The Minister of Energy and Mines of Cuba, Vicente de la O Levy, acknowledged this Wednesday before the National Assembly that there are communities and settlements that have gone for up to 105 consecutive days without electricity.
“There are communities, there are settlements that have gone up to 105 days without electricity, due to special transformers, because these are circuits using older voltages,” said Levy before the lawmakers, with a calmness that sharply contrasted with the humanitarian emergency he was describing.
In his speech, captured by the cameras of Canal Caribe, the minister candidly admitted that the country is not receiving fuel and that there are no prospects for that to change.
The statements were made during the ordinary session of the Cuban parliament, convened to discuss a package of 176 economic reforms grouped into 23 axes —including the authorization of private banking, the elimination of the 100-worker limit for micro, small, and medium enterprises, and the opening to foreign capital— while millions of Cubans survive without electricity, without water, and without prospects.
The minister attributed the extended outages to damage to old voltage transformers, which are very difficult to procure in the international market, and to the systematic theft of transformer oil.
“That theft of transformer oil that is happening daily, the amount of oil that has been stolen from us is almost equivalent to what we are producing in the same period that they are stealing from us,” he stated.
What De la O Levy neglected to mention is that this theft is, in itself, a symptom of desperation: Cubans dismantling industrial infrastructure to survive or sell the materials, destroying in the process the very network that could restore their electricity.
Regarding fuel, the minister was equally blunt: "We do not have fuel and we do not foresee any fuel in the volumes that our economy needs."
He specified that the Cuban economy requires 8 million tons of fuel annually, with half intended for electricity generation, and concluded: " Today, we are not receiving fuel, absolutely nothing".
Before those who might think that the regime holds some reserves, De la O Levy was blunt: "Some believe there is a little reserve of energy stored away to solve something, but that is practically impossible, technically impossible. There is no energy to distribute."
The history of this minister is a catalog of broken promises and statements that downplay the suffering of the population.
In May 2024, he described the blackouts as "tolerable", when the eastern and central parts of the country were experiencing outages of up to 20 hours a day.
In September of that year, he promised that Cuba would have “at least one minute” of generation without imported fuel in 2025 — a promise that was never fulfilled — and acknowledged that the government's strategy for the summer had “failed”.
In July 2025, he admitted to the Assembly that power outages would continue. In May 2026, he acknowledged the "profound citizen discontent" and described the situation as "so acute, critical." However, this Thursday he chose to once again normalize an anomaly of such magnitude as the existence of populations in Cuba without electricity for 105 days.
The numbers behind the collapse support every word. On July 24, the electrical outage came close to another historical record with 2,315 MW, near the maximum of 2,341 MW recorded on July 8.
Throughout this month, the National Electric System experienced at least four total blackouts. In Matanzas, there were outages lasting over 87 consecutive hours; in Holguín, circuits faced up to 39 hours without electricity.
Before all that, Levy offered a phrase that summarizes the regime's helplessness: «The path is long, it is sovereign, it involves the development of Cuban fuel with national crude and renewables».
And finally, for those who claim that the power outages are not distributed fairly, the minister had another memorable response: «There is no inequality, there are errors».
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