Hurricane Oscar crosses Cuba's eastern coast with winds and heavy rain as residents protest power and water outages.

The Cuban government had just announced emergency measures to reduce electricity use — then the power went out across the entire nation.

The prolonged nationwide blackout followed a massive outage Thursday night, part of energy problems that led to the largest protests in Cuba in almost 30 years, in July 2021. Those were followed by smaller local protests in October 2022 and March 2024.

As Cuban authorities were struggling to reconnect the country’s decrepit power grid on Sunday, a category-one hurricane barrelled into the east of the island, dumping heavy rain and lashing the area with winds.

Electricity outages have paralyzed an already-crippled economy, leading to shortages of everything from cash to running water.

Canel warned citizens there would be consequences for taking to the streets as many on the island were still without power after more than 72 hours.

Electricity has been restored to almost 90 percent of Havana, the Cuban capital's energy supplier reported Monday, but several provinces remained without power four days after the start of a