Unit 3 of the "Carlos Manuel de Céspedes" Thermoelectric Power Plant in Cienfuegos was finally synchronized with the National Electric System (SEN) on Friday, May 2, nearly three weeks past the deadline officially committed by the Electric Union (UNE), which had announced the completion of repairs and its reintegration for the first half of April.
Far from acknowledging its failure to meet deadlines, the Cuban regime chose to frame the delay within a narrative of technical victory and collective effort, as part of a propaganda strategy aimed at neutralizing the growing public perception of ineffectiveness and improvisation.
For six months, unit 3 was out of service due to a malfunction that occurred after a nationwide blackout. In January, a fire in the electrical control rooms of the plant worsened the situation, extending the maintenance work.
At the beginning of the year, the general director of the plant, José Osvaldo González Rodríguez, stated to the state newspaper Granma that work was still ongoing on the turbine of block 3. "A very complex task" that "takes time," said the executive, promising that it would be completed by mid-February.
Finally, he assured that its synchronization with the SEN was scheduled for the first half of April, with its nominal power of 158 MW.
Despite this history of setbacks, the reactivation of the plant has been presented by official media and regime spokespeople as a “success of the workforce” and a “demonstration of resilience,” in an attempt to obscure the failure to meet the timeline and the concrete consequences it has had for the population, particularly in Cienfuegos, where blackouts have been continuous and prolonged for months.
The images broadcast by the National Television News (NTV) showed an atmosphere of euphoria and almost epic fervor in the plant's control room as technicians and operators monitored the generation load.
The speech focused on the "joint effort" of workers from various provinces, on the "daily sacrifice," and on the "technical victory" of achieving 80 megawatts contributed to the national electric system, with promises of reaching 120. However, not a word was mentioned about the delays, the fire, or the material conditions that prevented meeting the announced deadlines.
This form of communication reflects a pattern already reported by independent media: transforming each failure into a symbolic victory, avoiding any accountability. As documented by CiberCuba in another recent article, this is a deliberate narrative strategy: pretending to find a solution to avoid acknowledging failure.
It is particularly striking to compare it with the recent massive blackout in Spain and Portugal, where the national electrical system was affected for several hours and the restoration of service was completed in less than 24 hours.
On that occasion, several official Cuban voices echoed the European event to justify the failures in Cuba, suggesting that the blackouts were a global phenomenon.
However, what was resolved in Spain in just one day, in Cuba took more than six months, and even then the planned deadline for reactivation was missed by almost three weeks, demonstrating not a comparable situation (a complete system failure versus the breakdown of a thermal power unit), but an abyss between management efficiency and responsiveness.
The case of the Cienfuegos thermoelectric plant is not an isolated incident, but part of a broader policy of concealing the structural collapse of the Cuban electrical system, which barely holds together with quick fixes, rhetoric of resilience, propaganda, and unfulfilled promises.
Meanwhile, the real causes of the crisis —technological obsolescence, poor planning, lack of investment, and unproductive centralization of the energy sector— remain absent from the official discourse.
Cubans, however, live a different reality. The electricity generation figures do not meet the minimum demand, and the scheduled blackouts are chaotic. In this context, presenting the return of a faulty unit, which should have been operational weeks earlier, as a milestone only emphasizes the disconnect between the narrative of those in power and the daily life of the population.
More than a technical victory, the synchronization of the CTE in Cienfuegos represents new evidence of the organizational and operational failure of the regime of Miguel Díaz-Canel, which can no longer hide, either with epic speeches or with propagandistic pyrotechnics, the state's inability to ensure a basic and sustained electrical service.
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