Millions of Cubans lose power before hurricane’s arrival

Six people died in connection to the Hurricane Oscar, the president of Cuba said Monday. The storm arrived as the country was already struggling with infrastructure issues. The Cuban power grid on Sunday afternoon collapsed for the fourth time in three days, leaving most of its nearly 10 million people without power as a hurricane arrived. The cascading failures began Friday morning when the country’s largest power plant went offline. Officials tried multiple times over the weekend to restore power as Hurricane Oscar approached the island but were only able to restart electricity in some areas for a limited time. Meanwhile, Oscar made landfall in southern Cuba Sunday evening as a Category 1 hurricane and brought heavy rain and flooding. The storm weakened to a tropical storm on Sunday night and was forecast to continue dumping rain on the island into this week, according to the National Hurricane Center.

How have Cuban people responded to the blackout? Some residents protested the outages Sunday after days outages for some communities. Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel on Sunday said the demonstrators were causing public disorder and warned that the government would not let anyone disturb the peace. Meanwhile, Energy Minister Vicente de la O Levy said he hoped to restore power to the grid by Monday or Tuesday morning.

What contributed to the outage? Cuban Prime Minister Manuel Marrero Cruz said deteriorating infrastructure and fuel shortages worsened by Hurricane Milton strained the electrical system, which had been already struggling. The island had rolling blackouts for months since Venezuela, Russia, and Mexico stopped fuel shipments.

Dig deeper: Read Grace Snell’s report in World Magazine about the World Food Program sending aid to Cuba amid its economic crisis.