The Antonio Guiteras Thermal Power Plant, the largest electricity generation facility in Cuba, went offline again on Tuesday night, just 24 hours after being synchronized with the National Electric System.
This Tuesday, the Electric Union (UNE) announced on its Facebook page at 22:11, briefly stating “causes pending identification.” The plant had been connected at 22:06 on Monday, making the incident one of the most brief and humiliating in a long series of failed reconnections.
The reaction in the comments was immediate and devastating. “A sneeze and zassss,” wrote one user. Another summarized the pattern with surgical sarcasm: “La Fuiteras is more of a meme than Barcelona.” A third directly pointed to the management: “It spends more time being fixed than it lasts online. Gallo Dust."
The indignation was not limited to jokes. «Unresolved issues haha, this sounds like a novel title. It's a shame that what the people are living through is a series but of TERROR», wrote another person.
Someone else summarized the arithmetic of failure: «Five days of repairs, less than two online. They insist on generating 190 MW and wear it out. It's better to generate 150 and last longer, but you are stubborn».
Other users also questioned the repairs and the continuous starts of the thermoelectric plant. One comment warned that forcing repeated starts damages the plant from within: "Every time they ignite the boiler, until it reaches parameters to take on load, and then cool it down again, it adds a few hundred gallons. It's better to properly fix everything and make a lasting start than to keep patching things up."
Another user was more direct: "That boiler and economizer have reached their limit. The Guiteras needs to be completely shut down, undergo long-planned maintenance, and have a complete overhaul of its boiler."
The outage on Tuesday is the most recent of at least 17 unscheduled outages that Guiteras has experienced in 2026.
Only in October, the plant has experienced successive breakdowns: on October 4, it went down due to issues with the high-temperature reheater; on the 9th, it fell again due to a leak in the steam tempering line; and on the 14th, it suffered another breakdown in the economizer with additional damage to the low-temperature reheater.
Between the 15th and the 17th, technicians replaced 11 segments of pipe and carried out hydraulic and pneumatic tests. The result was a connection that lasted only 24 hours.
The plant, inaugurated in 1988 and with more than 38 years of operation, has not received capital maintenance since 2010. A comprehensive repair would require replacing more than 500 tubes, executing between 1,000 and 1,200 welding seams, and a shutdown of at least 180 days, something that the authorities have avoided scheduling.
The context in which this new drop occurs is catastrophic. This Tuesday, at 6:00 in the morning, the Cuban electrical system had 920 MW against a demand of 2,330 MW. For peak demand hours, UNE estimated a availability of 970 MW and a demand of 2,820 MW.
Power outages lasting over 70 consecutive hours have become routine: towns in Matanzas such as Manuelito, Bolondrón, and Unión de Reyes have exceeded 70 hours without electricity, while in Pinar del Río some circuits have accumulated more than 90 hours.
The electrical collapse affects the water supply: the regime admitted that 2.5 million Cubans —32% of those receiving water through networks— experience partial or total service interruptions, with 88% of the incidents attributed to electrical problems.
The Guiteras is the living image of the system. Completely failed, concluded a user. Just four days earlier, the UNE had described the plant as "the largest and most efficient unit block in Cuba."
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