Hurricane Rafael moves across the Gulf of Mexico as a rare major November storm as Cuba recovers

The country’s entire power grid collapsed, state-run operator UNE said, plunging the country’s 10 million people into darkness – the second full blackout on the island in the past month – with many areas still without connection. More than 283,000 people were evacuated, 98,300 from the capital, authorities said.

The capital, Havana, with 2 million people living in densely packed and largely old buildings, is particularly vulnerable to natural disasters. Desperate locals came to hotels with their own generators in search of scarce power.

“This is the second time that we have to live through everything that has happened: the weather and the problems with the country’s energy grid,” local resident Mario de la Rosa Negrin told the Associated Press. “The hotel, in solidarity, offered the electricity from their power plants to the neighbors so that people could charge their mobile phones and their lamps.”

Rafael is the 17th named storm of the hurricane season. It is only the sixth hurricane recorded in the Gulf of Mexico in November and the third to be classified as Category 2 or higher. The others were Ida in 2009, a Category 2 storm, and Kate in 1985, which was a Category 3.