Nearly 300,000 people had to be evacuated from their homes
This article was written by the Associated Press and was published in the Toronto Star on November 8, 2024.
A man pushes his pig back home after taking it to higher ground when Hurricane Rafael passed through Batabanó, Cuba, on Thursday.
H AVA N A Cuba was left reeling Thursday after a fierce Category 3 hurricane ripped across the island, knocking out the country’s power grid, downing trees and damaging infrastructure.
No fatalities were immediately reported in Cuba, and Hurricane Rafael had weakened to a Category 2 storm as it swirled across the gulf toward Mexico where heavy rains were expected in the coming days.
Rafael crossed a western portion of Cuba on Wednesday evening about 75 kilometres west of Havana, where José Ignacio Dimas returned home from his night shift as a security guard to find his apartment building in the historic centre of the city had collapsed.
“The entire front wall of the building fell,” Ignacio Dimas said in a tight voice as he scanned the damage early Thursday. Like many buildings in the capital, it was aging and lacked maintenance.
More than 461 homes collapsed because of the hurricane, Cuban authorities said. More than 283,000 people from across the country had been evacuated from their homes, 98,300 of which were in Havana.
Streets across the western swath of the country were riddled with utility poles, wires and trees.
In Havana, residents picked up what debris they could, but huge trees and fallen telephone lines lined the ground, blocking traffic. Concerned about food going bad due to blackouts, a group of residents opened an informal soup kitchen.
“If we don’t work together as neighbours, nobody does it,” said Ariel Calvo, who was helping to shovel debris Thursday morning.
Lázaro Guerra, electricity director for the Ministry of Energy and Mines, said power had been partially restored in the island’s western region and that generation units were powering back up. But he warned that restoring power would be slow-going as crews took safety precautions.
Earlier in the week, Rafael brushed past Jamaica and battered the Cayman Islands, downing trees and power lines and unleashing heavy flooding in some areas.
This article was written by Andrea Rodriguez and was published in the Toronto Star on November 7, 2024.
A man walks through the wind and rain brought by Hurricane Rafael in Havana, Wednesday. Forecasters warned the storm could bring “lifethreatening” storm surges, winds and flash floods to western swaths of the island.
Hurricane Rafael made landfall in Cuba on Wednesday as a powerful Category 3 hurricane, plowing across the western part of the island shortly after powerful winds knocked out the country’s power grid.
Massive waves lashed at the shores of Havana as sharp winds and rain whipped at the city’s historic centre, leaving trees littered on deserted streets on Wednesday.
Forecasters warned Rafael could bring “life-threatening” storm surges, winds and flash floods to western swaths of the island after it knocked out power and dumped rain on the Cayman Islands and Jamaica the day before. The extent of the damage was still unclear as of Wednesday night.
The storm was located 90 kilometres west-northwest of Havana on Wednesday. After plowing across the island, it slowed to a Category 2 hurricane. It had maximum sustained winds of 170 km/h and was moving northwest at 20 km/h, according to the National Hurricane Center.
The storm is bad news for Cuba, which is struggling with devastating blackouts while recovering from another hurricane two weeks ago that killed at least six people in the eastern part of the island.
Earlier on Wednesday, the Cuban government issued an alert for the incoming storm while crews in Havana worked to fortify buildings and clear scraps from seaside areas in anticipation of flooding.
Classes and public transport were suspended on parts of the island and authorities cancelled flights in and out Havana and Varadero. Meanwhile, thousands of people in the west of the island were evacuated as a prevention measure.
Forecasters expected the storm to weaken over Cuba before emerging in the southeastern Gulf of Mexico as a hurricane.
The U.S. State Department issued an advisory for Cuba on Tuesday afternoon, offering departure flights to non-essential staff and American citizens, and advising others to “reconsider travel to Cuba due to the potential impact of Tropical Storm Rafael.”
On Tuesday morning, the Cuban Civil Defence called on Cubans to prepare as soon as possible, because when the storm makes landfall “it’s important to stay where you are.”
