Sawt Falasteen - With little electricity, Cuba girds for a hurricane

The arrival of Hurricane Oscar, after the collapse Friday of Cuba's largest power plant crippled the whole national grid, will pile more pressure on a country already battling sky-high inflation and shortages of food, medicine, fuel and water.

The storm was expected to make landfall in northeastern Cuba some time Sunday afternoon or evening, the US National Hurricane Center said in its latest bulletin.

As of Sunday morning, Oscar was a Category 1 storm packing maximum sustained winds of 80 mph (130 kph), the NHC said.

President Miguel Diaz-Canel said Saturday in a post on social media that authorities in the east of the island were "working hard to protect the people and economic resources, given the imminent arrival of Hurricane Oscar."

The Cuban president's office said in another post that progress had been made in restoring power, with 16 percent of consumers receiving electricity and approximately 500 megawatts being generated. But around midnight the energy ministry said a subsystem in western Cuba had collapsed.

That wattage was a fraction of the country's 3,300-megawatt demand on Thursday, the day before the grid collapsed and the government declared an "energy emergency" following weeks of extended outages.

The power grid failed in a chain reaction Friday due to the unexpected shutdown of the biggest of the island's eight decrepit coal-fired power plants, according to the head of electricity supply at the energy ministry, Lazaro Guerra.

National electric utility UNE said it had managed to generate a minimal amount of electricity to get power plants restarted on Friday night, but by Saturday morning it was experiencing what official news outlet Cubadebate called "a new, total disconnection of the electrical grid."

Most neighborhoods in Havana remain dark, except for hotels and hospitals with emergency generators and the very few private homes with that kind of backup in the economically challenged nation.

"God knows when the power will come back on," said Rafael Carrillo, a 41-year-old mechanic, who had to walk almost five kilometers (three miles) due to the lack of public transportation amid the blackout.

The blackout followed weeks of power outages, lasting up to 20 hours a day in some provinces.

Prime Minister Manuel Marrero on Thursday declared an "energy emergency," suspending non-essential public services in order to prioritize electricity supply to homes.

- Leaving Cuba -

President Diaz-Canel blamed the situation on Cuba's difficulties in acquiring fuel for its power plants, which he attributed to the tightening, during Donald Trump's presidency, of a six-decade-long US trade embargo.

Cuba is in the throes of its worst economic crisis since the collapse of key ally the Soviet Union in the early 1990s -- marked by soaring inflation and shortages of basic goods.

With no relief in sight, many Cubans have emigrated.

More than 700,000 entered the United States between January 2022 and August 2024, according to US officials.

While the authorities chiefly blame the US embargo, the island is also feeling the aftershocks of the Covid-19 pandemic battering its critical tourism sector, and of economic mismanagement.

To bolster its grid, Cuba has leased seven floating power plants from Turkish companies and also added many small diesel-powered generators.

In July 2021, blackouts sparked an unprecedented outpouring of public anger.

Thousands of Cubans took to the streets shouting, "We are hungry" and "Freedom!" in a rare challenge to the government.

One person was killed and dozens were injured in the protests. According to the Mexico-based human rights organization Justicia 11J, 600 people detained during the unrest remain in prison.

In 2022, the island also suffered months of daily hours-long power outages, capped by a nationwide blackout caused by Hurricane Ian.

U.Shaheen--SF-PST