Cuba’s national power grid has suffered a country-wide blackout as Hurricane Rafael made landfall on the island’s south-west coast as a powerful category 3 hurricane. In a brief statement on Wednesday, the country’s national power company, Union Eléctrica, said: “Strong winds caused by the powerful Hurricane Rafael have caused the disconnection of the national electrical system. Contingency protocols have been applied.” The energy and mines ministry had earlier said that a “controlled disconnection of power circuits” would be carried out to avoid accidents and power cuts. The power cut came shortly before the US National Hurricane Center said the storm made landfall in Cuba’s western province of Artemisa, bringing with it a “life-threatening storm surge, damaging hurricane-force winds, and flash flooding”. Wednesday’s power cut and storm came three weeks after the island was lashed by Hurricane Oscar amid a four-day nationwide blackout caused by the failure of the island’s biggest power plant and a fuel shortage. Sporadic outages have continued since then. The outage prompted expressions of fury in online forums, with many pointing out that Cuba’s power grid had survived bigger hurricanes in the past, such as the 2017 category 5 storm Irma. Others complained that power had already been out in much of the country for much of the past week. “This [announcement] is obviously for Havana, because the rest of the provinces haven’t had power for days anyway,” commented one. Nine provinces in west and central Cuba, including the capital, Havana, have been placed on cyclone alert. More than 70,000 people have been evacuated from their homes, mostly in Guantánamo in the east, where eight people were killed by Hurricane Oscar last month. Follow the link for full story...