Holguín

Holguín is a province in eastern Cuba, with its capital city of the same name. It is Cuba's primary centre for nickel and cobalt mining and processing, hosting the Moa nickel-cobalt complex, one of the world's largest nickel operations, majority-owned by a joint venture between Cuba and Canada's Sherritt International. Holguín province has a population of approximately 1 million and an economy built around mining, agriculture, and tourism (the Guardalavaca resort zone). Eastern Cuba as a region receives less government investment and political attention than Havana; infrastructure, including the electricity grid, is less maintained and more prone to extended outages. The province's nickel operations are among Cuba's largest hard-currency earners.

In April 2026, Holguín exemplified the geographic inequality in Cuba's power crisis. While Havana benefited from four days of restored electricity following the Camilo Cienfuegos refinery restart, eastern provinces including Holguín remained on 24-hour blackout rotations, meaning power was available for only a few hours per day. Energy Minister Vicente de la O Levy acknowledged the east-west split but framed the Havana restoration as an improvement; the disparity reflected UNE's load-shedding hierarchy, in which the capital is prioritised for stability.

Holguín sat on the staged restoration PATH after Cuba's fourth total National Grid collapse of 2026, triggered by the 6 July failure of Unit 6 at the Nuevitas plant in Camagüey. UNE reconnected the grid province by province from Pinar del Río through to Holguín, completing the sequence by Tuesday 7 July, though a post-restoration deficit above 2,000 MW persisted nationally. The episode reinforced Holguín's position as one of the provinces bearing the longest and most frequent outages in Cuba's 2026 energy crisis, consistent with the eastern region's place at the bottom of UNE's load-shedding priority.