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Residents of Guiteras Street, between Aguilera and Maceo, in the town of Ceiba Mocha, Matanzas province, have been without electricity or experiencing extremely low voltage for a week due to a malfunction in a transformer that the Electric Company has not addressed, according to a complaint posted this Saturday on Facebook.
The problem began on Saturday, June 6, when the electrical service was restored, leaving several homes without power and others experiencing dangerously low voltage. The disruption affects approximately three blocks of the community.
The neighbors immediately reported the outage to the Customer Service of the Electric Company and received the report number 18351. However, seven days later, the situation remains the same.
"At 8:15 in the morning on this June 13, the Customer Service system reported that report 18351 was still awaiting a car visit," stated Yuni Moliner, the author of the post.
The delay has a logistical explanation that does not justify the inaction: Ceiba Mocha is located about 20 kilometers from the center of the city of Matanzas, and the residents themselves point out that any connection or disconnection maneuvers require transporting a vehicle from the Basic Electric Organization from the municipal seat.
The municipality of Matanzas had accumulated over 200 pending outage reports as of June 12, illustrating the total saturation of the service system. An executive from the Electric Company of Matanzas described the province as the most affected in the country, with circuits that have accumulated more than 40 continuous hours of blackout.
The case of Ceiba Mocha is not an isolated one. The town of Cantel, in Cárdenas, went more than seven days without electricity following the explosion of a transformer at the Humberto Álvarez sugar mill. In Mayarí, Holguín, over 400 families were without power for 29 days and the solution required relocating a 630 kVA transformer from Havana. This past Saturday, residents of Güines reported being without electricity for more than a week following the explosion of another transformer, with three failed repair attempts.
The lack of preventive maintenance, the scarcity of spare parts, and repeated power outages are structural factors that worsen the frequency and duration of these breakdowns. "The lack of maintenance, limitations in accessing components, and repeated power cuts cause this type of breakdown to be among the most frequent," Moliner warned in his publication.
Everything is happening in the context of the worst energy crisis in Cuba in decades. The country has been under severe fuel limitations for more than 130 days due to an oil blockade, and on June 10, the generation capacity was only 960 MW compared to a peak demand of 2,595 MW, covering barely a third of what is needed.
While the Electric Company continues to accumulate unaddressed reports, the residents of Ceiba Mocha are still waiting for the vehicle that, according to the customer service system, has not arrived for a week.
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