A video published this Wednesday on Facebook by the citizen Dariel Vicedo highlights the energy inequality of the Cuban system in less than a minute: while the circuits surrounding the provincial headquarters of the Partido Comunista de Cuba (PCC) and the Gobierno Provincial de Matanzas have gone five days without electricity, the air conditioning units in both institutions remain on and running.
Vicedo recorded the air conditioning units operating from the street, with the sound audible from a distance, and titled it with a phrase that says it all: "Some are more equal than others".
"The circuits surrounding these two institutions have been without electricity since Saturday, five days ago," he notes in the recording, "and both deployments are operational and functioning."
"Look at the air conditioners at the provincial headquarters of the party in Matanzas. This is how it is all day long," says Vicedo at the beginning of the video, before moving towards the Provincial Government building.
"This comes from the provincial government, permanently lit," he adds.
The outage affecting those circuits began on Saturday, July 5th, which means that some residents of Matanzas were enduring up to 87 consecutive hours without electricity at the time of the report, according to data from the provincial electrical crisis dossier.
The immediate context is the third total blackout in Cuba in 2026, which occurred on Sunday, July 6, at 12:17 PM, when the unexpected shutdown of Unit No. 6 of the Nuevitas thermoelectric plant triggered a cascading collapse that left approximately 9.6 million people across the island without power.
That day, the national electrical system had only 1,000 MW available against a demand of 3,100 MW, with a forecasted deficit of between 2,200 and 2,230 MW. It was the eighth total blackout in the country in 24 months.
Matanzas is, officially, the most affected province in the national system throughout 2026. The Antonio Guiteras thermoelectric plant, located right there and the main generator in the country, has accumulated 17 outages from the system so far this year and has not received major maintenance since 2010.
In addition to this, there are eight substations out of service—four of which are due to the theft of dielectric oil—and 63 damaged transformers.
In June, some residents of Matanzas managed to go 96 consecutive hours without electricity, a record that the province had already broken several times before the total blackout on Sunday.
The contrast highlighted by Vicedo is neither new nor accidental. Miguel Díaz-Canel himself acknowledged in September 2025 the existence of "disproportions" in the distribution of power outages, admitting that certain provincial capitals experience "relatively comfortable" cycles while entire municipalities endure cuts of up to 25 hours daily.
The growing outrage has spilled over onto social media and the streets. This Wednesday, strong protests in La Hata and Guanabacoa were reported, and in June there were demonstrations outside the PCC headquarters in Santiago de Cuba due to blackouts lasting up to 22 hours a day.
The video by Vicedo surpassed 14,700 views in just a few hours, with 439 reactions and 67 comments, in a statement that condenses in 59 seconds the central contradiction of the system: the institutions of political power maintain their privileges while the surrounding population remains in the dark.
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