The Antonio Guiteras Thermoelectric Power Plant, the largest capacity plant in Cuba, went offline from the National Electric System (SEN) early Sunday morning, exacerbating an already critical electricity crisis coinciding with the 73rd anniversary of the Moncada assault.
La Unión Eléctrica (UNE) reported on Facebook that at 1:07 AM Unit 1 of the plant in Matanzas went out of service “due to a leak in the economizer,” the same failure that has been responsible for most of its outages throughout the year.
The coincidence with the national holiday did not go unnoticed on social media. "This is how the regime celebrates the defeat of Moncada," wrote activist Magdiel Jorge Castro on X.
The breakdown this Sunday is not an isolated incident. Since the beginning of summer, Guiteras has experienced a series of outages that reflects the structural deterioration of the plant.
On July 18, the plant was synchronized with the SEN for only 26 minutes before it went offline again due to a leak in the boiler, and on July 21, it went offline once more due to water loss in the same component.
By early July, the plant had accumulated at least 17 unplanned outages so far in 2026, with 293 hours of downtime recorded between January and the end of May due to defects in the economizer.
The underlying problem is technical neglect: the Guiteras has not received major maintenance since 2010. Partial repairs—welding, tube replacement, hydraulic tests—have not resolved the structural damage. Technicians indicate that a definitive solution would require at least 180 days of maintenance, something the authorities have postponed indefinitely.
The national electrical context in which this new outage occurs is extremely serious. The SEN collapsed on July 10 in what was the fourth total blackout of the year, just two days after the largest energy deficit in the country’s history was recorded on July 8: 2,341 MW.
For July 23 and 24, the UNE reported an expected demand of 3,200 MW compared to a barely available 1,070 MW, with maximum impacts reaching 2,315 MW. Outages in Havana ranged from 15 to 24 hours daily, while in some provinces, interruptions were recorded for up to 87 consecutive hours.
This Sunday, while the regime celebrated the anniversary of the Moncada with a central event in Pinar del Río led by Miguel Díaz-Canel, millions of Cubans faced another day without electricity, as the most powerful plant in the country was out of the system once again due to a breakdown in the same component that has been unresolved for months.
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