A community in Holguín lived for 60 full days without electricity following a transformer malfunction, a situation that Canal Caribe documented in a report shared on social media. The same team that was removed two months ago was recovered and reinstalled, thus avoiding the purchase of new equipment.
The reconnection did not put an end to the blackouts; it merely alleviated the situation slightly: the neighbors went from having no power at all to receiving it in two-hour blocks every twelve hours. Even so, they experienced it as a tremendous relief.
“It was two months of a situation where we had no power the entire time, and it has been a huge joy for us that they installed the transformer today. But we keep moving forward and fighting,” declared one of the residents in front of the cameras of the state channel. “Now we would have electricity from six to nine in the evening,” the woman shared with hope.
The technician who carried out the work explained the scope of the intervention: "Sixty days ago I removed this [transformer] and today we are making a division of the secondary circuit so that the community can receive the service again. All Cubans are suffering right now due to the overload," he said.
The case reflects an infrastructure crisis that overwhelms the province. In Holguín, there are approximately 120 affected transformers, according to the report itself. The "load coincidence factor" exacerbates the problem: when power supply is restored after a prolonged outage, all consumers turn on their devices at the same time, which can damage multiple transformers at once.
To reduce waiting times for electrical transformer failures, the Electric Company of Holguín has promoted the recovery of equipment in a provincial workshop that, with a stable supply of raw materials, could repair up to 60 transformers each month. According to information released on the matter, repairing one of these devices costs approximately 80,000 Cuban pesos, compared to nearly 6,000 dollars for importing a new one.
The provincial outlook is bleak even with the workshop in progress. The Electric Company of Holguín suspended the circuit rotation every 12 hours on October 17, maintaining supply only for the circuits that serve Lenin Hospital. In response to the announcement, an internet user summarized the collective sentiment with a single question: "Which rotation?"
This Saturday, three circuits in Holguín had accumulated 24 hours and 15 minutes of outages, with a provided demand of only 60 MW compared to a need of 240 MW, at 2:25 PM, according to data attributed to the provincial Electric Company.
The Minister of Energy and Mines, Vicente de la O Levy, warned on the 22nd that Cuba currently does not have fuel and does not expect to have any in the short term, which has resulted in a significant amount of inactive distributed generation. Cuba has experienced eight total disconnections of the National Electric System so far in 2026.
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