The Cuban Electric Union (UNE) wants to, but cannot. The socialist state-owned company is currently torn between two communication strategies or "narratives": one promising a moderately hopeful future to its users, and the other preparing them for an even more "terrible and complex" scenario.
Trapped in the whirlpool of its generation capacity deficit and battered by the whirlwind of opinions from Cubans enduring prolonged and frequent blackouts, the company led by Alfredo López Valdés is floundering in slow motion, unable to remedy the collapse of the national power system (SEN).
Weighed down by obsolete infrastructures, lack of investment, heavy and sulfurous crude, and the centrality of state-owned companies in the post-communist design of ruler Miguel Díaz-Canel, SEN and UNE sink into the mire of their own statements, appearing transparent in a dance of daily megawatts that triggers spasms among Cubans.
With the possibility of being lynched on social media, the truth is that tonight the nation may approach a deficit of around 1,200 MW. Tomorrow we will see the figures from UNE. But (and there is always a but) Felton is already preparing to resume generation in a couple of days, perhaps three. It is also worth noting that in the middle of the week, 500 MW will be incorporated, so power outages will be revived in a timely manner, but, in all honesty, we will have," said the official journalist José Miguel Solís on Monday on his social media.
For weeks, the UNE, the leaders of the regime, and their official press have been saying that the power outages are due to planned maintenance (a strategy announced by Díaz-Canel in 2022 to restore electricity generation by 2023), which will end at the end of June to ensure a summer without blackouts in the hottest months.
But who can guarantee "zero power outages?" recently asked the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC). So the strategy now is to "reduce" power outages, make them shorter, more bearable as the Minister of Energy and Mines, Vicente de la O Levy, would say, who recently claimed that, as they currently occur, power outages are "a tolerable nuisance."
The appointed ruler who promised to stabilize the SEN in 2023 and that the "terrible" blackouts would end in June, before the summer, now says that yes, but no, that the situation will improve, but not entirely.
In those ambiguities, UNE is also operating, celebrating the synchronization to the SEN of Unit 6 in Nuevitas after 77 days of maintenance, only to disconnect again in less than 24 hours, reestablish (it is "normal" for these things to happen, one of its directors stated), and reappear on the list of malfunctioning units published by the company in its daily social media updates (the eve, for example), although in person, engineer Lázaro Guerra Hernández, technical director of UNE, stated that it was in operation.
It is now time to entertain customers with Unit 1 of Felton's thermal power plant, which yesterday the Cuban Television News celebrated its entry into the "final phase of scheduled maintenance" and predicted its synchronization with the National Electric System this Wednesday, highlighting the "workforce feat" of its workers.
The official journalist Bernardo Espinosa's life is not enough to explain what is happening in SEN and UNE and the decisions made. There are loose ends in all his reports that do not seek the truth of the matter (an impossible mission in a totalitarian regime without freedom of the press), but rather to spread the dictates of the Palace, that air-conditioned stronghold where "yes but no" becomes the art of governing of the so-called "continuity".
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