The political leadership of Guantánamo called on Saturday to reduce the number of citizen complaints about the electrical service, as the province is receiving more than 150 complaints daily and has been experiencing months of blackouts, leaving residents without electricity for up to 33 hours.
According to a report from the station Radio Guantánamo, the call was made during the daily meeting of vitality to analyze the operational, economic, and social situation of the territory, presided over by Yoel Pérez García, the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC) in the eastern province, and Governor Alis Azahares Torreblanca.
The PCC argued that many of those claims "are not related to the difficult electricity situation the country is facing," but rather to organizational deficiencies within the linemen brigades and a lack of local response capacity.
The meeting acknowledged, however, that the figure of more than 150 daily complaints "can and should be reduced more swiftly, with greater work capacity and better organization," according to the official report.
This situation is compounded by the failure of several transformers in different municipalities of the province, although authorities announced the imminent arrival of new equipment as a partial solution.
Guantánamo relies on a single 110 kV high-voltage line to connect to the National Electricity System through Santiago de Cuba, which means that any failure in that line results in a total provincial blackout.
Just in June, a malfunction in that line left the entire province without electricity for more than 24 hours, with some areas going as long as 33 hours without service.
Before, in April, the outages were so prolonged that residents held protest demonstrations, because they received electricity for only 45 minutes to an hour per day.
Due to the inability to guarantee supply in households, the government recently opened more than 60 plazas and public spaces as collective television rooms, within the program Summer with My People, which it presented as a solution to power outages for the people of Guantánamo.
The national context exacerbates the provincial situation. On Thursday, the electrical deficit in Cuba approached another historic record of blackouts, with a deficit of 2,315 MW at 9:10 PM, just below the absolute record of 2,341 MW recorded on July 8.
July solidifies its position as the most critical month in the history of Cuba's electricity sector, with a generation availability of only 1,070 MW compared to a demand of 3,200 MW and 106 distributed generation plants out of service due to lack of fuel.
While the PCC calls for fewer complaints, the reality in Guantánamo is that every day more than 150 families call to report a service that the government itself admits it cannot guarantee.
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