Cubans struggle as electricity not fully restored to island after days of blackout

HAVANA – Many Cubans were waiting anxiously for Sunday as electricity across much of the island has not yet been fully restored after days of blackouts.

Electricity was restored to some areas of the Cuban capital, where 2 million people live, but most of Havana remained in darkness. 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 outage at the Antonio Guiteras power plant on Friday, which caused the island’s entire system to collapse, is just the latest in a series of power distribution problems in a country where electricity was restricted and distributed to different regions at different times of the year. day.

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.

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.

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.

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