Canadian in Cuba urging others to stay home

A large swath of Cuba remained powerless Monday, plunged into days of darkness following four power grid collapses in 48 hours.

No electricity has forced people to cook on open campfires along the street and no working appliances has resulted in food going to ruin.

The outage has also forced schools and workplaces in the country to close.

“There are mountains of garbage and rats running around,” said Jonathon Renko, a Canadian currently visiting Cuba.

“The Cuban people are suffering, it’s so sad to see,  people are hungry, people are thirsty, the line-up that I’ve seen of people just trying to get bread are probably half a kilometer long,” he said.

Renko added the resorts have generators but many have stopped working and most restaurants have closed. He said it’s been difficult to find a bottle of water.

He and others are desperate to come home.

“I have a hundred people here in the resort wanting to leave, I have their names everything oh…there you go the power is out again,” he said in a zoom interview with Global News, as his hotel room suddenly went dark.  ” There goes the air conditioning for the night,” he sighed.

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Renko has family in Cuba and visits often but admits he has never seen anything like what the people are experiencing there now.

He said hotel staff are exhausted and despite services being scarce tourists are still arriving.

“These poor people have no idea what they are coming into and not only that, they can’t even check them in because there’s no electricity, they couldn’t activate their cards to let these poor people in so you have 300-400 people in the lobby all freaking out yelling and fights going…it’s bad,” he said.

1:49 Cuba blackouts: Protesters bang pots as nation slowly restores power

The island wide power outage happened at the same time hurricane Oscar made landfall on the eastern end of country causing heavy wind and some flooding.

Cuba is also facing a severe economic crisis right now with widespread shortages on everything from medicine to fuel.

“Power outages are not uncommon in Cuba but the scale of this particular outage is unprecedented, there are problems of aging infrastructure and shortages of fuel,” said Amelia Kiddle, Associate Professor of Latin America history with  University of Calgary

“They primarily relied on fuel from Venezuela but in the last several years Venezuela has been in its own humanitarian crisis,” she said.

There are fears this situation could grow into a much larger humanitarian crisis, and some are again urging the United States to lift its trade embargo.

“We are doing everything to end with the blockade, the blockade is the main problem, if they let Cubans do their thing, you are not going to change the system there,” said Arturo Pinochet, a member of Calgary-Cuban Friendship Association.

While Cuba depends heavily on tourism, Jonathan Renko is urging others to stay home, at least until the power crisis is sorted.

“This is not the Cuba I know,” he said, adding he was finally able to book an early flight home on Wednesday.