( Spanish) — The president of Cuba, Miguel Díaz-Canel, said this Thursday that the island registered “major damage” in Artemisa, Havana and Mayabeque – the latter a province located in the east of Havana – after the passage of Hurricane Rafael.
Díaz-Canel did not specify the number of deaths or the number of injuries so far.
Rafael made landfall in western Cuba on Wednesday shortly after 4:00 pm local time as a major Category 3 hurricane. It made landfall along the southern coast of the province of Artemisa and left Cuban territory for more than two hours. later along the northern coast of Pinar del Río, according to the EFE agency.
After a first assessment of damage after the passage of Rafael, the Cuban Government recognized on Wednesday that the damage to housing, infrastructure and agriculture has been “very strong,” according to EFE.
Díaz-Canel commented that he plans to visit “the territories most impacted by the hurricane” starting this Thursday. “A new recovery process is already beginning,” he indicated.
The Meteorological Institute (Insmet) of Cuba measured winds of up to 185 kilometers per hour and recorded intense rains of up to 200 millimeters.
The strong winds caused by the hurricane caused the collapse of the national electrical system, reported the island’s Electrical Union.
Félix Estrada Rodríguez, director of the national load dispatch of the Cuban Electrical Union, explained in an interview broadcast by state television channel Caribe that the island’s electrical system collapsed a couple of hours before the tropical cyclone made landfall.
To the technical complexity of restoring electricity service, we must add the physical repair of cables and poles damaged by strong winds, explained on social networks the Ministry of Energy and Mines (Mined), which demanded “time” for recovery.
“We are working on the creation of electrical subsystems in the center and east of Cuba. In the West this process will be slower, the necessary electrical lines and installations must be reviewed,” said the Mined.
Rafael has affected more than four million Cubans and its damage will begin to be visible starting this Thursday.
This is the second hurricane to make landfall in Cuba so far in 2024. The previous one, Oscar, passed a little over two weeks ago through the northeastern end of the island and left eight people dead, damage to 12,000 homes and 13,000 hectares of damaged crops.
Until 7 a.m. ET this Thursday, according to the National Meteorological Service (SMN) of MexicoRafael was a category 2 hurricane heading towards the Gulf of Mexico, but still without a defined estimated path.
With information from Verónica Calderón and José Álvarez, from en Español.
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