A new electrical failure left five municipalities in central La Habana without water this Thursday, after a trip in the 110 kV lines at the Cuenca Sur source caused a complete shutdown of pumping and a major breakdown at two points of the 78-inch main pipeline.
According to Aguas de La Habana via their official channels, the affected municipalities are Plaza de la Revolución, Cerro, Diez de Octubre, Centro Habana, and La Habana Vieja.
The company specified that pumping will be guaranteed to the hospitals of Príncipe and Hermanos Ameijeiras, as well as to part of Centro Habana, but warned that "the rest of the territories will be affected."
In addition to the five central municipalities, the breakdown also interrupted the pumping in La Fortuna, Capdevila, Mazorra, and areas of Alta Habana, which are part of the Boyeros municipality.
Water brigades in Havana are working to restore service, although the company did not provide an estimated timeline for recovery.
This is not the first time that a blackout has triggered exactly this same disaster. The 78-inch pipeline of Cuenca Sur has experienced repeated breaks since 2024, always due to the same mechanism: when the electricity is cut off suddenly, the moving water creates “water hammer” — sudden pressure variations — that fracture the pipe.
The pattern repeated itself in July 2024, when a power outage on the same 110 kV lines damaged the conductor in three places and damaged four pumping units. It happened again in September 2024, in September 2025, in August 2026, and several times during October 2026.
On October 6, Aguas de La Habana had already announced scheduled interruptions in the same municipalities due to electrical work in Cuenca Sur and maintenance of that same pipeline. The breakdown this Thursday occurs, therefore, on a system that had been under continuous repair for weeks.
The crisis exacerbating this incident is of national proportions. On Tuesday, Alexis Acosta, vice president of the Water and Sanitation Business Group of INRH, acknowledged that only 32% of the population supplied by networks was receiving the service, "either partially or fully, affecting around 2.5 million residents."
The INRH has documented that the lack of electricity and pump failures account for 88% of the national incidents of water scarcity, while drought explains only 4%.
The dependency is structural: between 80% and 85% of the water distributed in Cuba must be pumped, and the pumping stations require continuous electricity for 10 to 12 hours to operate, a threshold that is impossible to reach when outages exceed 20 hours in urban areas.
In the face of despair, more and more Cubans are seeking their own solutions. In Matanzas, the number of hand-dug wells in the La Playa neighborhood has increased from 20 to more than 40 in just a few months. "I never imagined I would have to dig a well, just as I never imagined I would have to cook with charcoal or install solar panels," Kevin Martínez, a restaurant owner in that city, told AFP, in a testimony that encapsulates the resignation of millions of Cubans facing a crisis made continuous by blackouts.
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