Five multifamily buildings in a military community in the Casino Deportivo neighborhood of the Cerro municipality in Havana have been without electricity for over 48 hours due to a malfunction of the only operational transformer on a pole that has two units, according to a complaint posted on social media this Saturday.
The outage began on Thursday, September 24, around noon, when a loud noise signaled the equipment failure, citizen Mario Hui explained through his profile on Facebook.
Although the pole has two transformers, for months only one has been working, to which all the load of the other, which is no longer operational, had been transferred.
"For the past few months, only one was functioning, and it drained all the charge from the other, leaving the latter, which just stopped working three days ago," explained the whistleblower.
Residents reported the outage through the channels of the Electric Union (UNE) and even visited the offices in person; officials even arrived at the location of the breakdown, but as of this Saturday, the service had not been restored.
The outage also has a collateral effect on telecommunications. At the site of the state-owned and sole Telecommunications Company of Cuba S.A (Etecsa), located in front of the damaged transformers - at the entrance between Avenida La Ceiba and Final - are the cabinet and equipment that service the landline numbers with the prefix 7 637, which left hundreds of customers without service.
Nationally, the prolonged power outages have rendered approximately 56.5% of the telecommunications cabinets. During the most recent collapse of the National Electric System (SEN) on September 18, nearly 70% of the cabinets were rendered inoperable.
The case of the Casino Deportivo is not an isolated incident. In Calabazar, in the capital municipality of Boyeros, a transformer exploded in August following poor repairs, and no one from the Electric Company responded for two days.
In a similar case in Camagüey, the official response was to wait between 15 and 20 days to restore the service; and this same Sunday, residents of Caibarién, in the province of Villa Clara, reported that they had been without electricity for 12 days due to an unresolved breakdown.
In Havana, an average of 25 electric transformers break down each day, with days seeing over 60 units damaged, and out of 1,500 analyzed in the capital, 755 are operating overloaded.
The UNE acknowledged in June that there are no spare parts available in any province and that the country only has three repair workshops, in Havana, Villa Clara, and Manzanillo, with a combined capacity of about 70 units per day, which is insufficient to meet the accumulated demand.
The Minister of Energy and Mines, Vicente de la O Levy, admitted before the National Assembly at the end of July that the theft of dielectric oil exacerbates the collapse and that some communities have gone as long as 105 days without electricity due to damage to special voltage transformers that are difficult to acquire in the international market.
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