This Thursday, discrepancies between the National Electric Union (UNE) and the Ministry of Energy and Mines (MINEM) became evident through their social media posts, leaving the Cuban public uncertain about the state of their electricity supply. On its official Facebook page, UNE attempted to refute circulating claims of a massive power cut planned for the weekend, assuring that “there will be no scheduled interruptions” and that efforts were underway to improve the electricity supply nationwide.
However, just hours later, MINEM contradicted this assertion. Through its account on the social media platform X (formerly Twitter), it announced that “the forecast for the weekend mirrors today’s situation, so scheduled outages will persist due to the generation capacity deficit.”
These conflicting communications have deepened the confusion among citizens who face daily power disruptions, unable to predict with certainty whether outages will occur in the coming days. The lack of consistency between the statements from these two bodies highlights issues in institutional coordination amid an ongoing energy crisis that continually disrupts the daily lives of Cubans.
A Fragile System Struggling to Recover
These contradictory declarations come just days after the National Electric System (SEN) achieved its first synchronization last Tuesday following a collapse that left a large portion of the country without electricity for over three days. The rebooting of the system marked a significant step in restoring the service, yet the situation remains precarious.
Following the synchronization, UNE notified its users, warning that despite the system returning to a “normal operation regime,” issues were far from resolved: “There remains a generation capacity shortfall, so service interruptions will continue, but the system is now operating normally,” explained Lázaro Guerra Hernández, the General Director of Electricity at MINEM, in statements to Cuban Television.
Despite UNE's announcement of operational normalization, the Havana Electric Company issued an emergency alert this Thursday. It stated that service would be interrupted in two blocks of the capital between 10:00 am and 2:00 pm, underscoring the ongoing challenges to providing a stable and consistent electricity supply.