A resident of the Alamar neighborhood in the municipality of La Habana del Este reported this Thursday that the Al53 circuit has been experiencing months of power outages, with interruptions lasting three minutes between each restoration of service, a situation that, she claimed, occurred more than 60 times in a single day.
Ailín Roman Fernandez raised the situation on the Facebook page of Empresa Eléctrica Cuba UNE and directed her complaint to the Load and Dispatch Department of the Unión Eléctrica, responsible for electricity distribution across the circuits.
According to their complaint, the so-called DAF, which refers to the three-minute interruptions between one connection and another, hinder the use of household appliances.
The resident explained that neighbors should wait for the power supply to stabilize before connecting their refrigerators, something that, she stated, does not happen during the two to three hours of electric service they receive.
The situation also affects the water pumps in the buildings, which must be turned on repeatedly every time the supply is interrupted. The complainant stated that throughout the day, she counted more than 60 of these outages.
"We are tired of stating that the Al53 circuit in Alamar has been experiencing uncomfortable 3-minute DAFs between one another when they switch the power on," wrote Roman Fernandez.
The resident urged the UNE to resolve the issue and warned about the potential consequences for the water pumping systems in the buildings if these cycles of connection and disconnection continue.
"The water pumps in the buildings need to be turned on as many times as the DAF is turned off; we have counted over 60 times today. There will come a time when they break down, and what will we do then?" he questioned.
The situation in Alamar is not new. In May, a protest during a blackout in sector 12 of the neighborhood ended with police presence and at least one arrest.
In July, new casserole protests shook the neighborhood, with residents reporting outages that affected water supply and food preservation.
The pattern of unequal distribution among neighboring circuits has also been reported in other municipalities in Havana, raising suspicions of corruption that authorities have not publicly addressed.
The Alamar crisis is part of the most severe electrical collapse that Cuba has faced in decades, with several partial and total disconnections from the National Electric Power System so far this year.
At the end of July, the Minister of Energy and Mines, Vicente de la O Levy, acknowledged before the National Assembly that "the amount of oil that has been stolen from us is almost similar to what we are producing during the same period that we are being robbed," and revealed that some communities have gone up to 105 days without electricity.
The shortage of transformers worsens the situation. The Electric Union admitted in June that there are no spare parts available in any province of the country, while in Havana, around 25 transformers are damaged every day.
Desperation extends beyond Alamar. Recently, residents of Guanabacoa stood guard until 3:30 in the morning to prevent workers from the Electric Company from removing the transformer from their block without showing a work order.
Several towns in Caimito, Artemisa, have gone 21 days without electricity following the theft of dielectric oil from transformers.
"Are they going to leave us in the dark forever? Is that the plan? Does anyone actually care about us?" asked a resident of Camagüey on social media last week, who had been without electricity for more than 10 days due to a transformer breakdown with no replacement available.
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