Sorted by date Results 1 - 20 of 20
HAVANA (AP) — Hurricane Rafael made landfall in Cuba on Wednesday as a powerful Category 3 hurricane, shortly after powerful winds knocked out the country's power grid. Forecasters warned Rafael could bring "life-threatening" storm surges, winds and flash floods to western swaths of the island after it knocked out power and dumped rain on the Cayman Islands and Jamaica the day before. The storm was located 40 miles (65 kilometers) south-southwest of Havana on Wednesday. It had maximum sustained winds of 115 mph (185 kph) and was moving n...
HAVANA (AP) — Cuba's electrical grid went offline Friday after one of the island's major power plants failed, and as a massive blackout that started a day earlier swept across the Caribbean island. Cuba's energy ministry announced that the grid had gone down hours after the Antonio Guiteras thermoelectric plant had ceased operations, at about 11 a.m. local time. Authorities said at the time it was only offline temporarily. Hours earlier, Prime Minister Manuel Marrero had sought to assuage concerned citizens about the outage that began T...
HAVANA (AP) — Cuba's capital was largely paralyzed on Monday and the rest of the island braced for the fourth night of a massive blackout that has generated a handful of small protests and a stern government warning that any unrest will be punished. Hurricane Oscar was crossing the island's eastern coast with winds and heavy rain after a night that saw protests of several dozen people in urban neighborhoods like Santos Suárez and central Havana. Some banged pots and pans in the streets, while others demonstrated from their balconies. Pr...
HAVANA (AP) — Lightning struck a crude oil storage tank in the city of Matanzas, causing a spreading fire that led to four explosions which injured nearly 80 people and left 17 firefighters missing, Cuban authorities said Saturday. Firefighters and other specialists were still trying to quell the blaze at the Matanzas Supertanker Base, which began during a thunderstorm Friday night, the Ministry of Energy and Mines tweeted. The official Cuban News Agency said the lightning strike set one tank on fire and the blaze later spread to a second t...
HAVANA (AP) — Relatives of the missing in Cuba's capital desperately searched Saturday for victims of an explosion at one of Havana's most luxurious hotels that killed at least 27 people. They checked the morgue, hospitals and if unsuccessful, they returned to the partially collapsed Hotel Saratoga, where rescuers used dogs to hunt for survivors. A natural gas leak was the apparent cause of Friday's blast at the 96-room hotel. The 19th-century structure in the Old Havana neighborhood did not have any guests at the time because it was u...
HAVANA (AP) — Tropical depression Fred was moving along Cuba's northern coast and could regain tropical storm status as it moves towards the Florida Keys on Saturday and southwest Florida on Sunday, forecasters said. Meanwhile, still east of the Caribbean Sea, forecasters were watching a tropical depression that they said would likely become Grace, the seventh named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season. A tropical storm warning was in effect for several islands including Antigua and Barbuda, Anguilla, Saint Martin and Saint Barthelemy. A t...
HAVANA (AP) — Large contingents of Cuban police patrolled the capital of Havana on Monday following rare protests around the island nation against food shortages and high prices amid the coronavirus crisis. Cuba's president said the demonstrations were stirred up on social media by Cuban Americans in the United States. Sunday's protests marked some of the biggest displays of antigovernment sentiment in the tightly controlled country in years. Cuba is going through its worst economic crisis in decades, along with a resurgence of coronavirus c...
HAVANA (AP) — Tropical Storm Elsa swept over western Cuba with strong rain and winds Monday, and forecasters said it would move on to the Florida Keys on Tuesday and Florida's central Gulf coast by Wednesday. The storm was moving over mainly rural areas to the east of Havana after making landfall near Cienega de Zapata, a natural park with few inhabitants. By late afternoon, Elsa's maximum sustained winds had slowed to 50 mph (85 kph). Its core was about 45 miles (75 kilometers) southeast of Havana and moving to the northwest at 14 mph (22 k...
HAVANA (AP) — For most of his life, Raul Castro played second-string to his brother Fidel — first as a guerrilla commander, later as a senior figure in their socialist government. But for the past decade, it's Raul who has been the face of communist Cuba, its defiance of U.S. efforts to oust its socialist system — and its efforts to forge a rapprochement with its longtime foe. The younger Castro, now 89, formally announced Friday that he would step down as first secretary of the island's Communist Party, leaving the Caribbean nation witho...
HAVANA (AP) — For two years the Trump administration has been trying to stamp out one of Cuba's signature programs __ state-employed medical workers treating patients around the globe in a show of soft power that also earns billions in badly needed hard currency. Labeling the doctors and nurses as both exploited workers and agents of communist indoctrination, the U.S. has notched a series of victories as Brazil, Ecuador and Bolivia sent home thousands after leftist governments allied with Havana were replaced with ones friendlier to Washington....
