The five-day blaze at Cuba’s main oil storage facility in Matanzas was sparked by lightning on Friday night.

By then, it had killed at least one person and injured 125 others, and dealt a critical blow to Cuba’s energy infrastructure.

“I’m frightened of this horrible cloud and I’m worried about power cuts,” said Adilen Sardinas, 29, who is eight months pregnant.

Officials have not said how much crude, diesel and fuel oil has been lost in the fire, but Cubans are already bracing for an even more severe energy crisis.

“Despite reducing fuel and food supplies to an essential minimum, in 2021 they accounted for more than half of all import spending, with more severe cuts in all other imports, including spare parts, production inputs, capital equipment and consumer goods, so you can see what a devastating effect that was going to have.”.

Fulton Armstrong, who was the US intelligence community’s most senior analyst on Latin America, said there are “fears among supporters of a return to the normalization process launched by President Obama that the [Biden] administration is … privately hopeful that the energy and other problems are a test that ‘the regime’ fails”

Jorge Piñon, director of the University of Texas at Austin’s Latin America and Caribbean energy and environment Program, said that even before the blaze, his modelling had predicted a “total collapse” of the island’s energy grid this summer