The Electric Union (UNE) reported this Saturday at 12:46 that the tripping of the 220 kV Nuevitas-Las Tunas transmission line caused a partial disconnection of the National Electroenergetic System (SEN) in the eastern region of Cuba.
The incident occurs at one of the worst moments for the Cuban electrical system this year. Since 06:00 this Saturday, the SEN has already recorded 1,222 MW affected, with a capacity of only 1,250 MW compared to a projected demand of 2,900 MW and an estimated deficit of 1,680 MW.
The 220 kV line connecting Nuevitas to Las Tunas is a critical electrical corridor: its shutdown could electrically isolate the entire eastern region, which includes Las Tunas, Holguín, Granma, Santiago de Cuba, and Guantánamo.
The new incident is linked to a regional disconnection that occurred just two days earlier, when a fluctuation in the transmission lines took Unit 1 of the Lidio Ramón Pérez thermoelectric plant in Felton offline and left the provinces from Holguín to Guantánamo without electricity.
The report from last Tuesday already warned about the extreme fragility of the system: units from the thermal power plants Renté, Felton, Santa Cruz, Nuevitas, and Antonio Guiteras —the largest plant in the country, located in Matanzas— were either under maintenance or out of service, leaving the national electricity grid with no buffer against any transmission failure.
So far in 2026, the SEN has accumulated at least eight total outages: two in March —the one on March 16 lasted for 29 hours and 29 minutes—, three in July, two in August, and one on September 18, the latter caused by the tripping of two high voltage lines originating from Matanzas, with a restoration that took 14 hours and 45 minutes.
Total disconnections are compounded by multiple regional partial outages, with the eastern region being the hardest hit.
On August 27, an outage isolated areas from Las Tunas to Guantánamo following the departure of Felton units, the Diez de Octubre CTE, and the Antonio Maceo CTE; the reconnection did not occur until the next day.
The generation crisis is structural: the system operates with chronic deficits exceeding 1,000 MW, and people in the eastern region of Cuba are experiencing power outages that surpass 20 hours daily.
On October 1 and 2, the maximum disruption reached 2,059 MW and 2,130 MW, respectively, figures that illustrate the magnitude of the energy collapse that preceded the new incident this Saturday.
After the eighth total disconnection of the year in September, UNE had reported that the system was connected "from Pinar del Río to Nuevitas," implying that the eastern region remained isolated; a description that, with the outage this Saturday, has once again become the reality for millions of Cubans.
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