Related videos:
A partial outage of the National Electric Power System left the entire central and eastern region of Cuba without electricity this Thursday, from the province of Ciego de Ávila to Guantánamo, following the service outage of the Antonio Guiteras Thermoelectric Power Plant at 4:58 AM due to a boiler leak.
According to the Electric Union (UNE), at 06:09 a partial system collapse occurred, and by 06:30 the availability was only 636 MW compared to a demand of 2,420 MW, with 1,790 MW affected.
This is the ninth failure of the CTE Guiteras so far in 2026, just five days after the plant was synchronized to the SEN on May 9 following around 300 corrective actions and approximately 90 hours of downtime.
The reconnection process progressed gradually throughout the morning: at 08:16, Ciego de Ávila was successfully linked to the national electricity grid, while the other affected provinces operated with isolated microsystems.
At 09:19, Camagüey resumed operations, with Unit 6 of the CTE Diez de Octubre beginning the start-up process, and at 09:50, Las Tunas connected to the national grid.
Among the main reported incidents are breakdowns at Unit 6 of the Máximo Gómez CTE, Units 1 and 2 of the Ernesto Guevara De La Serna CTE, Unit 2 of the Lidio Ramón Pérez CTE, and Unit 5 of the Antonio Maceo CTE, with 263 MW out of service due to limitations in thermal generation.
The day on Wednesday, the 13th, had already recorded a maximum impact of 2,153 MW at 9:30 PM, exacerbated by emergency outages at the Santa Cruz power plant, the Cienfuegos power plant, and the Moa engines.
The collapse this Thursday occurs in the worst energy context that Cuba has experienced in decades. The Minister of Energy and Mines, Vicente de la O Levy, publicly acknowledged on Wednesday that the country "is out of fuel" and described the situation as "acute, critical, and extremely tense."
The director of CTE Guiteras, Román Pérez Castañeda, has acknowledged that the plant needs at least 180 days of downtime for major maintenance — the last one was in 2010 — but that "the country's situation still does not allow it."
The pattern repeats with alarming regularity: Guiteras goes offline, gets partially repaired, and fails again within days, dragging millions of Cubans down with it.
The forecast for the peak nighttime hours this Thursday is devastating: the UNE estimates an availability of 976 MW against a demand of 3,150 MW, with a projected deficit of 2,174 MW and an estimated impact of 2,204 MW if the expected conditions persist.
Filed under: