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A Cuban court sentenced Alexis Benítez Babier to eight years of imprisonment for stealing 60 liters of dielectric oil from a generating plant, during a trial held as a deterrent measure in front of workers from the electric sector.
The Sala de Delitos contra la Seguridad del Estado of the Provincial People's Court of Havana was established in the special municipality to hear case number four of 2026, charged with the crime of sabotage, reported the official newspaper Victoria.
According to the oral hearing, the defendant worked as a B operator in the Electric Central Unit and acted in October 2024 with full awareness of the critical energy situation the territory was facing, worsened by the outage of unit MAN 6.
To commit the theft, he manipulated and rendered useless the lead seal that protected the access key to the oil of machine four at the MAN 1 plant and took possession of 60 liters of the lubricant MARTRON TI 4040, essential for the operation of the generators, it was revealed during the trial.
The court determined that "the removal of 60 liters of oil from machine 4 of the MAN 1 plant would have caused a drop in generation, already affected, from 14.7 MW to 11.5 MW, which would have left 50 percent of customers without electrical service in a day."
The total estimated impact was 24 megawatt-hours, with an economic loss valued at 4,477.70 Cuban pesos. As auxiliary penalties, public rights were revoked and a ban on leaving the national territory was imposed.
The case is not isolated. On Friday, another exemplary trial in Artemisa prosecuted a 36-year-old citizen for stealing 70 liters of dielectric oil from a transformer in Cayajabos, with a proposed sentence of 12 years.
In Matanzas, the theft of transformer oil increased during the first quarter of the year, with 40 individuals charged across more than 10 criminal networks.
The lieutenant colonel Roberto Domínguez Rodríguez from the Ministry of the Interior explained that "most of the time those who steal it do not do so for personal use, but to profit," reselling it on the black market as a substitute fuel at prices ranging from 600 to over 1,000 Cuban pesos per liter.
The legal framework supporting these convictions is the Ruling 475/2025 of the People's Supreme Court, issued in May 2025, which classifies acts that damage or steal components of the National Electric System as sabotage, rather than common theft, with penalties ranging from seven to 15 years under Article 125 of the Penal Code, and up to life imprisonment or the death penalty in aggravated cases.
Exemplary trials are held in front of workers from the sector and neighbors as the audience, in a deliberate strategy by the regime to deter these crimes, while the island remains engulfed in an unprecedented electrical crisis.
The defendant and their defense have 10 business days to file a cassation appeal before the Supreme People's Court once they receive the written notification of the sanction.
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