In the early hours of this Wednesday, western Cuba suffered a blackout general due to a partial outage of the island’s Electrical System.
The disconnection initially affected the provinces between Pinar del Río and Cienfuegos, including Havana, according to journalist Lázaro Manuel Alonso reported on Facebook.
According to the communicator, the Unión Eléctrica – which had not notified of the failure in its networks – was investigating the cause of what happened.
In a second postassured that the Antonio Guiteras thermoelectric plant, in Matanzas, was online, while the provinces of Pinar del Río, Artemisa, Mayabeque and the capital remained without electricity service.
For its part, the Ministry of Energy and Mines specified in X that the disconnection occurred around 5:00 in the morning and that the affected territories were between Pinar del Río and Mayabeque, which coincides with Alonso’s second note.
The entity indicated that it was already working on recovery, although at that time it did not explain the cause of the fall of the Electrical System in western Cuba.
Around 5:00 this morning a SEN disconnection occurred in the western area. From Mayabeque to Pinar del Río.
Work is already underway on recovery.— Ministry of Energy and Mines of Cuba (@EnergiaMinasCub) December 3, 2025
Already in the morning, in a television intervention, Lázaro Guerra Hernández, general director of electricity of the Ministry of Energy and Mines, said that the disconnection occurred after a failure in a transmission line that links the Santa Cruz and Guiteras thermoelectric plants.
The director pointed out that this produced an overload that took units from Mariel, Santa Cruz, Cienfuegos and Felton offline, although the latter had already been connected. according to the Electrical Union (UNE) while Céspedes 3 was in the startup process.
Guerra Hernández stated that the process of energizing substations in the west was underway to progressively restore electrical service, while at around 8:30 AM Havana had 44 MW connected to the system. according to the UNE.
One more fall
This Wednesday’s partial outage adds to others that have been occurring since last year, including five total disconnections.
The most recent general one occurred last september after an “unforeseen departure” from the Antonio Guiteras thermoelectric plant and a few days after a breakdown in a 220 kV line would have disconnected the eastern region.
In October There was another one partially due to a “parameter oscillation”, although its scope was short and could be resolved in a few hours, unlike what happened with the general falls.
This new incident also has as its setting the current worsening of the prolonged energy crisis that Cuba has been suffering for several years, mainly due to the age and poor condition of its thermoelectric plants and the chronic fuel shortage.
It occurs in the midst of a new peak of blackouts that brought the maximum impact to 2105 MW last Monday, a new negative record for the island. This, while the availability of generation is in the red and cannot cover even half of the estimated demand.
