Guantánamo rejoined national grid, but residents said power remained out
The Electric Company first announced the province's disconnection and later restoration of the link; residents said service did not improve.
Guantánamo restored its connection to Cuba's National Electric System on Friday, October 30, but residents said they still had no electricity. For those neighbors, the reconnection announcement did not produce a perceptible change at home. Reactions shared on social media mixed frustration and irony over the gap between restoration of the province's grid connection and continued outages affecting parts of the population.
The sequence began with a notice from the Guantánamo Electric Company reporting that the territory had been disconnected from the national grid. Soon afterward, the company said the link had been restored. The two announcements came within a short interval, but the province's return to the grid did not mean every resident immediately had service. Residents' accounts focused on that difference.
User comments expressed dissatisfaction that outages persisted after the reconnection became known. Some questioned what the province's return to the grid meant in daily life if electricity had not returned to their homes. ‘We are still without power’ summarized that perception, while others said they noticed no difference before, during or after the announcement.
The situation was also associated with damage to provincial electrical infrastructure: 54 transformers were reported affected. That figure accompanies the context of Guantánamo's outages, although Friday's central information was the sequence from the disconnection notice to the later reconnection announcement. For residents who said they remained without service, connection to the national system was not equivalent to electricity in their homes. Their comments reflected the difference between the state of the grid link and the supply they received.