Cuba begins restoring power after Hurricane Rafael leaves island in blackout

# Cuba begins restoring power after Hurricane Rafael leaves island in blackout

*Event date: 2024-11-07*

Cuba has begun restoring electricity after Hurricane Rafael knocked out the country’s power grid, leaving the entire island in darkness and deepening the strain on a fragile infrastructure system.

Al Jazeera reported that around 10 million people were left without power when the storm tore through the country with winds reaching 185 kilometers per hour. The Energy and Mines Ministry said it was slowly restoring electricity in parts of eastern and central Cuba, though the western half of the island remained harder to repair after the hurricane’s passage.

The blackout came on the heels of another major outage only weeks earlier, adding to a sense of exhaustion among residents who had already lived through a similar collapse in services. Al Jazeera said the country had experienced a comparable islandwide blackout less than two weeks before Rafael arrived, followed by Hurricane Oscar, which caused major destruction and killed six people in eastern Cuba. That sequence made Rafael feel less like an isolated emergency and more like the latest blow in a worsening pattern.

The storm crossed the island about 60 kilometers west of Havana, affecting Cuba’s tobacco-growing provinces of Artemisa and Pinar del Rio. It damaged homes, uprooted trees and toppled telephone poles, while the capital itself remained without power late into Thursday. The outage closed businesses and schools and disrupted transport services, even as authorities worked to restart basic functions.

The hurricane also exposed how vulnerable Cuba remains to severe weather because of old and poorly maintained housing and public infrastructure. Al Jazeera reported that forecasters had warned of life-threatening storm surge, strong winds and flash flooding. Once Rafael entered the Gulf of Mexico, it lost intensity, but the damage inside Cuba had already been done.

Residents described the consequences in immediate, practical terms. One Havana resident told Al Jazeera he feared food in his refrigerator would spoil without electricity. Another said a building in the historic center had partially collapsed and left him homeless. Those accounts show how the storm compounds an already difficult economic situation, where power, food and housing all remain unstable.

The government said it had mobilized the military to help respond. But the broader story is that Cuba’s repeated blackouts are no longer only power failures; they are national emergencies that interrupt food storage, transport, communications and the ability of people to work and recover after disasters.

Rafael was the 17th named storm of the 2024 season and one of the few November hurricanes strong enough to bring widespread damage. For Cuba, the immediate task was restoration. The longer-term problem remains how to keep the electrical grid functioning through a storm season that is increasingly able to push the entire system to its limit.