The general director of the Unión Eléctrica (UNE), engineer Rubén Campos Olmos, appeared this Monday before the cameras of Canal Caribe in Matanzas to explain the latest breakdown of the Antonio Guiteras thermoelectric plant, which was removed from the National Electric System (SEN) last Friday night due to a failure in the boiler's economizer.
The figure that Campos Olmos provided to describe the problem unintentionally summarizes the state of collapse of the plant: «We are talking about more than 500 tubes, with perhaps 1,000 to 1,200 cords, of these parts, of these curves that are failing us».
What the report from Canal Caribe portrayed as a heroic and patriotic response is actually the umpteenth emergency intervention on a facility that has been in operation for 39 years and that, between January and May 2026, was out of the system at least 12 times, accumulating 293 hours out of service due solely to defects in that same component.
Campos Olmos himself admitted on camera that in just two weeks, the machine had malfunctioned three times in the same area: "People might wonder, in just two weeks, the machine has had three incidents in this same area of the malfunction in the inlet header of the economizer... but it's simply not possible to change all those curves in such a short time."
He also acknowledged that the leak in the boiler "accounted for almost 70% of the actual time the machine was out" during the previous year, adding that "it's not exactly that things are done poorly where we work, there is a quality control system, there is an inspection process."
What Campos Olmos did not mention is that the plant was reconnected to the SEN on May 28 after four days of repairs, and it went offline again less than 48 hours later. The plant's director, Román Pérez Castañeda, had explained that a complete repair of the economizer would take almost a month, and a comprehensive capital maintenance would require 180 days.
The economizer is made up of 136 elements, each with three tubes, and the failures have occurred in different areas of the same component, indicating a widespread wear that partial repairs cannot reverse.
The central character of the report is equally revealing: Campos Olmos was the director of Guiteras itself before being promoted to general director of UNE in March 2026. The man who now publicly explains why the plant fails time and again is the same one who managed it for years. His predecessor, Alfredo López Valdés, was dismissed in April 2026.
The pattern of statements regarding "tubes" in Cuban thermoelectric plants is not new. The Minister of Energy and Mines, Vicente de la O Levy, warned in May 2024 that the Felton thermoelectric plant needed to clean its 22,000 tubes for optimal functioning. In May of this year, the minister himself acknowledged that the country was in a situation that was "acute, critical, and extremely tense" and "without fuel."
The report from Canal Caribe, true to the official script, attributes the obstacles to "the economic, financial, and commercial war imposed by the United States government against Cuba," while omitting that the capital maintenance has been delayed for years due to decisions made by the regime itself.
The authorities promised that Guiteras could synchronize with the SEN again next Tuesday, contributing about 200 megawatts to a system that recorded a record deficit of 2,153 MW in May.
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