()— Millions of Cubans remained without electricity for the third consecutive day this Sunday after new attempts to restore power overnight failed.
Cuba’s Electrical Union said about 16% of the country regained electricity when the aging power grid became overloaded again late Saturday. Authorities did not say when service would be restored.
This is the third total collapse of Cuba’s electrical grid since Friday, and most of the country’s 10 million inhabitants have had their access to electricity interrupted during this time.
Recovery efforts will be further complicated by the upcoming arrival of Hurricane Oscar in eastern Cuba, which is expected to bring strong winds and waves, according to meteorologists.
Hurricane Oscar made its first landfall on the island of Inagua, in the Bahamas, with estimated maximum sustained winds of 130 km/h, according to the National Hurricane Center (NHC) update from this Sunday to 5 a.m. ET.
It is expected to reach the northeast coast of Cuba as a hurricane this afternoon. “Weakening is expected after landfall, but Oscar could still be a tropical storm when it moves north of Cuba late Monday and moves across the central Bahamas on Tuesday,” the NHC said.
The first blackout in Cuba occurred on Friday, when one of the country’s main power plants stopped working, according to the Ministry of Energy.
Hours after authorities said supply was slowly being restored, the country suffered a second national blackout on Saturday morning.
The blackouts threaten to plunge the communist nation into a deeper crisis. Both the supply of water and the keeping of food fresh depend on the reliability of the electrical supply.
Some people began flooding WhatsApp chats with updates about which areas had power, while others organized to stock medicines in the refrigerators of those who briefly had power, or were lucky enough to have a generator.
In Havana, residents waited for hours to buy a few loaves at the handful of stores that sold bread in the capital. When the bread ran out, several people angrily argued that they had jumped the line.
Many wondered aloud where Cuba’s traditional allies, such as Venezuela, Russia and Mexico, were. Until now, they had been supplying the island with much-needed barrels of oil to keep the lights on.
Meanwhile, tourists were still seen cruising around Havana’s main avenues in classic cars from the 1950s, although the generators in many hotels had run out of fuel.
A foreign visitor told that Havana’s José Martí International Airport was operating in the dark with only emergency power, adding that printers were not working to issue tickets and there was no air conditioning in the terminal.
Reuters reporters witnessed two small protests overnight towards Sunday, while videos of protests also emerged elsewhere in the capital.
Cuban authorities blamed the energy crisis on a confluence of events, from increased U.S. economic sanctions to disruptions caused by recent hurricanes and the impoverished state of the island’s infrastructure.
In a televised speech Thursday that was delayed by technical difficulties, Cuban Prime Minister Manuel Marrero Cruz said much of the country’s limited production was halted to avoid leaving people completely without power.
“We have been paralyzing economic activity to generate (energy) for the population,” he said.
The country’s Health Minister, José Ángel Portal Miranda, said on X Friday that the country’s health facilities were running on generators and that health workers were continuing to provide vital services.
‘s Mia Alberti and Gene Norman and en Español’s Verónica Calderón and Gerardo Lemos contributed to this report.
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