People walk along the boardwalk as waves crash during a power outage in Havana, Monday, Oct. 21, 2024.
| Photo Credit: AP

Cuba’s capital remained largely paralyzed on Monday (October 21, 2024) and the rest of the island braced for the fourth night of a massive blackout that has generated a handful of small protests and a stern government warning that any unrest will be punished.

Hurricane Oscar made landfall Sunday before crossing the island’s eastern coast as a tropical storm Monday (October 21) with winds and heavy rain, leaving at least 6 dead after a night that saw protests by several dozen people in urban neighborhoods like Santos Suárez and central Havana.

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Some banged pots and pans in the streets, while others demonstrated from their balconies. Protesters who said they have no water blocked at least one street with garbage.

“The country has completely halted,” said homemaker Mayde Quiñones, 55. She cares for her mother-in-law, who is in her 80s. “This hurts everyone, but the elderly most of all.”

The Cuban government has a low tolerance for civil disobedience. President Miguel Díaz-Canel warned on national television Sunday (October 20) that “we’re not going to allow any vandalism, or let anyone disturb people’s tranquility.”

The prolonged nationwide blackout followed a massive outage Thursday night, part of energy problems that led to the largest protests in Cuba in almost 30 years, in July 2021. Those were followed by smaller local protests in October 2022 and March 2024.

It’s all part of a deep economic crisis that has prompted the exodus of more than half a million Cubans to the U.S., with thousands more heading to Europe.

The Cuban government and its allies blame the United States’ 62-year-old trade embargo on the island for its economic problems but White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Monday (October 21) that the Cuban government’s “long-term mismanagement of its economic policy and resources has certainly increased the hardship of people in Cuba.”

Power remains relatively cheap but increasingly unavailable. The Cuban government has said that it’s producing 700 megawatts when peak demand can hit 3 gigawatts. Authorities said by Monday afternoon that about 80 percent of Havana had intermittent power but people were skeptical.

“We have the fridge full of food and we’re scared,” said small-business owner Juan Estrada, 53, whose central Havana business hasn’t had consistent power since Friday morning.

Energy Minister Vicente de la O Levy said in a news conference he hoped that more reliable electricity will be restored by Monday or Tuesday morning but classes remained closed through at least Thursday.

He said that Oscar, which made landfall on the 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 Holguín, and Renté in Santiago de Cuba, are located in the area.

Oscar later weakened to a tropical storm but its effects were forecast to linger in the island through Monday.

Many of Havana’s 2 million people resorted to cooking with improvised wood stoves on the streets before their food went bad in refrigerators.

People were lining up Monday to buy subsidized food and few gas stations were open.

The failure of the Antonio Guiteras plant on Friday was the latest problem with energy distribution in a country where electricity has been restricted and rotated among different regions at different times. The status of Cuba’s other power plants was unclear.

People lined up for hours on Sunday to buy bread in the few bakeries that could reopen.

Some Cubans like Rosa Rodríguez had been without electricity for four days.

“We have millions of problems, and none of them are solved,” said Rodríguez. “We must come to get bread, because the local bakery is closed, and they bring it from somewhere else.”

The blackout was considered to be Cuba’s worst since Hurricane Ian hit the island as a Category 3 storm in 2022 and damaged power installations. It took days for the government to fix them.

The Cuban government announced emergency measures to slash electricity demand, including suspending school and university classes, shutting down some state-owned workplaces and canceling nonessential services.

Local authorities said the outage stemmed from increased demand from small- and medium-sized 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. De la O Levy also said Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, and Russia, among other nations, had offered to help.

A hurricane was bearing down on Cuba Sunday (October 20, 2024) as the island nation’s authorities scrambled to restore power following a massive nationwide outage.

The expected arrival of Hurricane Oscar, just days after the failure of Cuba’s largest power plant crippled the national grid, and piled more pressure on a country already battling sky-high inflation and shortages of food, medicine, fuel and water.

President Miguel Diaz-Canel said Saturday in a post on social media that authorities in the east of the island were “working hard to protect the people and economic resources, given the imminent arrival of Hurricane Oscar”.

“Packing winds of 140 km (85 miles) per hour, Oscar was forecast to reach eastern Cuba on Sunday, where heavy rains are expected,” according to the U.S. National Hurricane Center.

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The Cuban Presidency said in another social media post that progress had been made in restoring power, with 16% of consumers receiving electricity and around 500 megawatts being generated.

That was a fraction of the country’s 3,300-megawatt demand on Thursday, the day before the grid collapsed and the government declared an “energy emergency” following weeks of extended outages.

The power grid failed in a chain reaction Friday due to the unexpected shutdown of the Antonio Guiteras power plant, the biggest of the island’s eight decrepit coal-fired power plants, according to the head of electricity supply at the Energy Ministry, Lazaro Guerra.

National Electric Utility (UNE) said it had managed to generate a minimal amount of electricity to get power plants restarted on Friday night, but by Saturday morning it was experiencing what official news outlet Cubadebate called “a new, total disconnection of the electrical grid.”

Most neighborhoods in Havana remained dark on Saturday, except for hotels and hospitals with emergency generators and the very few private homes with that kind of backup in the economically challenged nation.

“God knows when the power will come back on,” said Rafael Carrillo, a 41-year-old mechanic, who had to walk almost five kilometers (three miles) due to the lack of public transportation amid the blackout.

Yaima Vallares, a 28-year-old dancer, told AFP that “everything is very difficult. For almost a day we have had this blackout that makes life so hard for us.”

“I am trying to remain calm because there is too much stress over everything in this country,” she said.

The blackout followed weeks of power outages, lasting up to 20 hours a day in some provinces.

Prime Minister Manuel Marrero on Thursday declared an “energy emergency,” suspending non-essential public services in order to prioritize electricity supply to homes.

Schools across the country are now closed until Monday.

“This is crazy,” Eloy Fon, an 80-year-old retiree living in central Havana, told AFP on Friday.

“It shows the fragility of our electricity system… We have no reserves, there is nothing to sustain the country, we are living day-to-day.”

Leaving Cuba

President Diaz-Canel blamed the situation on Cuba’s difficulties in acquiring fuel for its power plants, which he attributed to the tightening, during Donald Trump’s presidency, of a six-decade-long US trade embargo.

Cuba is in the throes of its worst economic crisis since the collapse of its key ally the Soviet Union in the early 1990s — marked by soaring inflation and shortages of basic goods.

With no relief in sight, many Cubans have emigrated.

More than 700,000 entered the United States between January 2022 and August 2024, according to US officials.

While the authorities chiefly blame the US embargo, the island is also feeling the aftershocks of the Covid-19 pandemic battering its critical tourism sector, and of economic mismanagement.

To bolster its grid, Cuba has leased seven floating power plants from Turkish companies and also added many small diesel-powered generators.

In July 2021, blackouts sparked an unprecedented outpouring of public anger.

Thousands of Cubans took to the streets shouting, “We are hungry” and “Freedom!” in a rare challenge to the government.

One person was killed and dozens were injured in the protests. According to the Mexico-based human rights organization Justicia 11J, 600 people detained during the unrest remain in prison.

In 2022, the island also suffered months of daily hours-long power outages, capped by a nationwide blackout caused by Hurricane Ian.