Late Sunday Cuba’s eastern province of Guantanamo was hit by a Category 1 hurricane. Hours later it was downgraded to a tropical storm (Oscar) as it moved through the island’s northeastern coast. This storm through Wednesday is expected to bring between 6 and 12 inches of rain (and 18 inches in some isolated areas in that area) and life-threatening flash flooding and mudslides.
Other parts of the island were not directly affected by this storm. For example, some neighborhoods in Havana had electricity restored, but most of the city remained dark. The impact of the blackout goes beyond lighting as services like water supply depend on electricity to run pumps.
Manuel Cuesta Morúa, a Cuban political activist, said Cubans are living with increased hardship. Even preserving food is hard due to a lack of refrigeration, he said. With no electricity, Cubans can’t use air conditioning, fans or electrical stoves on the tropical island. “This is terrible, and the government has no solutions, as the lights went off at his home in Havana. “People are very upset.”
Jorge Piñón, a Cuba and energy expert at the University of Texas at Austin, offered the following observation, “The government just doesn’t have the cash to buy crude oil, diesel or even cooking gas. It doesn’t even have enough money to pay for fuel shipments, and that’s sparking what we are seeing today. It’s an immense cash crunch.”
A Wall Street Journal editorial said, “The country has been enduring weeks of periodic blackouts that can last for 10 to 20 hours at a time, as the Communist government struggles to provide even basic services. The regime blames deteriorating equipment, fuel shortages and rising electricity demand. It also blames the U.S. trade embargo, as it always does for every ill on the island.” The editorial continued:
- “But nothing stops Cuba from importing the parts it needs from the rest of the world. The real problem is a regime that can’t make much of anything work except exporting its people. Russia and Venezuela have reduced fuel sales to the island, which can’t pay its bills. Shortages of food and medicine are rampant.”
- “Cuba’s dictatorship is a human tragedy and its people deserve much better. But they won’t get it as long as Communists run the place and enrich themselves at the expense of the people they impoverish.
On Sunday Cuba’s President Miguel Díaz-Canel described what Cuba is experiencing with the collapse of the national electrical energy system (SEN) as an “exceptional situation“ that he attributed to the alleged economic war and financial persecution of the United States against the regime, while he threatened to respond with repression to citizen protests over the desperate lack of electricity.” He added the following:
- “”We have not had stable fuel suppliesso that the system can operate at its full capacity and with all its stability.”
- “The entire professional and operational potential of the electrical energy system is at work here. We have had the opportunity to work with other colleagues in the national office and we must see the level of knowledge and precision with which the colleagues in the national load dispatch work in communication with the provinces.”
- “Work is currently underway in two key areas: stabilizing the system and managing to obtain fuel suppliesthat will allow us to work in a better situation over the coming weeks.”
- “Efforts are being made to obtain spare parts to gradually recover distributed generation, which has been severely affected.”
- “We will not allow acts of vandalism and much less disturb the peace of our people. That is a conviction and a principle of our revolution.”
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Tropical Storm Oscar Unleashes Heavy rain on Cuba After Landfall, N.Y. Times (Oct. 19 & 21, 2024); Cubans struggle with an extended power outage and a new tropical storm, Wash. Post (Oct. 21, 2024) Perez, Cuba Suffers Mass Blackout as Energy Crisis Deepens, W.S.J. (Oct. 18, 2024);Editorial: Cuba Can’t Keep the Lights On, W.S. J. (Oct. 20, 2024); Oscar weakens as it passes through Cuba and becomes a tropical storm, Diario de Cuba (Oct. 21, 2024); Diaz-Canel threatens to respond to protests with repression: for ‘principle of the revolution,’ Diario de Cuba (oct. 21, 2024);
Comment: Update on Cuban Electricity Crisis
By October 21, electric power had been restored to most of Havana, but outside the capital, most of the island’s population were still withut power.
Preliminary damage from Oscar in eastern Cuba: collapsed houses, destroyed crops and isolated areas.
So far in 2024, Cubans have imported more thatn $200,000 worth of elctrical generators from the U.S. while imports of air conditioners and their spare parts from the U.S. exceeded $1 million.
On Monday (October 21) 15 independnet Cuban civil society organizations denounced the State’s responsibility for the widespread total collapse of essential services for human subsistence, which began afer weeks of deficit of energy generation on the island. These organizaions summarized it as follows:
• “The lack of electricity makes it impossible to refrigerate medicines and food that require it, as well as to cook the latter. In a scenario of total disconnection in the country and without having created the necessary conditions, the population has been prevented from both cooking and accessing prepared food, since bakeries, cafeterias and other centers are closed. Without electricity, the national aqueduct system also fails to connect the water distribution in the residential sector, previously subject to a regime of two or three days without supply.”
Another summary of testimonies about the problems on the island created by the electrical shortages stated the following:
• “These conditions, combined with the government’s surveillance, control and criminalization of any independent initiative that could articulate and assist the most disadvantaged, make the survival conditions that Cubans have been facing in recent years impossible.”
• They denounce” the political responsibilities of the Cuban State in the generation of this crisis, especially aggravated after the implementation of the Ordering Task, and the lack of a plan that provides an effective and sustainable solution to this widespread crisis” and demand “information on the differentiated impacts of this crisis”, as well as “a plan of measures” in the short and medium term for compensation and assistance to the most affected populations.”
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Torres, Hurricane Oscar left six people dead in Cuba while the country struggles withj power outage, Miami Herald (Oct. 21, 2024),
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/cuba/article294306329.html ;
Preliminary damage from Oscar in eastern Cuba: collapsed houses, destroyed crops and isolated areas, Diario de Cuba (Oct. 21, 2024), https://diariodecuba.com/cuba/1729536969_57906.html;
Blackouts, another lucrative business for US exports to Cuba, Diario de Cuba (Oct. 21, 2024),
https://diariodecuba.com/economia/1729543203_57905.html..