La Unión Eléctrica (UNE) announced this Saturday that the National Electroenergetic System (SEN) had become "connected throughout the country", without clarifying that the reconnection of the transmission system does not equate to the return of electricity service in homes.
The announcement, shared on their official Facebook account, came a day after the eighth total blackout of the SEN in 2026, which occurred on Friday afternoon, when the successive failure of two 220 kV transmission lines —Matanzas-Cienfuegos and Matanzas-Santa Clara— left millions of people across the island without electricity.
The response from Cubans on social media was immediate and striking: dozens of comments from residents in multiple provinces contradicted official optimism with irony and frustration.
"What country? Because where I live, there has been no electricity since yesterday afternoon," wrote an internet user in the UNE's post, capturing the widespread sentiment.
Other users were equally straightforward: “I just found out that I don’t live in Cuba,” someone pointed out, while another summarized the contradiction in four words: “Connected, but without power.”
Complaints have come from Guantánamo, Las Tunas, Ciego de Ávila, Pinar del Río, Matanzas, Villa Clara, Sancti Spíritus, Granma, Artemisa, and Havana, with some citizens experiencing more than 34 hours or even days without electricity.
"In which country will it be? In another, because ours is the land of dreams," summarized another internet user, in a phrase that captured the chasm between the official statement and the reality experienced by millions of Cubans.
The situation in the capital was clear: the recovery in Havana barely reached 44.2% on the morning of this Saturday, with 126 out of 286 distribution circuits active and very few of the main water pumping systems operational.
The situation worsened due to a new breakdown at the Antonio Guiteras Thermoelectric Plant, the largest in the country, located in Matanzas: the collapse of the SEN caused damage to the economizer of its boiler, with "punctures at several points on the steam generator", as described by the plant's director, Román Pérez Castañeda.
The cooling of the boiler takes almost 72 hours, so the repair crews would not be able to intervene until the afternoon of Monday, September 21.
The "Guiteras" has accumulated at least 17 unscheduled outages so far in 2026, making it one of the most fragile links in a structurally deteriorating electrical system.
Instead of taking responsibility for that deterioration, the UNE described the work of its operators as conducted "amid a genocidal siege that prevents the arrival of spare parts, technology, and fuels," shifting the blame to the U.S. embargo.
However, the crisis is primarily a result of decades of mismanagement and neglect of the infrastructure: the Minister of Energy and Mines, Vicente de la O Levy, admitted in May that Cuba had “absolutely no fuel, no diesel” for electricity generation.
The last few months have seen maximum generation deficits exceeding 2,000 MW on multiple days, against a demand of around 3,100 MW, a gap that no Facebook announcement can bridge.
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