo that Washington has imposed on the island since 1962.
On Saturday night, most of Havana’s neighborhoods were dark, except for hotels and hospitals equipped with emergency generators and the few private homes that have this type of equipment.
President Díaz-Canel held a supervision meeting on Friday night in which he promised that there will be no rest for state services until electricity is fully restored on the island.
Frequent outages
For three months, Cubans have been suffering from increasingly frequent electricity cuts, with a national energy deficit of 30%. By Thursday, this deficit had reached 50%. In recent weeks, in several provinces, the outages have lasted more than 20 hours a day.
In Cuba, electricity is produced by eight dilapidated thermoelectric plants, sometimes damaged or undergoing maintenance, as well as several floating plants, which the government rents to Turkish companies, and generators.
In September 2022, the island had already experienced a widespread “blackout” after Hurricane Ian hit the west of the island. Completely restoring power took several days in the capital and several weeks across the island.
Source: BFM TV