The Cuban comedian Víctor Molina posted a video on his Facebook account in which he expresses, with evident frustration, that his area of Havana has been receiving only two and a half hours of electricity per day for nearly 20 days.
"I hope that this arrangement we've had for nearly 20 days, of only having electricity for two and a half hours a day, doesn't become permanent, because we really don't deserve this," Molina says in the clip recorded from his home.
The comedian, who resides in Havana although frequently visits the United States, recently returned from one of those stays abroad, which makes the contrast with the reality in Cuba even more evident.
In the video, Molina describes power outages that last up to 22 consecutive hours and points out that the supply has been shifted to the early morning, making it difficult to perform basic tasks. “Two and a half hours, and now they’ve decided to schedule it in the early morning. I really don't understand how we can have 22 hours without electricity and maybe just two and a half hours with power,” he laments.
The complaint extends beyond the practical: "Since we have no electricity, we don’t know if the Martians have arrived, if the world is ending, if we’re missing out on everything," she says before adding, "We don’t deserve this. There's no time even to do laundry. I've been wearing the same sweater for three days."
Molina's testimony aligns with the data recorded by the Electric Company of Havana in recent weeks. This Thursday, the capital had 91 affected circuits and 217 MW of interrupted load just by six in the morning, and the Freyre 2 circuit had gone 18 hours and 13 minutes without electricity.
On Sunday, the P322 circuit in Centro Habana accumulated 19 hours and 41 minutes of blackout, with 160 circuits affected throughout the capital.
The underlying cause is the structural collapse of the National Electroenergetic System (SEN): on Wednesday, the available capacity was only 1,017 MW against a demand of 2,950 MW, with a deficit close to 2,000 MW.
The deterioration accelerated in the middle of the month: on October 16, a fire in unit one of the Santa Cruz Thermal Power Plant reduced national availability to 740 MW, with a maximum impact equivalent to 75.5% of the country's demand.
"Two and a half hours, I repeat, and a half, which we measured. And now at dawn. Tough, tough," concludes Molina in the video, which garnered over 128,000 views and nearly 6,600 reactions in just a few hours.
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