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The historian and activist Alina Bárbara López Hernández published a public complaint on Facebook yesterday, at the request of her neighbors, regarding a defective electric pole in Matanzas that has been causing surges for months, damaging appliances and leaving the building without electricity for increasingly prolonged periods.
According to their account, the neutral cable of the pole explodes "every couple of months," and the technicians from the electric company respond with shoddy repairs that don't address the root issue: "We report it, they come with complete calm, fix the break poorly, and leave. Until it happens again."
The last breakdown occurred on Friday, when the building had already been without power for more than 36 hours. On the night from Saturday to Sunday, the technicians carried out what López Hernández referred to as "shoddy work": a neighbor who is an electrician warned them that the job was incorrect and handed them a roll of adhesive tape to insulate the exposed wires, but his warning was ignored.
In the brief two hours that the power was restored, the neighbors found that the problem persisted. At the time of publication, the building had been without electricity for over 72 hours, due to the general blackout and the voltage surge, and only 220-volt power could be used, rendering the building's 110-volt turbine useless and leaving residents without water.
The human consequences described are severe: "Children crying from the heat, longing to bathe and have a glass of cold water; sick elderly people who cannot carry water; houses cooking all the time with coal and without water to clean the soot that forms."
The neighbors with solar panels tried to help by charging cell phones, fans, and preserving food, but López Hernández herself acknowledged that "it's not enough, it's too much time."
This episode is not the first with the same post. In March, the same building experienced more than 100 hours of power outage due to a broken neutral wire, with a voltage spike of 168 volts that damaged electric pots, induction cookers, televisions, batteries, and scooter chargers. The complaint filed with the electric company was recorded under number 7,503 without an effective response, and a company vehicle that passed through the area refused to address the issue, claiming that “it was not their responsibility.”
The pattern repeats in a context of national electrical collapse: the generation deficit in Cuba reached a record of 2,174 MW on May 14, with blackouts lasting between twenty and 22 hours daily in some areas of the country. Díaz-Canel acknowledged that the situation was "particularly tense", while the Cuban electrical system has experienced seven total collapses in 18 months.
López Hernández warned that if the problem is not resolved, residents could stage "a high-profile pot-banging protest" and approach the local government. He concluded his complaint with a phrase that encapsulates the described dynamic: "It is shameful that only when there is a complaint and it appears in CiberCuba do they come to manage the damage."
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