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.
I get WHAT China is doing, and WHY, I am saying they are less interested in intervening than the USSR was, which is plainly true. Involvement in Singapore has nothing to do with that. China becoming a more dominant global power does not assuage worries over the conditions and fates of communist countries presently. Particularly when those inroads include profiting from the exploitation of communist movements like in the Philippines. That is not a substitute for the Soviet's relationship with Cuba, and mentioning the existence of Belt and Road doesn't change that
it is great that China is providing an alternative to the US for other countries, and they are a godsend for Cuba post Eastern Bloc collapse, but I think we need to recognize that China is way less interested in going to the mat for Cuba. I know why the USSR could support Vietnam and Cuba so much even at the height of the Cold War, and why China is not going that route, but let's not pretend they are just as good for Cuba or just as interested in supporting it as the USSR or even GDR had been.
In a span of 4 years 1976-1980 the USSR spent around 6 billion dollars in aid on building up and modernizing Cuban industry alone. The huge debt forgiveness of 10 billion from China recently is amazing and celebratory, but those kinds of direct investments and aid are not happening anymore and as long as the embargo remains, they are necessary.
I don't think China has betrayed them, but it is fair to say the USSR's relationship was far better and more beneficial.
The USSR was resupplying Cuba in the same way the US resupplied Berlin during the airlift. This, as military operations throughout Latin America intensified.
China doesn't enjoy the same network of allies.
I think China is building the kind of global economic foundation that the USSR failed to establish. And, as a result, Chinese international presence will be better for Cuba than the USSR's military-focused posturing.
The USSR saw Cuba as a counterweight to American regional hegemony. China is including Cuba into a more durable global mutual aid network.
That soviet aid number I gave was ASIDE from the military aid. In that same time frame the military aid was around 2.5 billion. Calling soviet aid more military focused is ahistorical anti-materialism. That relationship as a "counterweight" sure got more homes built. Defend China's relations with Cuba all you want, that's fine, but don't misconstrue the material aid th4e USSR provided with random blanket claims. "will be better" does not make it better as it stands in the present conditions people live in. That soviet aid helped then and there when it mattered most and made it so Cuba had a chance to survive its fall.
I hope china achieves all that, but I am talking about the actual conditions. Saying China will do x and y as a rebuttal to saying the Soviets had been more involved is goofy. You can prefer China's ,method, but that does not change the material fact that the USSR aided more directly and beneficially. A hypothetical is not material, doesn't make it bad, but it is not a substitute for the benefits of that other relationship. Those homes exist, those factories exist, that matters and currently while Cuba's grid fails, those matter more than promises of future improvements
Good info on the Cuban economy's growth during that time if you want to look at it materially and not based on a generalization and reductive take. https://archive.org/details/CastroMainReportSecondCongressPCC/page/n5/mode/2up