Residents say three Micro 7 apartment buildings have gone a month without power

Families living in three apartment blocks in Micro 7, Santiago de Cuba, reported that their electricity has been out for more than a month. Their complaint, directed at the Electric Company, was shared on Facebook. Residents say the outage has remained continuous during that period, unlike the rotation between blackouts and hours with power that characterizes the block schedule for residential service.

The Soviet-influenced prefabricated buildings, constructed between the 1960s and 1980s, are located in the Jose Marti District. Their facades show deteriorating concrete, peeling paint and a lack of maintenance. In demanding the restoration of power, residents rejected the idea that their request should be treated as a favor from the company responsible for local electricity service and called for a solution to the prolonged interruption.

The area had seen other protests during 2026. Shortly before the complaint from these three buildings, a resident said she had been without power for almost an entire day. Signs demanding food, electricity and freedom also appeared in August after outages lasting as long as 22 hours. Those were earlier expressions of neighborhood discontent over blackouts in Micro 7, preceding the current report of the buildings' continuous disconnection.

The organization of service in the city had changed in mid-June, when the provincial electric company distributed outages among nine residential blocks. In some areas, service was reduced to one or two hours a day. Barely three days after announcing the reorganization, the utility itself acknowledged that it could not guarantee even that minimum amount of electricity to customers affected by the blackouts.

Other Santiago neighborhoods also experienced lengthy interruptions. Residents of Veguita de Galo reported in July that a transformer failure had left them without power for 26 days. According to their account, the replacement unit exploded before it had operated for two hours. In Mariana de la Torre, a wiring failure in another transformer caused a 48-hour outage in September.

That same September, residents of the Garzon complex described another episode of approximately 40 hours without electricity in their 18-story towers. The outage disabled both elevators and pumping systems. Residents had to use the stairs, in some cases to the top floor, and carry water up from the street. A woman living on the tenth floor called the situation they faced in the buildings inhumane.