Passport and Civil Registry services restored at the Spanish Consulate in Havana following a computer outage

The Consulate of Spain in Havana announced the resumption of normal operations for the issuance and renewal of passports following a "computer outage" that temporarily disrupted service on Monday, March 15.

The processes related to the Civil Registry have also been reestablished, as the diplomatic mission specified on Twitter.

"We hope to resolve the technical issue affecting our computer systems at the Lonja today. Residents in Havana who had appointments for passports today will be given a new appointment," stated a previous tweet where the Consulate specified that they would try to find a solution for residents in the provinces, who travel to the capital solely for their procedures.

The computer problems reported on Monday occurred at the new office, which was opened on March 8 in the building of the Lonja del Comercio in Old Havana. This allowed the Consulate to double the capacity for passports, from 50 to about 115 daily.

The office increased the number of windows for first issuance and renewal of passports from two to three, in order to further expand services throughout 2021.

"The idea is to have five simultaneous service windows for the public, plus a separate cash window for payments, and for each window to process about 40 passports, which amounts to around 200 daily," said the Consul in statements to the Efe agency.

After the partial closure due to the coronavirus pandemic and the increasing volume of requests was about to overwhelm the services, the Spanish Consulate hinted last week at gradually returning to normalcy in processing procedures.

Between March and September 2020, due to the restrictions imposed in Cuba by the coronavirus, the passport section of the Spanish Consulate remained closed, leading to a flood of applications, compounded by the large number of Cubans who needed to renew their Spanish passports in 2020.

In Cuba, approximately 160,000 people hold Spanish nationality. Most of them are Cubans who benefited from the Historical Memory Law, which grants nationality to the children and grandchildren of Spanish emigrants.