A hurricane warning was in effect Wednesday for the Cuban provinces of Pinar del Rio, Artemisa, La Habana, Mayabeque, Matanzas and the Isle of Youth.
A tropical storm warning was in effect for the Cuban provinces of Villa Clara, Cienfuegos, Sancti Spiritus and Ciego de Avila, as well as the lower and middle Florida Keys from Key West to west of the Channel 5 Bridge, and Dry Tortugas.
This article was written by Andrea Rodriguez and Milexsy Duran, and was published in the Globe & Mail on October 21, 2024.
A man sits on a sidewalk on Sunday as Cuba suffers a third major setback in restoring power to the island. Millions in Havana were still in the dark Sunday with people lined up for hours to buy bread from the few bakeries that remained open.
Most of Havana remained in the dark Sunday as the hurricane bore down on the island’s coast
Many Cubans waited in anguish late Sunday as electricity on much of the island had yet to be restored days after an islandwide blackout. Their concerns were raised as Hurricane Oscar first made landfall in the southeastern Bahamas and then slammed into Cuba’s coast.
Energy Minister Vicente de la O Levy said in a news conference he hopes the country’s electricity grid will be restored on Monday or Tuesday morning.
But he recognized that Oscar, which hit the island’s eastern coast Sunday evening, will bring “an additional inconvenience” to Cuba’s recovery since it will touch a “region of strong [electricity] generation.” Key Cuban power plants, such as Felton in the city of Holguin, and Rente in Santiago de Cuba, are located in the area.
Some neighbourhoods had electricity restored in Cuba’s capital, where two million people live, but most of Havana remained dark. The impact of the blackout goes beyond lighting, as services like water supply also depend on electricity to run pumps.
People resorted to cooking with improvised wood stoves on the streets before the food went bad in refrigerators.
In tears, Ylenis de la Caridad Napoles, mother of a 7-year-old girl, says she is reaching a point of “desperation.”
The failure of the Antonio Guiteras plant on Friday, which caused the collapse of the island’s whole system, was just the latest in a series of problems with energy distribution in a country where electricity has been restricted and rotated to different regions at different times of the day.
People lined up for hours on Sunday morning to buy bread in the few bakeries that could reopen.
Some Cubans like Rosa Rodriguez have been without electricity for four days.
“We have millions of problems, and none of them are solved,” Ms. Rodriguez said. “We must come to get bread, because the local bakery is closed, and they bring it from somewhere else.”
About half of Cuba was plunged into darkness on Thursday evening, followed by the entire island on Friday morning after one of the plants failed.
Besides the Antonio Guiteras plant, whose failure on Friday affected the entire national system, Cuba has several others, and it wasn’t immediately clear whether they remained functional.
The blackout was considered to be Cuba’s worst in two years after Hurricane Ian made landfall as a Category 3 storm in 2022 and damaged power installations. It took days for the government to fix them. This year, some homes have spent up to eight hours a day without electricity.
Cuba’s government had said on Saturday that some electricity had been restored after one of the country’s major power plants failed. But the 500 megawatts of energy in the island’s electricity grid, far short of the usual three gigawatts it needs, had quickly decreased to 370 megawatts.
Even in a country that is used to outages as part of a deepening economic crisis, Friday’s collapse was massive.
The Cuban government has announced emergency measures to slash electricity demand, including suspending school and university classes, shutting down some state-owned workplaces and cancelling non-essential services.
Local authorities said the outage stemmed from increased demand from small- and mediumsized companies and residential air conditioners. Later, the blackout got worse because of breakdowns in old thermoelectric plants that haven’t been properly maintained, and the lack of fuel to operate some facilities.
Cuba’s Energy Minister said the country’s grid would be in better shape if there had not been two more partial blackouts as authorities tried to reconnect on Saturday. Mr. De la O Levy also said Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela and Russia, among other nations, had offered to help.
