Many Cubans were waiting anxiously for Sunday as electricity has not yet been fully restored to much of the island. after days of blackout.
Power was restored to some areas of the Cuban capital, home to 2 million people, but most of Havana remained dark. The impact of the outage extends beyond lighting, as services like water supplies also rely on electricity to run pumps.
People resorted to cooking with improvised wood stoves on the streets before food deteriorated in refrigerators.
In tears, Ylenis de la Caridad Napoles, mother of a 7-year-old girl, said she was reaching a point of “despair”.
THE breakdown of the Antonio Guiteras factory Friday’s crisis, which caused the island’s entire system to collapse, is just the latest in a series of energy distribution problems in a country where electricity has been restricted and distributed between different regions at different times of the day.
Ramón Espinosa / AP
People queued for hours on Sunday morning to buy bread at the few bakeries that could reopen.
Some Cubans, like Rosa Rodríguez, have been without electricity for four days.
“We have millions of problems and none of them are solved,” Rodríguez said. “You have to come and get bread, because the local bakery is closed and they bring it from elsewhere. »
About half of Cuba was plunged into darkness Thursday evening, followed by the entire island Friday morning after one of the power plants failed.
In addition to the Antonio Guiteras plant, whose breakdown on Friday affected the entire national system, Cuba has several others, of which it is not yet clear whether they remain functional.
The power outage was considered Cuba’s worst in two years after Hurricane Ian made landfall as a Category 3 storm in 2022 and damaged electrical installations. It took the government days to fix them. This year, some households have spent up to eight hours a day without electricity.
The Cuban government said Saturday that some electricity had been restored after one of the country’s main power plants failed. But the island’s 500 megawatts of power, a far cry from the usual 3 gigawatts it needs, has quickly dwindled to 370 megawatts.
There is no official estimate of when the outage will end. Even in a country accustomed to outages amid a deepening economic crisis, Friday’s collapse was massive.
The Cuban government announced emergency measures to reduce electricity demand, including suspending classes at schools and universities, closing some state-owned workplaces and cutting non-essential services.
Local authorities said the outage was due to increased demand from small and medium-sized businesses and residential air conditioners. Later, the blackout worsened due to breakdowns in old, poorly maintained thermoelectric plants and lack of fuel to operate some facilities.