The National News of Cuban Television (NTV) experienced an interruption this Sunday, October 30, due to an electrical failure in its central studios during a Sunday broadcast.
The incident was shared on Facebook by journalist Javier Díaz. Allegedly, it had been deleted from the pages of the official Canal Caribe.
In the 49 seconds of the video, the sports section presenter is seen being interrupted by the blackout.
Later, a broadcaster had to apologize to the audience during the live transmission: "Greetings, unfortunately there was a power failure at the central studios of Cuban television."
After the interruption, the news program resumed its broadcast with a report on the visit of the Minister of Domestic Trade, Betsy Díaz Velázquez, to the province of Matanzas to oversee progress in gastronomic and service transformations.
This is not the first time that the main news outlet of the Cuban state has been left at the mercy of power outages.
In June, the NTV experienced a power interruption of about 15 minutes during its broadcast, as documented at the time by journalist Daniel Benítez: "For about 15 minutes, they were without electricity and had to play music and other informational breaks."
That same month, a failure at the Apolo Substation in Havana caused several thermoelectric units to go offline, including units 6 and 8 of the Mariel Thermoelectric Power Plant and unit 3 of the Renté Thermoelectric Power Plant, further exacerbating the generation deficit.
The Cuban electricity crisis has reached historic levels this year. On May 14, the worst deficit of the year was recorded: only 976 MW available against a demand of over 2,600 MW, which forced simultaneous cuts of up to 70% across the island.
At the beginning of June, the projected deficit was nearing 1,940 MW during peak hours, while the Electric Company confirmed that residents of Holguín would have just three hours of electricity per day, with some municipalities experiencing blackouts lasting up to 50 consecutive hours.
The channel that reports on power outages cannot guarantee electricity even for its own broadcasts.
The new incident of the Sunday NTV thus becomes a symbol of the depth of a crisis that the state media apparatus can no longer conceal.
Voices from within the system have broken the silence. At the end of May, Jeannette Juaristi Torres, a director associated with the Cuban Institute of Radio and Television and Canal Habana, published a viral complaint in which she rejected the notion that the U.S. embargo was the main cause of the crisis: "We are dying while alive," she wrote, pointing to the obsolescence of infrastructure, lack of maintenance, and fuel shortages as determining factors.
The national television signal had already experienced a 59-minute outage in August 2024 due to technical issues, and Canal Habana collapsed that same month due to a lack of electricity, events that illustrate how the energy crisis has been impacting even the institutions that the regime uses as informational showcases for years.
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