Article text:
spoiler
PINAR DEL RIO, Cuba, Sept 27 (Reuters) - Cuba's electrical grid collapsed late on Tuesday, local officials said, leaving the entire country in the dark shortly after Hurricane Ian plowed through the western end of the island leaving a path of destruction in its wake.
The sprawling Category 3 hurricane was barreling north towards the Dry Tortugas, off the Florida Keys, late on Tuesday, with maximum sustained winds of 120 miles per hour (195 km per hour), the U.S. National Hurricane Center (NHC) said.
Cuba's electrical grid - decades-old and in desperate need of modernization, has been faltering for months with blackouts an everyday event across much of the island.
But officials said the storm had proven to be too much for the system, provoking a failure that shut off the lights for the island's 11.3 million people.
"The system was already operating under complex conditions with the passage of Hurricane Ian," said Lazaro Guerra, technical director of Cuba's Electricity Union. "There is no electricity service in any part of the country right now."
He said the union would work through the night and into Wednesday to restore power as soon as possible.
The countrywide blackout added insult to injury for exhausted Cubans.
Mayelin Suarez, a street vendor who sells ice cream in the provincial capital, called the night of the storm's passage the "the darkest of her life."
"We almost lost the roof off our house," Suarez told Reuters, her voice trembling. "My daughter, my husband and I tied it down with a rope to keep it from flying away."
The hurricane hit Cuba at a time of dire economic crisis. Blackouts and long-running shortages of food, medicine and fuel are likely to complicate efforts to recover from Ian.
"Ian has done away with what little we had left," said Omar Avila, a worker at butcher shop in Pinar del Rio. "It's a horrible disaster."
Ian made landfall in Cuba's Pinar del Rio Province early on Tuesday, prompting officials early on to cut power to the entire province of 850,000 people as a precautionary measure and evacuate 40,000 people from low-lying coastal areas, according to local media reports. The storm left at least two dead in western Cuba, state-run media reported.
Violent wind gusts shattered windows and ripped metal roofs off homes and buildings throughout the region, where many houses are decades old and infrastructure is antiquated. Roads into the areas directly hit by the hurricane remained impassable, blocked by downed trees and powerlines.
Havana appeared to have escaped the brunt of the storm although rain and strong winds uprooted trees, flooded low-lying areas and left many of the city's roadways impassable.
By 8 p.m. local time, it appeared that virtually all of the city was without power, with only some of the larger tourist hotels still lit by generators.
Further north, in Florida, residents and officials were hunkering down in anticipation of what the NHC called a "large and destructive hurricane."
Ian is expected to bring winds of up to 130 mph (209 kph) and as much as 2 feet (0.6 meter) of rain to the Tampa area on Florida's Gulf Coast starting early on Wednesday through Thursday evening, the National Weather Service said.
A hurricane warning has been extended to portions of far southwestern Florida as the storm's path veered slightly from previous predictions.
The storm surge along Florida's Gulf Coast could cause devastating to catastrophic damage with some locations potentially uninhabitable for weeks or months, the service warned, urging residents to move to safe shelter before the storm's arrival.
A little rant, and I admit I'm not being totally rational or fair here:
Seriously, what has China been doing for Cuba, a fellow communist country - a comrade in arms? Maybe they've been giving them tons of support and I'm off base here... but I don't think I am. The Cuban people have put up with a lot and I have faith they'll carry on the revolution but jfc... at some point when you don't have reliable electricity... I don't know if I could blame Cubans for capitulating to the US. The blockade is just so cruel and brutal, and I have no doubt it will never, ever be lifted until the US collapses.
I love you China, but seriously, how many new power plants are they bringing online every year? You're telling me a communist country of 1.4 billion that's killing it in every way couldn't modernize the Cuban grid for them? Even if it's not gratis, just do it on some very favorable terms. I swear sometimes it feels like China will bend over backwards for western nations or engage in big programs with other parts of the global south, while Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam et al get not much more than a "hang in there comrades" from China. Khrushchev kinda sucks but the man understood international solidarity.
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OK good. I was really hoping I was kinda wrong and someone would say "no here's where China's actually helping them".
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and also because the US will bomb you if you try
Getting supplies from the Eastern Pacific and up into the belly of American naval power without being subject to some bullshit sanction or seizure of assets is incredibly hard.
Asking why China isn't doing more to help Cuba is a bit like asking why Americans aren't doing more to help liberate the brave Xinjiang Rebels of Northwestern China.
You can make a bunch of diplomatic noise (and China absolutely does), but without free access though Panama or the Mid-Atlantic, there just isn't a lot of material aid you can provide.
Chinese Foreign Policy sucks ass
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I'm more than happy to be told I'm off base on this, glad to see I'm wrong.