Cuba slowly turning lights on after storm

Lights in Cuba slowly came back on Wednesday night, one day after 11 million Cubans were plunged into darkness after Hurricane Ian wiped out the country’s entire power grid.

Ian, which made landfall as a Category 3 storm in Cuba’s Pinar del Rio province, initially knocked out electricity for about 1 million people in the western provinces before the entire grid went down, according to Electric Union.

Cuba’s utility ministry began slowly restoring power throughout the day Wednesday, activating power plants in Felton and Nuevitas. A few lights had turned on in Havana, but most of the capital city and Cuba’s western provinces remained without power Wednesday night.

At least two Cubans were killed by the storm.

“Although the first impact is very painful, there’s nothing to do but overcome the adversity,” Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel said.

Tens of thousands of people were evacuated to the east ahead of Ian’s arrival. Many others hunkered down and took shelter as Ian dumped torrential rain and devastating winds across the region.

Some protective structures didn’t hold. The two deaths happened when one woman was killed by a falling wall and another person was crushed under a collapsing roof, Cuban state media reported.

“I spent the hurricane at home with my husband and the dog. The masonry and zinc roof of the house had just been installed. But the storm tore it down,” said Mercedes Valdés, who lives along the highway connecting Pinar del Río to San Juan y Martínez. “We couldn’t rescue our things ... we just ran out.”

Pinar del Rio is home to many tobacco farms, which are essential to the country’s vital cigar industry.

“It was apocalyptic, a real disaster,” wrote Hirochi Robaina, owner of world-famous cigar producer Finca Robaina.

Blackouts are not unprecedented in Cuba, a communist nation that continues to struggle economically and has been under decades-long sanctions from the United States.

As a Category 3 storm, Ian was the strongest hurricane to strike Cuba since Hurricane Irma made landfall on the island as a Category 5 storm in 2017. In the last two years, Hurricanes Laura and Ida both struck Cuba as relatively minor storms before strengthening in the Gulf of Mexico and slamming into the U.S. Gulf Coast as Category 4 hurricanes.