The Camagüey writer and journalist María Antonia Borroto Trujillo reported this Friday on Facebook that her neighborhood has been without electricity for 48 consecutive hours, and that when she tried to file a formal complaint with the electricity authorities, she was passed from one call to another until she was told to return on Monday.
Borroto Trujillo, a Doctor of Communication Sciences and a member of the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC), reported that after two days without service, she called the official number for the Electric Union again, 18888. "A very kind young woman answered, and she told me that our report is still pending —I say 'our' because several neighbors have insisted— and that she had no idea when they would come to fix the problem," she wrote.
When asked if such a prolonged interruption would grant them any priority, the operator referred them to the Municipal Basic Electric Office (OBE) customer service number, which is responsible for handling formal complaints.
What followed was a series of three unsuccessful calls.
In the first call, an official asked her to call back in three minutes to transfer her to the person in charge of complaints. In the second call, that person immediately hung up on her: "Call back in forty minutes. I'm currently attending to someone and I can't leave them hanging to assist you."
In the third instance, after that time had passed, the response was definitive: the person in charge had left, and there would be no service until Monday.
"But... I mean, I've been without power for more than forty-eight hours and I can't even file a complaint..." wrote Borroto Trujillo, recounting the conversation. "I don't know if he said anything, because I hung up. It all seemed like a mockery to me, and in the worst possible taste."
The post sparked a wave of reactions. One commentator captured the sentiment with a question: “Who cares about us?”. Another described the situation as “indifference after indifference,” while a third sarcastically remarked on the imposed wait: “Hey, anyone’s elbow and ear would cramp up in forty minutes!”
This episode is the most recent in a series that the writer has documented over the past few weeks. On July 31, she published an ironic "Basic Manual for Communicating with the Electric Company". The posts on August 6 and 7 accounted for "7 days, 172 hours, 10,320 minutes, 619,200 seconds without power" and coined a phrase that circulated widely: "The Revolution has ultimately become this: to charge everything that needs to be charged." Three days later, her neighborhood surpassed 10 days without electricity due to a malfunctioning transformer that collapsed every time they attempted to reconnect it.
The case reflects a crisis that overwhelms Camagüey and the entire nation. The Minister of Energy and Mines, Vicente de la O Levy, acknowledged in July before the National Assembly that some communities have gone up to 105 days without service due to damage to special transformers, and that the theft of dielectric oil reached volumes comparable to national production. The question that Borroto Trujillo raised weeks ago remains unanswered officially: “Will we be left in the dark forever? Is that the plan? [...] Does anyone really care about us?”
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