By AFP -Agence France Presse
Cuba still without electricity after Hurricane Rafael
On Thursday, Cubans were assessing the damage caused by Hurricane Rafael, which hit the island and plunged it into darkness but has not caused any deaths so far.
Rafael hit western Cuba on Wednesday as a major category-three hurricane and swept across the island in two and a half hours before losing intensity as it entered the Gulf of Mexico.
This came just two weeks after Hurricane Oscar, which left eight dead in the east of the island during a national electricity blackout that lasted four days.
President Miguel Diaz-Canel said that the provinces of Artemisa, Havana, and Mayabeque were the hardest hit.
Writing on the social platform X, he said that the authorities were working to restore power in the center and east of the island and that they were assessing the damage to infrastructure in the west “to begin the recovery (of power) there as well.”
In Havana, residents used brooms, shovels, and buckets to clear branches, garbage, mud, and pieces of cement from the streets.
The highway linking the capital to western Artemisa was littered with fallen electricity poles, and the streets of the towns along the route were littered with branches, roof tiles, and chunks of concrete from damaged houses.
In the town of Candelaria, about 40 km from where Rafael hit the coast, 49-year-old housewife Lidia was desperate.
“Now the hurricane is leaving, and we'll have another blackout, which means we won't have any water,” she said outside her house. “What are we going to cook? What water are we going to drink?”
Cuba has been suffering hours-long power cuts for months - a symbol of the island's worst economic crisis since the fall of the Soviet Union, an important ally and financial supporter, in the early 1990s.
Last week, the UN General Assembly renewed its long-standing call for the US to lift its six-decade trade embargo on the communist island.
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