Complaint in Playa draws attention to how blackouts are distributed
A resident on circuit 1242 reports outages lasting more than 20 hours and contrasts the situation with circuit 1244, where he says service remains available nearly all the time.
In Havana's Playa municipality, a resident on circuit 1242 reported that power cuts last more than 20 hours and that, once service is restored, his area has electricity only briefly. In the complaint, posted on Saturday, November 7, he compared that experience with neighboring circuit 1244, where he says power remains available almost all the time.
The post included a photograph of a streetlight on during the day at the intersection of 19th and 48th streets, which the resident identified as part of circuit 1244. He connected that image to his questions about the differences he perceives between the two circuits during power restrictions.
The author asked for the outages to be distributed more fairly and clarified that he was not seeking to have service cut for those who receive it. The complaint appeared in a Facebook group called Empresa electrica de la Habana, which brings together users and is not an official page of the state-owned utility.
Differences in the duration of blackouts between nearby areas had already prompted other complaints from Playa residents, along with requests for information about how officials decide which circuits receive electricity for longer periods. In July, the Electric Company stopped organizing outages by blocks and began managing them by circuit, a change that has led residents to question the distribution criteria.
In August, Elizabeth Gonzalez Aznar asked for the list of priority circuits to be made public and requested both the addresses of those areas and the reasons used to select them. That earlier request places the current complaint within a broader demand for explanations about how electricity is allocated in Playa.
On Monday, the Erol Bey floating power plant, operated by the Turkish company Karpowership, permanently left the port of Havana; its departure meant the loss of 63 megawatts of installed capacity. In July, Roberto Morales Ojeda, the Communist Party of Cuba's secretary of organization, acknowledged that misconduct had been reported in the electricity sector and attributed it to four or five workers.