Cuba recovers from blackout that left 5 million in the dark

Posted on Monday, 09.10.12

Cuba recovers from blackout that left 5 million in the dark
By Juan O. Tamayo
jtamayo@ElNuevoHerald.com

Electricity was still being restored Monday to an estimated five million
people in Havana and the western half of Cuba after a massive blackout
that underlined the precarious state of the island's power grid and
reportedly sparked rumors of a government collapse.

Cuban authorities gave no detailed explanation for the blackout, issuing
only a 66-word communiqué reporting that there had been an
"interruption" in a high-voltage line near Ciego de Avila, 250 miles
west of Havana.

The outage that hit shortly after 8 p.m. Sunday blacked out about five
million people in Havana and from Villa Clara to Pinar del Rio
provinces. Most of the area had power back after about five hours,
although some parts of Havana were not restored until 9 a.m. Monday.

Brief blackouts also were reported at different times in the eastern
provinces of Santiago de Cuba and Camaguey, and it was not clear if they
were linked to the outage in western Cuba.

Island residents have been reporting a growing string of blackouts this
summer as the power generation and distribution network continues to
erode from decades of mismanagement and lack of investment.

The Canada-based Sherritt International Corp., Cuba's largest private
foreign investor, noted in its annual report this February that its
share of the island's electricity generation would drop by 11 percent
this year.

Cuba's government-controlled media has repeatedly reported on the
growing theft of cables and girders from transmission towers. And the
state power monopoly, the Electric Union, reported in July that
"electrical fraud" tripled from 8,359 in 2005 to 27,470 last year.

Blogger Yoani Sanchez wrote in her Generacion Y web page on Monday that
the latest blackout, clearly one of the largest to hit Cuba in years,
and the lack of timely official information on its extent or causes had
provoked a string of fears and rumors.

"More than half the worried people who phoned me during the darkness
linked what happened to a problem in the government," Sanchez wrote.
"Phrases like 'this has collapsed,' were repeated everywhere. This shows
the political and social fragility of a nation where a blackout … can
lead its citizens to believe the entire system collapsed. Significant, no?"

Dissident journalist Roberto de Jesús Guerra said a State Security agent
who monitors his activities telephoned him Sunday night to warn that he
"would be held responsible for whatever happened" as a result of his
Tweeter reports on the blackout.

Guerra, a member of the Hablemos Press news agency, told El Nuevo Herald
Monday that he had also received a summons to appear the same day in a
State Security office near his Havana home.

Government-run television and radio stations continued with their normal
programming during the blackout, and broadcast the first official word
on the outage at around might Sunday.

Massive blackouts hit Cuba repeatedly in the first half of the 1990s,
after the collapse of Soviet subsidies cut the supplies of fuel and
spare parts for the island's generating plants. Cheap oil sent by
leftist Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has largely covered the
shortages since then.

Cuba has 17 generating plants with a maximum capacity of 3,267
megawatts, although both the plants and the distribution networks break
down often because of the aged machinery and other equipment.

http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/09/10/2995188/cuba-recovers-from-blackout-that.html