Cuba restores power to parts of Havana following hurricane

HAVANA (Reuters) - Cuba had restored power to nearly 20% of the capital Havana by late on Friday afternoon, the government said, two days after hurricane Rafael struck the island and collapsed the country's electrical grid, leaving millions in the dark.

Rafael knocked out hundreds of power lines and poles across the western half of the country, downing trees, cutting communications and complicating recovery efforts.

The hurricane strike was the latest blow to the Communist-run country's already precarious electrical grid, which just two weeks ago collapsed multiple times, knocking out power for days and sparking scattered protests across the island.

The timing could not have been worse.

Another hurricane, Oscar, struck the far eastern end of Cuba in mid-October, a one-two punch that has crippled a country already suffering from severe shortages of food, fuel and medicine.

On Friday, officials said the national grid was back online and providing electricity to parts of central and eastern Cuba, though the hard-hit western farm provinces of Pinar del Rio and Artemisa were still largely without electricity ahead of the weekend.

Central Havana and its eastern suburbs saw lights flicker back on in places on Friday. Most of the western half of the city of two million people, however, remained in the dark.

Authorities had not yet given an estimate for when power would be fully restored in the capital.

Havana resident Claudia Espinosa, who lives in Vedado, where many trees and power lines still littered city streets, said she had been without power for three days.

"The situation is critical," she said. "There is no water, there is no food, everything is going to waste."

Cuba's grid operator UNE on Friday warned that even in areas where power was available, the country was still running a substantial generation deficit and blackouts would persist.

The country's decrepit oil-fired generation plants have struggled to keep the lights on for decades, but this year the system collapsed into crisis as oil imports dropped off from allied countries like Venezuela and Mexico.

Russia on Friday pledged to provide Cuba with approximately 80,000 tons of diesel fuel worth $60 million to assist the island nation in its energy crisis, Russian state-run RIA news agency reported on Friday.

(Reporting by Dave Sherwood; additional reporting by Alien Fernandez and Mario Fuentes; Editing by Bill Berkrot)