HAVANA (Reuters) – Cuba said on Wednesday it would keep schools closed through Sunday and non-essential workers at home, as the crisis-ridden Caribbean island struggled to recover from last Friday’s power grid collapse and hurricane Oscar this week.
Guantanamo Province in the island’s far east was particularly hard hit by Oscar, which made landfall as a Category 1 hurricane and dumped more than 18 inches of rain in some areas. The cyclone was downgraded to a tropical storm before moving north towards the Bahamas earlier this week.
The storm, combined with a near-unprecedented collapse of the power grid on Friday, created a nightmare scenario in a country already facing dramatic shortages of food, fuel and medicine.
The crisis led to scattered protests in Havana and elsewhere in the country.
Officials said late Tuesday that seven people had died as a result of the storm. Cuba’s armed forces had rescued nearly 500 people from remote areas isolated by floods or landslides, while more than 4,000 residents remained in bomb shelters.
Flash floods destroyed homes, roads, farmlands and already dilapidated infrastructure in the major coffee-producing region. Wind and rain had damaged at least 2,280 homes, state media reported.
Communications in rural areas were still patchy, and most of the Eastern Province remained without power as emergency workers cleared the tangle of downed power lines.
The United Nations said on Wednesday it would support Cuba in post-Oscar recovery efforts.
The storm had also complicated the recovery of Cuba’s already precarious power grid. Cuba stabilized its electricity supply on Tuesday, but warned that outages would continue as before the grid collapse.
Cuba’s aging power plants, struggling to keep the lights on, reached full crisis this year as oil imports from Venezuela, Russia and Mexico declined, culminating in the collapse of the power grid last Friday.
A generation shortfall of about a third of total demand was expected on Wednesday, the national electricity company said, leaving many Cubans still in the dark.
