Millions of people across Cuba remain without electricity after a failed attempt to restore power Saturday night. In the meantime, Hurricane Oscar is expected to reach eastern Cuba on Sunday, bringing heavy rains.
The national power grid in Cuba first went out of service around midday on Friday after the island’s largest power plant shut down, according to state media. The grid failed again on Saturday morning. Authorities’ efforts to restore power to the island were thwarted for a third time late Saturday night.
In fact, Cuban authorities announced some progress in restoring power in the evening and then went on to report another failure of the power grid. The third outage marks a major setback in the government’s efforts to quickly restore power to depleted residents already suffering from severe shortages of food, medicine and fuel.
The country saw two small protests in the city of Marianao and in the Cuatro Caminos neighbourhood of Havana, according to Reuters. The impact of the blackout goes beyond lighting, with services such as water supply also relying on electricity to run pumps; internet traffic in Cuba plummeted on Saturday, according to the data from NetBlocks.
The latest blackouts are considered as the largest in Cuba in two years, after a Category 3 hurricane damaged electrical installations and the government took days to fix them. Local authorities said the shutdown was due to increased demand from small and medium-sized companies and air conditioners in homes.
Hurricane Oscar, with winds of 140 kilometres per hour, is expected to reach eastern Cuba on Sunday with heavy rains expected, the US National Hurricane Centre said. Authorities in the east of the island were “working hard to protect the people and economic resources given the imminent arrival of Hurricane Oscar,” according to President Miguel Diaz-Canel.