The U.S. National Hurricane Center said Hurricane Oscar made landfall on Cuba’s eastern coast after striking the southeastern Bahamas earlier in the day.
The hurricane centre in Miami said the storm’s centre arrived in the Cuban province of Guantanamo on Sunday evening with maximum sustained winds near 130 kilometres an hour.
The system is expected to move across eastern Cuba Sunday night and Monday. Forecasters said six to 12 inches (15.2 to 30.5 centimetres) of rain are expected across eastern Cuba through early Wednesday, with some isolated locations getting up to 18 inches (45.72 centimetres). A storm surge of up to three feet (0.91 metres) in some areas of Cuba’s north shore in the area was possible, the centre said.
Oscar was expected to weaken over eastern Cuba before making a turn to the northeast and approaching the central Bahamas on Tuesday, the centre said.
The storm’s centre was located about 10 kilometres east-southeast of Baracoa, or about 80 kilometres east-northeast of Guantanamo. It was heading west-southwest at 11 kilometres an hour.
This article was written by Dave Sherwood and Marianna Parraga, and was published in the Globe & Mail on October 19, 2024.
Cuba plunged into a countrywide blackout on Friday after one of the island’s major power plants failed and caused the national electrical grid to shut down, its energy ministry said.
The Communist-run government had already closed schools and non-essential industry and sent most state workers home in a last-ditch effort to keep the lights on during severe power shortages.
But shortly before midday, the Antonio Guiteras power plant, the country’s largest and most efficient, went offline, prompting a total grid failure and leaving approximately 10 million people without power.
Officials did not say what had caused the plant to fail.
“There will be no rest until [power] is restored,” Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel said on X.
The blackout marks a new low point on an island where life has become increasingly unbearable, with residents already suffering from shortages of food, fuel, water and medicine.
The electricity shortages had already prompted officials to cancel all non-vital government services on Friday. Schools, including universities, were shuttered through Sunday. Recreational and cultural activities, including night clubs, were also ordered closed.
Officials said in midafternoon they had begun taking steps to restore power but that the process would take time.
Virtually all commerce in the capital Havana ground to a halt on Friday. Many residents sat sweating on doorsteps. Tourists hunkered down in frustration.
“We went to a restaurant and they had no food because there was no power, now we are also without internet,” said Brazilian tourist Carlos Roberto Julio, who had recently arrived in Havana. “In two days, we have already had several problems.”
Prime Minister Manuel Marrero late on Thursday blamed worsening blackouts during the past several weeks on a perfect storm well-known to most Cubans – deteriorating infrastructure, fuel shortages and rising demand.
“The fuel shortage is the biggest factor,” Mr. Marrero said in a televised message to the nation.
Strong winds that began with Hurricane Milton last week has crippled the island’s ability to deliver scarce fuel from boats offshore to its power plants, officials said.
Cuba’s government also blames the U.S. trade embargo, as well as new sanctions under former president Donald Trump, for difficulties in acquiring fuel and spare parts to operate its oil fired plants.
“The complex scenario is caused primarily by the intensification of the economic war and financial and energy persecution of the United States,” Mr. Díaz Canel said on X on Thursday.
“The United States is not to blame for today’s blackout on the island, or the overall energy situation in Cuba,” a spokesperson for the White House National Security Council said.
While demand for electricity has grown alongside Cuba’s private sector, fuel supply has evaporated.
Cuba’s largest oil supplier, Venezuela, has reduced shipments to the island to an average of 32,600 barrels a day in the first nine months of the year, about half of the 60,000 b/d sent in the same period of 2023, according to vessel-monitoring data and internal shipping documents from Venezuela’s state company PDVSA.
PDVSA, whose refining infrastructure is also ailing, has this year tried to avoid a new wave of fuel scarcity at home, leaving smaller volumes available for export to allied countries like Cuba.
Russia and Mexico, which in the past have sent fuel to Cuba, have also greatly reduced shipments to the island.
The shortfalls have left Cuba to fend for itself on the far costlier spot market at a time when its government is near-bankrupt.
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