A power deficit of 1,300 MW is forecast for today as more tankers carrying oil and fuel continue to arrive.
14ymedio, Havana, 18 March 2025 — After the collapse last Friday of the national electricity system (SEN), electricity is not the only thing missing for Cubans. In Havana, the image of elderly people carrying buckets or pushing wheelbarrows with water containers has become frequent. In some neighborhoods, the supply cycle was interrupted by the total blackout, and, since then, “not even one drop of water” has reached homes.
This is the case of Luyanó, in the municipality of Diez de Octubre, where the neighbors who talked to 14ymedio assure that they have been “more than a week”, since Monday, March 10, without water. Normally, they say, the service works every other day. The options to overcome the shortage range from appealing to the kindness of neighbors with wells to going to relatives with reservations to be able to bathe or cook.
In Nuevo Vedado, where the editorial staff of this newspaper is located, the situation is similar. “I only have a small reserve left, and I hope that this afternoon there is enough water in the building’s cistern to be able to pump it into a container,” says a resident in the area.
“I had to go to the Hermanos Ameijeiras hospital on Monday. and there were nurses complaining that they had not been able to wash their uniforms”
I had to go to the Hermanos Ameijeiras hospital on Monday, and there were nurses complaining that they had not been able to wash their uniforms because they still had no power in their homes,” adds the neighbor, worried about the hygiene of the employees who are exposed to diseases and infections. In the center, despite now having electricity, “the servers were down and there was no network,” she adds.
According to an article published yesterday in the State newspaper Granma, the “greatest complexity” with the water supply is in the capital. Interviewed by the official media, José Antonio Hernández Álvarez, director of Water and Sanitation in the province, explained that water service would not be available until “the afternoon-night of Wednesday” if the supply is restored.
“The stability in the pumping systems begins about 72 hours after being energized, in this case after the reconnection of the national electrical system, which collapsed last Friday,” Granma added.
The weekend of total blackouts has reminded many of the obstacles they faced at the end of the year, when the SEN suffered three power outages in three months. In Holguín, on the other side of the island, Manuel still laments that most of the food he had refrigerated ended up in the trash. “We had to bring food to my wife’s grandmother, who lives in the countryside about five kilometers from the city, because everything went bad,” he says.
He explains that this week everything has returned to the usual “normality,” at least in Havana. “The blackouts are now scheduled and will happen as before. But in the countryside it takes two hours and more to turn on the power, taking the programming schedule as a reference,” he says.
As of this Monday, and despite the fact that many Cubans continue to suffer the consequences of the total blackout of the weekend, the Electric Union began again to broadcast its usual report. For this Tuesday, the deficit is forecast at 1,300 megawatts, a number that has become standard in recent months and that represents almost half of the Island’s demand.
The situation is barely alleviated by the tankers that arrive on the Island and take time to distribute the tons of oil they bring. “It took the Corossol about 120 days to unload its precious cargo of urgently needed fuel,” Texas University expert Jorge Piñón told this newspaper about the ship loaded with 650,000 barrels of diesel that had been circulating around the Island since November before docking at the port of Matanzas on March 3.
The same is repeated, says the specialist, with the Marlin Aventurine, which has been waiting to unload in the operational part of the Matanzas Supertanker Base since March 5. On the horizon, with an expected arrival in Matanzas on April 1, he explains, there is another ship approaching, the Marlin Ammolite, with an estimated 330,000 barrels of fuel from France. “Does Cuba have a problem in the storage capacity in its logistics chain or a financial problem?” asks Piñón, who emphasizes that these three tankers “do not come from Mexico, Russia or Venezuela, where there would not be any kind of delay for payment reasons.”
They are all, for the moment, questions: “Is it Cuba who is paying in cash for the fuel in these three tankers? Or is it a third party, Russia or Venezuela, that is the counterparty through a credit to the supplier?” Not counting the freight, the expert estimates these three tankers carry fuel worth 85 million dollars.
Meanwhile, unit 6 of the Renté thermoelectric plant, in Santiago de Cuba; the 2 of Felton, in Holguín; the 6 of Mariel, in “maintenance in Artemisa; as well as the 3 of Santa Cruz del Norte, in Mayabeque; the 3 and 4 of Cienfuegos, and the 5 of Renté are out of the game.
Another 435 megawatts are not available in thermal generation, he says without offering explanations. And, finally, 42 distributed generation plants are not working due to lack of fuel, affecting another 176 megawatts.
Translated by Regina Anavy
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