A team of workers from Holguín installed two new transformers at the corner of San Antonio and Tropical streets in the Puentes Grandes neighborhood of Havana, after a resident reported the negligence of the Unión Eléctrica (UNE) on Facebook regarding the equipment failure.
The intervention was completed in three days, despite the UNE having warned those affected that the wait would be between 30 and 40 days.
The case was documented by the troubadour Ariel Díaz, who published his complaint on Facebook with a mix of indignation and irony. "I can't imagine what we, the affected ones, will do for 30 or 40 days without electricity. Where will we charge our devices? What will we eat?" he wrote in a previous post, where he also lashed out at those who labeled him a traitor for complaining: "The Android revolutionaries call me a traitor. I invite them to spend the next month at my house so they can give me a good lesson in ideological resistance."
The photographs accompanying the case update on Facebook show a Havana street in poor condition, where the old transformer—severely rusted and with deteriorated ceramic insulators—was placed before being replaced.
Another photo shows the two new teams secured in the bed of a cargo truck.
In addition to installing the two transformers, the crew replaced all the wiring of the circuit, which had been spliced on multiple occasions.
The neighbor also picked up on rumors circulating in the neighborhood: that the transformer might have been deliberately damaged to demand money, and that this is precisely why the UNE sent a team from Holguín instead of resolving the issue with local personnel. Díaz clarified that they are "just that... rumors," but the suspicion reflects the accumulated distrust of the neighbors toward the institutions.
He concluded with a remark that summarizes the pattern repeating throughout the capital: "Ah! And no minister lives around here. For the insightful."
The break occurred last Saturday, according to Díaz's initial post, who reported that the circuit had failed again at the same corner. As he detailed, the neighborhood had electricity since 2:00 am, and by 5:48 pm, the same houses as always were still without service and no one had come to fix it.
"This time I neither called, nor reported, nor asked. If it were of interest to anyone, they had 16 hours to come just to put a little cable on the pony," he pointed out.
The case of Puentes Grandes is part of a transformer crisis affecting all of Havana: by the end of July, the capital reported an average of 25 damaged single-phase units per day, with some days exceeding 60 breakdowns.
In June, the UNE acknowledged that there was no physical availability of spare transformers and that there are only three specialized workshops for repairing them in the country.
The pattern of reporting on social media followed by institutional response has been seen in several neighborhoods.
In July, the UNE installed two transformers in Guantánamo following a viral post that alerted about 21 days without electricity, and in August, residents of Guanabacoa guarded to prevent workers from removing a transformer without ensuring its replacement.
Public pressure on social media has effectively become the only mechanism that forces the regime to act.
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