A resident of Sancti Spíritus named Ayaini Valdés posted a video on Facebook in which she reported, visibly exhausted and furious, that about 70 families in her community, in circuit 116, had been without electricity for seven consecutive days following the explosion of a transformer that the Electric Company could not replace because, as she was told, there were simply no spare parts available.
"All sweaty, all grimy, I'm in a terrible mood," Valdés began before describing the situation.
According to the account, the transformer failed on Tuesday, June 16, at four in the afternoon.
On Saturday the 20th, technicians from the Electric Company came and repaired it, but the solution lasted less than 24 hours: on Sunday, Father's Day, at ten in the morning, when the service was reconnected, the equipment exploded again.
The Electric Company’s response, according to the complainant, was that there was no transformer available to replace the damaged one, and that connecting the circuit to another network would require "a multimillion-dollar investment." Meanwhile, the community remained in the dark.
On Monday, June 22, Valdés reported: "It's no longer 40 hours of blackout for every two hours of electricity; it's seven days."
And in the video description, he wrote that the officials "are cooling themselves" while dozens of homes—housing children, the elderly, and sick individuals—remained without electricity.
"How much longer will the mistreatment and injustice continue against us? Seven days without electricity, where there are children, where there are elderly people, where there are individuals who need electricity," he claimed.
The case of circuit 116 is not an exception within the province. The Electric Company of Sancti Spíritus has 26 circuits affected simultaneously, with only 71 out of more than 200 circuits providing active service, and a generation deficit of 83 MW.
The Electric Union admitted on June 7 that there is no physical availability of transformer spare parts throughout the country, and Cuba has only three specialized workshops for their repair - in Havana, Villa Clara, and Manzanillo - which are completely overwhelmed.
In Holguín, 25 transformers were reported damaged compared to just six replacements received; in Guantánamo, there were eight broken units with no chance of replacement. This situation reflects the structural collapse of an electrical infrastructure that the government itself warned in December 2025 would make 2026 a "difficult" year with continuous blackouts.
In May, a historical record was set for electricity deficit in Cuba: 2,174 MW, leaving 70% of the Island without power simultaneously. On March 16, the longest national blackout in recent history occurred: 29 hours and 29 minutes without electricity across the country.
More than 9 million people are facing severe difficulties in cooking, and 200,000 residents of Havana lack regular access to drinking water as a direct consequence of the outages.
Filed under: