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The Cuban News Agency (ACN) announced this Saturday, with notable enthusiasm, that Guantánamo is inaugurating summer 2026 "full of activities" cultural and recreational events that will extend throughout the province, as if the crisis burdening its residents were a minor detail not worth mentioning.
According to the state media, the provincial opening ceremony will take place in Baracoa, while the main city will start its own programming at five in the afternoon on Pedro A. Pérez Street, in front of the Rubén López Sabariego Cultural Center.
Tiodelcy Frómeta Columbie, deputy director of the Municipal Culture Department, described the kickoff with optimism: performances from the cultural centers, sports activities in José Martí Park, and on the boulevard of Crombet, the circus company Carpandilla, Danza Libre, the Provincial Concert Band, the Children's Playroom, a popular art fair, and the live orchestra Sabor y Ritmo.
The agenda, according to ACN, extends over several weeks: on Sunday, festivities will continue at the Elpidio Valdés amusement park and the La Edad de Oro park, featuring performances by Guaracheritos del Caribe. Later, there will be a clown festival, a concert by Lidis Lamorú at the Teatro Guaso for Children's Day, and a concentrated carnival from July 14 to 16. The Provincial Cinema Center, on the other hand, will premiere "Michael" this Saturday, the musical biopic about the King of Pop, which, according to Juan Carlos Vallina, the center's programming director, "has become the highest-grossing film in history."
The program also includes a Mountain Film Festival in San Antonio del Sur on July 17 and 19, workshops on free dance, folklore, and theater, a book fair, a photography club, and, as an ideological highlight, a series of documentaries in honor of the centenary of Fidel Castro's birth.
What the ACN report carefully omits is the actual scenario in which this entire celebration will take place. On June 11, the only 110 kV line connecting Guantánamo with the National Electric System experienced an automatic trip and left the entire province suddenly in the dark.
Days earlier, on June 7, the Electric Union had acknowledged that eight transformers are damaged in the province —three in Baracoa, two in Maisí, two in El Salvador, and one in Manuel Tames— with no spare parts available anywhere in the country to replace them.
In municipalities such as Imías, San Antonio del Sur, and Maisí, power outages accumulate to as much as 20 to 30 hours continuously without electricity. The crisis has reached such an extreme that Guantánamo had to resort to animal-drawn carts to distribute milk due to the lack of fuel for distribution trucks. Additionally, illegal electrical connections have been detected, causing overloads in the network and worsening transformer breakdowns.
In addition to that, a massive invasion of seaweed that is ruining the beaches of Guantanamo, such as Baracoa, Baitiquirí, and El Guanal, there is a health alert and a notable decline in tourist visitors.
The national electricity deficit exceeded 2,000 MW in June, and one in three Cuban households had someone who went to bed hungry in the past month, according to recent research.
At the end of May, the event "Start of Summer 2K26" in Varadero offered 72 hours of music with guaranteed electricity and VIP tables for $600, while the rest of the country endured power outages of up to 50 hours.
Guantánamo begins its summer "filled with activities" with eight broken transformers, lacking spare parts, power outages of up to 30 hours, and beaches covered in sargassum. The state-run press, true to its nature, prefers to talk about Carpandilla and the King of Pop.
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