Cuba slowly restores power after hurricane, Havana still dark

ARTEMISA, Cuba — Cuban authorities said they had begun restoring power to the eastern half of the island on Thursday, a day after Hurricane Rafael knocked out the country’s electrical grid, leaving 10 million people in the dark.

The grid collapsed on Wednesday as Rafael tore across Cuba with top winds of more than 115 mph (185 kph), damaging homes, uprooting trees and toppling telephone poles.

The hurricane had spun off westward into the Gulf of Mexico where it no longer posed an immediate threat to land, the Miami-based U.S. National Hurricane Center said.

Rafael was the latest blow to the Communist-run country’s already precarious electrical grid, which just two weeks ago collapsed multiple times, leaving many in the country without power for days and sparking scattered protests across the island.

The Energy and Mines Ministry said on Thursday afternoon it was making progress restoring power to pockets of central and eastern Cuba, but warned the process would be slower in western parts of the island, which were hardest hit by the storm.

Havana, the capital city of two million, was still without power late in the day on Thursday, and authorities had not said when it would be restored.

The country’s decrepit oil-fired generation plants have struggled to keep the lights on for decades, but this year the system collapsed into crisis as oil imports dropped off from allied countries Venezuela, Russia and Mexico.

Rafael was the second hurricane to hit the island in less than a month after Oscar ravaged eastern Cuba in October, a one-two punch that was sapping more resources in a country already suffering shortages of food, fuel and medicine.

Rolling blackouts lasting hours had become the norm across much of Cuba even before the two storms struck.