Residents of at least two neighborhoods in Camagüey have been without electricity for almost a week following transformer failures in their areas, and the only response they received from the authorities, in one of the cases, is that they will have to wait between 15 and 20 days for the service to be restored.
According to reports published on X by independent journalist Jose Luis Tan Estrada, residents of 3rd Street, between 1st and 2nd, in the Salomé Viejo neighborhood, have been in the dark for six days after the area's transformer caught fire.
Electric company workers arrived at the site, confirmed that the equipment was burned, left without offering an immediate solution, and left the residents with the promise of a wait of between 15 and 20 days, reported Tan Estrada this Sunday.
The situation is repeating in the Montejo neighborhood, near La Caramelera, where a transformer exploded about five days ago and, as of the date of the report, had still not been repaired or replaced, the reporter stated on Saturday.
These reports are not isolated cases in the city. At the beginning of August, the writer and journalist María Antonia Borroto Trujillo warned that a neighborhood in Camagüey had been without electricity for over 10 days due to the failure of a transformer that collapsed every time they attempted to reconnect it, and that the authorities took five days to determine that it needed to be replaced with a larger capacity one.
"Are they going to leave us in the dark forever? Is that the plan? Are there no other options? Does anyone really care about us?" Borroto publicly asked in light of the lack of an official response.
The underlying problem is structural. The Electric Union acknowledged in June that there are no physical spare transformers available in any province of the country, and national production, distributed among workshops in Havana, Santa Clara, and Manzanillo, barely reaches about 70 units per day, far below the accumulated demand.
The Minister of Energy and Mines, Vicente de la O Levy, acknowledged before the National Assembly in late July that the theft of dielectric oil exacerbates the collapse. "The amount of oil that has been stolen from us is almost equivalent to what we are producing during the same period in which we are being robbed," he said.
The official also revealed that some communities have gone without electricity for up to 105 days due to damage to special transformers for old voltages, which are difficult to obtain in the international market.
The crisis is not limited to Camagüey. In Calabazar, in the Havana municipality of Boyeros, a few days ago a transformer exploded due to poor repairs and shortly after, no one from the Electric Company had come to address the issue.
In Havana, where an average of 25 transformers are damaged each day, three women recently stayed awake until 3:30 am to prevent workers from the Electric Company from taking the transformer from their block in Guanabacoa, after another group of workers attempted to remove it during the day without presenting an order that justified the operation.
In Camagüey, the situation is further exacerbated because Unit 5 of the Diez de Octubre thermoelectric power plant in Nuevitas has been undergoing maintenance throughout August, which further reduces the provincial generation capacity, with a deficit that has fluctuated between 128 and 133 MW, according to daily reports.
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