Miguel Díaz-Canel celebrated this week as a historic milestone the fact that Cuban national crude can be refined, when in reality the Cabaiguán refinery has been processing that same oil since 2010, as acknowledged by the deputy director of CUPET during the April session of the National Council of Innovation (CNI).
The announcement from the regime revolves around a thermoconversion technology developed by the Oil Research Center (Ceinpet), affiliated with the Union Cuba Petróleo (CUPET), to process the heavy crude from the northern oil belt, characterized by its high density, viscosity, and sulfur content.
We broke a criterion, a taboo that existed in the country, that national crude could not be refined, that it could not be used for other purposes, and practically we had condemned it to be used directly in a group of thermoelectric plants," declared Díaz-Canel, unleashing a propagandistic enthusiasm that contrasts with the increasingly acute energy crisis in the country.
What the regime omitted is that thermoconversion —industrially known as visbreaking or thermal cracking— is a process widely used in refineries around the world for decades, with a global installed capacity of approximately four million barrels per day since 1996.
What the Cuban regime announced is not even the construction of a facility with technology for this type of processing, but rather the transition to a pilot plant yet to be built at the Sergio Soto refinery in Cabaiguán, in Sancti Spíritus. The presidential statement did not specify either the cost or the timelines for the construction of the pilot plant.
The results obtained so far are modest: in an initial experimental run at the Hermanos Díaz refinery in Santiago de Cuba, enough naphtha was produced to cover only 15 days of oil and gas production in Varadero, along with a diesel that is "not of special quality, but is marketable," and a fuel currently under evaluation for power plants and the nickel industry.
Díaz-Canel himself inadvertently acknowledged the magnitude of the regime's planning failure: "To my surprise, the issue was not starting research; there was already established science, there was research; what needed to be done was to organize and articulate it."
In other words, the research had existed for years, but the government had not articulated it, while Cuba was sinking into the worst energy crisis in its history.
The announcement comes at a moment of unprecedented energy collapse. On the very day Díaz-Canel was celebrating the supposed scientific advancement, the electrical deficit exceeded 1,333 MW, with blackouts lasting up to 18 hours in several provinces.
Cuba produces only about 40,000 barrels of domestic crude oil daily, covering just 40% of its consumption, and needs eight fuel ships per month without receiving even a fraction of that amount.
The regime lost its main suppliers: Venezuela, following the capture of Nicolás Maduro on January 3, 2026, and Mexico, which suspended shipments on January 9 due to U.S. sanctions. The only recent relief was a Russian donation of 100,000 tons of crude oil that barely covers one third of the monthly demand.
In March 2026, at least three total collapses of the National Electroenergetic System were recorded, the seventh in 18 months. This Saturday, a new automatic frequency trip left areas of Playa and Havana del Este without electricity, the sixth incident of this kind in Havana so far in 2026.
The pattern is clear: while Cubans endure nearly 18 hours of power outages daily, the regime publishes announcements of "scientific advancements" based on globally recognized industrial technology, limited experimental results, and pilot plants that do not yet exist, all framed within a discourse of energy sovereignty that fails to light even a single bulb on the island.
A technology known for decades
Far from being a Cuban discovery, the so-called thermoconversion is part of a set of standard technologies in the international oil industry used since the mid-20th century for processing heavy and extra-heavy crudes.
Processes such as visbreaking, thermal cracking, or coking are commonly applied in countries with large reserves of heavy crude oil, such as Venezuela, Canada, or Mexico, where they help to reduce the viscosity of oil, improve its handling, and obtain marketable derivatives.
In this context, the regime's announcement does not represent a technological innovation on a global scale, but rather a local adaptation of already established methods, applied under conditions of scarcity of supplies and industrial limitations.
Additionally, the acknowledgment that this research has existed for years reinforces the idea that this is not a recent development, but rather a delay in its implementation within the country's energy strategy.
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