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);