HAVANA (AP) — The Cuban government announced Friday that it is launching widespread rationing of chicken, eggs, rice, beans, soap and other basic products in the face of a grave economic crisis. Commerce Minister Betsy Díaz Velázquez told the state-run Cuban News Agency that various forms of rationing would be employed in order to deal with shortages of staple foods. She blamed the hardening of the U.S. trade embargo by the Trump administration. Economists give equal or greater blame to a plunge in aid from Venezuela, where the collapse of the...
HAVANA (AP) — President Donald Trump's Cuba policy is driving millions of dollars from the island's private entrepreneurs to its state-run tourism sector, the opposite of its supposed goal, according to new government figures. Trump announced in June 2017 that he was tightening limits on U.S. travel to Cuba in order to starve military-linked travel businesses and funnel money directly to the Cuban people. He restricted Americans' ability to travel to Cuba on their own, rather than with a tour group. At the same time, he allowed U.S. cruise l...
HAVANA (AP) — For half a century Fidel Castro seemed to be everywhere in Cuba — inspecting factories, farms and offices, expounding to the press and zooming to the scenes of natural disasters to direct the minutest details of the response. His brother Raul was a military man who operated from behind the scenes, rarely making speeches and going long stretches without appearing in public, even as he attempted historic reforms of Cuba's economy and foreign policy. A month after taking office, the Castros' successor as president of Cuba has bro...
HAVANA (AP) — The only three survivors of Cuba's worst aviation disaster in three decades were clinging to life Saturday, a day after their passenger jet crashed in a fireball in Havana's rural outskirts with 113 people on board. In the first official death toll provided by authorities, Transportation Minister Adel Yzquierdo Rodriguez said 110 had died including five children. He also announced that a flight recorder from the plane had been located. Carlos Alberto Martinez, director of Havana's Calixto Garcia Hospital where the survivors were b...
HAVANA (AP) — A 39-year-old airliner with 110 people aboard crashed and burned in a cassava field just after taking off from the Havana airport Friday, leaving three survivors in Cuba's worst aviation disaster in three decades, officials said. The Boeing 737 went down just after noon a short distance from the end of the runway at Jose Marti International Airport while on a short-hop flight to the eastern city of Holguin. Firefighters rushed to extinguish the flames that engulfed the field of debris left where Cubana Flight 972 hit the g...
HAVANA (AP) — Raul Castro turned over Cuba's presidency Thursday to a 57-year-old successor he said would hold power until 2031, a plan that would place the state the Castro brothers founded and ruled for 60 years in the hands of a Communist Party official little known to most on the island. Castro's 90-minute valedictory speech offered his first clear vision for the nation's future power structure under new President Miguel Mario Diaz-Canel Bermudez. Castro said he foresees the white-haired electronics engineer serving two five-year terms a...
HAVANA (AP) — Miguel Diaz-Canel has been the presumptive next president of Cuba since 2013, when Raul Castro named the laconic former provincial official to the important post of first vice president and lauded him as "neither a novice nor an improviser," high praise in a system dedicated to continuity over all. Castro said nothing about how a young civilian from outside his family could lead the socialist nation that he and his older brother Fidel created from scratch and ruled with total control for nearly 60 years. Exiles in Miami said D...
HAVANA (AP) — The Cuban government on Wednesday selected 57-year-old First Vice President Miguel Mario Diaz-Canel Bermudez as the sole candidate to succeed President Raul Castro in a transition aimed at ensuring that the country's single-party system outlasts the aging revolutionaries who created it. The certain approval of Diaz-Canel by members of the unfailingly unanimous National Assembly will install someone from outside the Castro family in the country's highest government office for the first time in nearly six decades. The 86-year-old C...
HAVANA (AP) — The eldest son of late Cuban leader Fidel Castro killed himself on Thursday after months of treatment for depression, state media reported. He was 68. Official website Cubadebate said Fidel Castro Diaz-Balart had been in a "deeply depressed state." A brief note read on state television said his treatment had "required an initial hospitalization then outpatient follow-up." The eldest son of Cuba's late revolutionary leader was known for his resemblance to his father, earning him the nickname Fidelito or Little Fidel. Castro D...
HAVANA (AP) — A bizarre string of attacks on diplomats in Havana has sent Cuban-American relations to their lowest point in decades, with the Trump administration virtually closing its embassy here and expelling Cuban officials from Washington. But few people on this communist-run island believe a word of the U.S. allegations. Despite increasingly tough talk by the U.S., including White House Chief of Staff John Kelly saying Thursday that Cuba "could stop the attacks on our diplomats," the common reaction in Havana is mocking disbelief. "It i...
