The General Director of the Holguín Electric Company, engineer Ruber Reynaldo González, acknowledged that the prolonged service interruptions are causing a chain of overloads and breakdowns that further exacerbate the energy crisis in the province.
In statements issued by the local television channel Telecristal, Reynaldo explained that the main cause of the gunshots in the lines and the damaged transformers is the accumulated demand that occurs when electricity returns after almost 40 hours of blackout.
"We cannot ask anything else of someone, of a home that spends 40 dark hours, or 39, than to not overload everything, but the overload exceeds us," admitted the executive.
As explained, when service is finally restored, families simultaneously try to charge batteries, backup equipment, fans, and other essential devices to cope with the prolonged outages. This concentrated demand ends up causing circuit breakers to trip and damage to the infrastructure.
"The difference between having power and not having power today is more than 30 hours, 39, so it's understandable that people are walking down the street with an EcoFlow or with fans in a bag to go charge them at a relative's or a friend's house, and that's causing the overload," he pointed out.
The situation has placed the provincial electrical grid in a downward spiral of deterioration. González acknowledged that even when they manage to energize a circuit without major incidents, the impact on the transformers is significant.
"Every time we close a circuit and this phenomenon does not occur, there are 10, 12, 15, and even 20 transformers triggered," he stated.
The response capacity is far from covering the accumulated damages. The official explained that the country has only three specialized workshops for transformer repairs: one in Havana, another in Villa Clara, and the one in Manzanillo for the eastern region.
The shortage of equipment and parts has turned repairs into an extremely slow process. "Six transformers are arriving from Havana tomorrow, and I have 25 damaged ones," González acknowledged, who also revealed that there are 19 kV transformers that have been out of service for over a month due to a lack of spare parts.
The magnitude of the energy deficit helps explain the collapse. Holguín, the second province with the most electrical customers in the country, has 383,180 users and a peak demand of around 240 MW. However, it currently has only 70 MW available, less than 30% of what is needed to meet its requirements.
Of that limited capacity, 26 MW are allocated to services deemed vital, and around 20 MW to the nickel industry, leaving only 14 MW for a residential demand estimated at 190 MW.
As a result, residential circuits receive only about three hours of electricity after enduring between 39 and 40 hours of blackout. The director himself acknowledged that this rotation system is the only available alternative given the large gap between generation and consumption.
The situation becomes even more complicated when a circuit fails before completing the expected service time. González acknowledged that these unexpected interruptions directly affect the daily lives of the population, which relies on those few hours to cook food, pump water, and charge essential equipment.
The crisis in Holguín has been ongoing since early 2026. In March, the company was already implementing schemes of just three hours per shift; in April, the outages increased to 18 hours a day.
In May, the director of the UEB Despacho Territorial, Davielquis Cortina Cobas, admitted that the strategy leaves entire municipalities without electricity in order to keep strategic circuits energized, including the headquarters of the Communist Party and the provincial government.
The director's statements represent one of the most explicit recognitions made so far by an authority in the electricity sector: the blackouts themselves are accelerating the deterioration of an infrastructure already weakened by years of lack of investment, shortages of parts, and generation deficits, trapping the province in a cycle where each outage causes new breakdowns, and each breakdown leads to more blackouts.
Filed under: