The Electric Union (UNE) attributed this Monday the new total disconnection of the National Electroenergetic System (SEN) to adverse weather conditions, which occurred while the country was attempting to recover from the sixth general blackout of the year that took place on Sunday.
The state-owned company published a statement on its official Facebook account with the following message: "In the process of restoring the SEN, the existing weather events have caused impacts on the network, directly affecting the generating units that were online. We continue to work diligently to reverse this situation and achieve the restoration of the system as soon as possible."
Minutes before that announcement, the official journalist Lázaro Manuel Alonso had reported the news: "A new disconnection of the National Electric System occurred a few minutes ago. Despite the progress made today, an oscillation caused the outage."
The collapse occurred when the system's recovery was barely partial and extremely fragile. Havana had started this Monday with only 14% of the electricity supply restored: 87,480 customers and 78.51 MW, with 12 substations and 29 energized circuits, prioritizing 19 hospitals and two water pumps.
This new outage comes just a few hours after the sixth total blackout recorded on Sunday at 10:43 PM, also confirmed by the UNE.
In that context of minimal recovery, the Antonio Guiteras thermoelectric plant —the largest in the country, located in Matanzas— had initiated a cold start at 10:17 in the morning with expectations of synchronizing to the SEN by nightfall.
The electrical crisis is also affecting telecommunications. The Telecommunications Company of Cuba (ETECSA) announced this Monday national disruptions to the cellular phone service following the breakdown of the generator that provides electrical support to one of its main centers, impacting the prefixes 52, 509, 598, and 599.
With this new disconnection, millions of Cubans will face another night without electricity, and the restoration of the National Electric System—which was already progressing slowly—will experience an even greater delay, with the regime yet to provide a concrete recovery timeline.
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