UNE

UNE traced Cuba's national blackout of 2 August, the year's sixth total power failure and its eleventh since late 2024, to a fault inside a Havana substation that tripped the Felton plant in Holguin, not the storm damage on a 220kV line that CNN and AP reported. The failure came a day after a partial outage had already struck five provinces, and the utility's own attempt to bring the system back up on 3 August failed too; whether the two reported causes reconcile is not established from UNE's account.

Seven thermal units were already offline when the fault hit, six days after Antonio Guiteras, Cuba's largest generating unit, stopped for the 20th time in 2026. With that little of the fleet still running, UNE had almost no spare capacity Left to absorb a single new fault.

UNE's National Grid collapsed three times in July 2026 before August's sixth annual failure, each collapse widening the year's record deficit. Unit 6 failed at Nuevitas on 6 July, Cuba's fourth total blackout of the year, leaving parts of Matanzas dark for up to 87 hours during a staged restoration. A 220kV line between Santa Clara and Sancti Spiritus failed on 10 July, cutting generation to 935 MW against 3,100 MW of demand; Felton unit 1 tripped on 14 July and collapsed the grid a second time, widening the deficit to 2,020 MW.

UNE's own 16 July bulletin recorded a 2,126 MW actual deficit the previous day, then projected it widening further to 2,240 MW, with only 990 MW available against 3,200 MW demand, the worst published shortfall of the year at that point. The 11 June sanctioning of CUPET, which licenses UNE's thermal-plant fuel, removed any near-term resupply route behind the deepening numbers.