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) regarding the malfunctioning equipment on Facebook.
The intervention was completed in three days, despite 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 had published his complaint on the social network with a mix of indignation and irony.
"I can't imagine what we will do, those of us affected, for 30 or 40 days without electricity. Where do we charge our devices? What do we eat?" he wrote in a previous post, in which he also lashed out at those who labeled him a traitor for complaining: "The Android revolutionaries call me a traitor. I invite them to come to my house this next month, so they can give me a good lesson in ideological resistance."
The photographs accompanying the case update on Facebook show a poorly maintained street in Havana, where they placed the old transformer - with severe rust and damaged ceramic insulators - that was replaced.
Another photo shows the two new teams secured in the bed of a pickup truck.
In addition to installing the two transformers, the crew replaced all the wiring of the circuit, which had been spliced multiple times.
The neighbor also picked up rumors circulating in the neighborhood: that the transformer may have been damaged deliberately to demand money, and that this is precisely why the UNE sent a crew 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 residents towards the institutions.
Finally, he closed his publication with a warning regarding situations that have been reported in the capital: "Ah! And no minister lives around here. For the discerning."
The outage occurred last Saturday, according to the initial report from Díaz, who then stated that the circuit had failed again at the same intersection. He detailed that the neighborhood had electricity since 2:00 am, but by 5:48 pm the same houses as always were still without service and no one had come to repair it.
"This time I neither called nor reported nor asked. If anyone was interested, 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 crisis involving transformers that is impacting all of Havana. By the end of July, the capital was recording an average of 25 single-phase units damaged per day, with some days exceeding 60 breakdowns.
In June, the UNE acknowledged that there was no physical availability of replacement transformers and that there are only three specialized workshops to repair them in the country.
The pattern of complaints on social media followed by institutional responses has been repeated in several neighborhoods. The UNE installed two transformers in Guantánamo after a viral post that alerted about 21 days without electricity. Meanwhile, residents of Guanabacoa stood guard 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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