Residents of the 18-story buildings in Garzón, in Santiago de Cuba, have been without electricity service for approximately 40 hours, according to a report shared this Sunday on Facebook by journalist Yosmany Mayeta Labrada.
A neighbor living on the 10th floor of the complex, whose identity was kept confidential at their own request, described what the families in the area are going through as "inhumane."
According to their testimony, electricity arrived this Sunday around noon, but the supply lasted barely 10 minutes: a malfunction occurred in the so-called "caballito," and when it was repaired, the cycle of about two hours that was due to them had already passed without the residents being able to take advantage of it.
The situation is particularly serious due to the characteristics of these high-rise buildings. With the elevators out of service, residents are forced to climb up and down as many as 18 floors by stairs. Water also does not reach the upper floors because its distribution depends on a pumping turbine that requires electricity to operate.
"The saddest part is that we have had to start fetching water from the street in front and carry it up between 9, 10, and 17 floors multiple trips just to be able to bathe and cook; you wouldn't want to see how children of eight and six years old have had to start carrying water with little containers to help their mother and grandmother," commented a resident of the buildings.
"Here live the elderly, the sick, and children who cannot sleep at night. Everything in these buildings is more complicated. It brings tears to God's eyes to see how the elderly and children have to climb all those stairs," he recounted.
In her post, Mayeta Labrada emphasized the human aspect of the crisis: “One thing is to talk about blackouts from an office, and a completely different one is to climb 18 floors in the dark, without an elevator, in the heat, and possibly without water, after dozens of hours without electricity.” She concluded her statement with a direct demand: “After 40 hours, they need much more than explanations: they need electricity.”
The complex of buildings, known as Centro Urbano Sierra Maestra and popularly referred to in Santiago de Cuba as the "18 Plantas de Garzón," consists of five 18-story towers located on Victoriano Garzón Avenue, between Pedrera and San Miguel. Constructed in the 1980s using the IMS system, a Yugoslav technology for precast post-tensioned concrete designed with earthquake-resistant features.
The towers came to accommodate around 2,000 people. The five buildings are named after episodes and locations related to the guerrilla struggle in the Sierra Maestra: Turquino, La Plata, El Jigüe, Cinco Palmas, and Combate de Uvero.
Since June 16, the Electric Company of Santiago de Cuba reorganized the power outages into nine residential blocks, with only one or two hours of service per day for each block. In July, residents of the locality of Veguita de Galo reported 26 consecutive days without electricity due to a transformer failure.
Extended power outages in high-rise buildings also affect residents from other provinces. In July, a 12-story building in Santa Clara went without electricity or water for over 112 hours, facing the same issue with electric pumping. In the Garzón buildings themselves, that same month, there were warnings about the dangers of smoke and toxic gases from cooking with charcoal due to the inability to use electric stoves.
This Sunday, the National Electric System (SEN) recorded only 1,010 MW of availability against a forecasted demand of 3,250 MW, with a maximum projected shortfall of 2,125 MW. So far in 2026, there have been seven nationwide blackouts due to total disconnections of the SEN.
Related videos:
Filed under: