The director of the Provincial Electric Company of Matanzas, Alejandro Rodríguez Azpeitía, pointed out portable energy stations —popularly known as "ecoflow"— as one of the factors worsening transformer failures in the province, in statements reported by the official newspaper Girón.
The technical argument of the official is that a single portable station consumes approximately 1,200 W during the 40 minutes it takes to charge. If ten households in the same neighborhood connect their devices at the same time when electricity returns, they add 12 kW to a 50 kW transformer. "That is almost 20% of the load for which it is designed, and that damages it," stated Rodríguez Azpeitía.
The official explanation omits a detail that the official himself admitted during the same interview: the transformer factory has been "practically shut down" for about 15 days due to a lack of dielectric oil, and the province has not received new equipment. "They are damaged without replacement," he acknowledged.
The reaction on social media was one of sarcasm and outrage: Cubans point out that the regime shifts the responsibility for a structural crisis, caused by decades of lack of investment, onto the population, rather than acknowledging the equipment sent by their families from abroad.
And the fact is that the ecoflows are not a whim: they are mostly sent by the diaspora—from the United States and Europe—at a cost of between $549 and more than $1,150 per unit, in direct response to the State's inability to guarantee electricity. The blackouts in Matanzas exceed 24 consecutive hours in numerous areas, and the town of Cantel has accumulated 109 days without electricity or running water since July 10.
The collapse of transformers in Matanzas is alarming. As of October 27, 162 units were out of service: 37 of 19,000 kVA, 116 of 7,620 kVA, and nine of 2,400 kVA. The failures affect 5,687 customers and more than 15,000 people. The rate of deterioration is three to four transformers per day.
The oldest out-of-service transformer without replacement dates back to July 23 —70 homes in a hamlet before the industrial area of Matanzas have been without service for over three months— and the next one is from August 3. By mid-October, the province had already recorded 132 damaged transformers with no outlook for new deliveries, according to Radio 26.
Due to the shortage of equipment, the authorities in Matanzas announced a measure that reveals the depth of the collapse: they will install 12 disconnectors to free up 19 MW currently protecting hospital circuits and redistribute them to the rest of the network. In practice, hospitals will no longer have guaranteed continuous supply. The crisis has already had dramatic consequences in other provinces: at the Regional Center for Neonatal Surgery in Holguín, nurses had to manually ventilate newborns when power outages interrupted mechanical ventilators.
The systematic theft of dielectric oil further worsens the situation. Only in Matanzas, there were 175 thefts involving more than 55,950 liters stolen by the end of August, affecting 43 of its 98 substations.
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