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The National Electric System (SEN) of Cuba reports a generation deficit exceeding 1,400 MW this Monday, according to the official information note from the Electric Union.
The maximum impact on Sunday was 1,426 MW at 8:20 PM, with service interrupted for 24 hours and continuous outages throughout the night.
For the peak hours this Monday, the Electric Union forecasts an availability of just 1,675 MW against a demand of 3,100 MW, resulting in a projected deficit of 1,425 MW and an estimated impact of 1,455 MW.
At six o'clock this morning, there were already 845 MW affected, with a demand of 2,486 MW.
The escalation coincides exactly with the depletion of fuel processed from the Russian shipment. Díaz-Canel himself acknowledged in an interview published on April 21 that the shipment "represents a third of what we need in a month" and that "with that we can meet the needs for about 10 days."
The Minister of Energy, Vicente de la O Levy, was even more precise on April 22: “With just this ship, we have fuel until the end of this month”, he stated, anticipating the scenario that is now unfolding.
Those ten days have passed, and the deficit is rising sharply again.
The relief was real but fleeting and deeply unequal. Havana experienced approximately five consecutive days without power outages due to generation deficits, from April 20 to April 25, thanks to the prioritized distribution of Russian fuel, while the rest of the country—especially Holguín, Granma, Santiago de Cuba, and Moa—continued to endure power cuts of up to 24 hours daily during the same period.
Blackouts returned to the capital on the night of Saturday the 25th, when an automatic frequency shot affected areas of Playa and Habana del Este, and the deficit in Havana surged again after just a few days of relief.
The active outages in the system include 2 units from the Ernesto Guevara De La Serna Power Plant, 4 from the Carlos Manuel de Céspedes Power Plant, 2 from the Felton Power Plant, and 5 from the Renté Power Plant, with 417 MW additionally out of service due to thermal limitations.
The only partial relief comes from the 54 photovoltaic solar parks, which on Sunday contributed 4,102 MWh with a maximum output of 521 MW during the daytime. However, without large-scale battery storage, this generation does not meet the nighttime demand, when the largest deficits occur.
The crisis has structural roots: Cuba needs between 90,000 and 110,000 barrels of oil daily but only produces about 40,000. Minister De la O Levy himself acknowledged that Cuba needs eight fuel ships per month to meet its demands.
Díaz-Canel came to call the shipment of oil from Russia "symbolic", a description that inadvertently encapsulates the magnitude of the issue: symbolic gestures in the face of a structural collapse lasting decades.
A second Russian tanker, the Universal, with 251,000 barrels of diesel—far below the 730,000 barrels of the first shipment—is scheduled to arrive in the Caribbean on April 29, which could provide temporary relief, although it will be insufficient to resolve the chronic deficit faced by the Cuban people.
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