Energy emergency in Cuba: Regime announces it will increase its national crude oil production.

In the television appearance last Thursday, Cuban Prime Minister Manuel Marrero Cruz addressed, among other topics, the possibility of increasing national crude oil production, presenting this measure as part of the regime's future strategies in the tumultuous scenario of the energy collapse affecting the country.

Marrero, who was in Santiago de Cuba along with officials from the Ministry of Energy and Mines to inform about the current energy crisis, had to wait for some "technical difficulties" in the television signal to be resolved before making his appearance and thus highlighting how extremely critical the electrical situation is on the island.

Some of his statements, due to the chaotic nature of the transmission and the complexity of the information, went unnoticed by the Cuban public, such as the recurring emphasis on the production of national oil.

According to Marrero, the government seeks to enhance "the generation of thermoelectric plants that consume national fuel," with the aim "to see how we can make it more efficient, and there is the example we mentioned of Guitera and Felton," two of the plants on which the Cuban electrical system depends the most.

But the prime minister's idea goes a step further, in the midst of a scenario in which Cuba cannot even supply itself, the leader expressed the intention to "maximize generation with national crude."

For the official, “today we also need some investments, we have the potential to produce more national crude oil, which we need to achieve, and not just for our generation. If we produce more national crude oil, we can export it, and with those revenues, we can acquire other fuels that we need and even import supplies for the recovery of the system.”

However, the director of the Electric Union, Alfredo López Valdés, had explained at the beginning of the hearing that the characteristics of Cuban crude oil are not good because it contains a high level of sulfur, one of the problems he mentioned as a reason why the boilers of the thermoelectric plants frequently go offline.

"It is precisely that sulfur that directly affects the boiler, so at this time several of these thermoelectric plants are not generating at their maximum capacity because they are losing efficiency, and that is where it sends us a signal that we need to stop and take a 24-hour break, etc., to be able to perform maintenance," López Valdés pointed out.

Since last Friday, the island has been experiencing an intensification of its energy crisis, especially following the collapse of the electrical system caused by the shutdown of the most important thermoelectric plant, the Antonio Guiteras in Matanzas.

This fact caused some of the measures announced by the Cuban Prime Minister to remain unfulfilled, as the situation became much more complicated. From the suspension of activities in the state sector to protect the residential sector, they ended up without electricity, both for the state and residential sectors, in an event that has provoked various reactions in the internal order, as well as attention from international media, increasing pressure on the Cuban government to find immediate solutions.