The Cuban government estimated Sunday that electricity will be restored in the country on Monday evening for the vast majority of the population, at a time when Cuba prepares for the imminent arrival of Hurricane Oscar, which is expected to hit the island during the day . east of the island.
“We can talk about the fact that between tomorrow, Monday morning, afternoon or evening” the service will be restored for the majority of Cubans, indicated the Minister of Energy and Mines, Vicente de la O Levy. The Cuban presidency had previously announced a restoration of 500 megawatts. “The system will continue to increase its load over the next few hours,” he said.
For comparison, the country had consumed 3,300 megawatts on Thursday, the day before the total electricity blackout linked to the closure of the island’s main thermal power plant, located in Matanzas (west).
An island in “energy emergency”
Not far away, Hurricane Oscar crosses the Caribbean in a west-southwest direction at a speed of approximately 19 km/h, with winds of up to 130 km/h. At 12:00 GMT (2:00 pm Paris), it was about 185 km from Guantanamo Bay, according to the latest report from the American National Hurricane Center (NHC). A hurricane warning remains in effect for the southeast of the Bahamas and the northern coast of the Cuban provinces of Holguin and Guantánamo.
Oscar will hit Cuba in the midst of an energy crisis, after the island spent a second night without electricity due to a fault Friday at its main thermoelectric power plant, which caused the grid to shut down completely.
The authorities in the east of the island “are already working hard to protect the population and economic resources, given the imminence of Hurricane Oscar”, assured President Miguel Díaz-Canel in a message published Saturday evening on X.
On Thursday, the Cuban president announced that the island is in a situation of “energy emergency” faced with difficulties in purchasing the fuel needed to power its power plants, due to the strengthening of the embargo that Washington imposes on island since 1962.
Neighborhoods in the dark
On Saturday evening, most neighborhoods in Havana were in darkness, with the exception of hotels and hospitals equipped with emergency generators and the few private homes that have this type of equipment.
For three months, Cubans have been suffering from increasingly frequent power outages, resulting in a national energy deficit of 30%. By Thursday this deficit had reached 50%. In recent weeks, in several provinces, outages have lasted more than twenty hours a day.
In Cuba, electricity is produced by eight dilapidated thermoelectric power plants, sometimes broken or under maintenance, as well as several floating power plants leased to Turkish companies, and generators.
Power outages were one of the triggers for the historic demonstrations of July 11, 2021. In September 2022, the island had already experienced a widespread “blackout” following the passage of Hurricane Ian which hit the island west of ‘island. Fully restoring electricity took several days in the capital and several weeks across the island.
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