Only two hours of light for 72 hours of blackouts, Cubans in Matanzas report

Residents of the Los Mangos neighborhood in Matanzas had accumulated more than 72 consecutive hours without electricity this Tuesday, with only two hours of power received during that entire period, according to complaints posted on social media by journalist and activist Yirmara Torres Hernández.

Torres Hernández has systematically documented the power outages in his area through Facebook. In his most recent post, he reported 53 hours without electricity in Los Mangos with the phrase "And we continue," while on June 13, he had already warned: "We are still without power, 67 hours."

Matanzas has become the province most affected by the energy crisis in Cuba during 2026. On June 9, residents of circuit 1456 — covering Calzada de San Luis, Parque Maceo, and La Jaiba — reported up to 85 consecutive hours without service, a record that highlights the severity of the disaster.

In Ceiba Mocha, residents had been without electricity for a whole week as of June 13, while in Carlos Rojas, the outages exceeded 48 hours, with only an hour and a half of service restoration when it returned.

The municipality of Matanzas had accumulated over 200 pending outage reports as of June 12, a figure that reflects the total saturation of the provincial electrical service system.

The collapse is not exclusive to Matanzas. This Tuesday, the Electric Union reported a availability of only 970 MW against a demand of 2,525 MW, with 1,555 MW affected at six in the morning and a projection of a 2,000 MW deficit during the peak nighttime hours.

The situation worsened on June 15 when the CTE Guiteras went offline again due to a boiler leak, adding to the 106 distributed generation plants halted due to fuel shortages, which represents 890 MW unavailable.

Santiago de Cuba also reorganized its blackouts on Tuesday into nine blocks, with only one or two hours of electricity daily per residential area, a situation that is reflected in many parts of the country.

The crisis is neither new nor temporary. Since May 2024, the Electric Company of Matanzas has already scheduled two-hour cycles of electricity followed by six hours of blackout, which confirms that the deterioration is structural and has deepened with no solution in sight.

A Cuban summed up the accumulated desperation with a phrase circulating on social media: "Here, they don't even give you explanations anymore, fifty, eighty, however many hours without electricity."