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The Antonio Guiteras Thermal Power Plant (CTE), the largest in the Cuban electric system, completed its maintenance work on Wednesday and moved towards a new hydraulic test as a preliminary step for a possible nighttime start-up, according to an official update published by the plant on Facebook.
"Maintenance work has been completed. A hydraulic test will be conducted, and if positive results are obtained at night, the start-up process will begin," reported the plant located in Matanzas.
During maintenance work, 544 welding seams were inspected, of which 172 were repaired. In addition, the thickness was measured at over 850 points, which resulted in the need to replace five corbels.
This new outage comes just four days after the Guiteras went offline from the National Electro-Energetic System (SEN) on May 30, having been connected for less than 48 hours after being reconnected on May 28.
The cause of that last outage was a leak in the economizer. The director of the Electric Union (UNE) described the complexity of the failure on Monday: "There are 500 tubes," he pointed out to illustrate the magnitude of the damage.
The cycle repeats with a regularity that no longer surprises anyone. In May, the Guiteras left the SEN at least on the 5th, 14th, 24th, and 30th, accumulating between nine and eleven departures so far in 2026.
The underlying issue is structural. The plant has gone over 15 years without major maintenance —the last comprehensive work was done in 2010— and a complete intervention would require approximately 180 days of downtime, something that the authorities have stated they cannot take on given the country's energy situation.
This impossibility leads to partial and emergency repairs that do not address the underlying deterioration. The executive Román Pérez Castañeda denied in May that the faults are due to poorly executed repairs and attributed them to structural deterioration and failures in different locations.
The skepticism of the Cuban population regarding each new announcement of startup is palpable. When the plant generated 200 MW after a reconnection in May, Cubans responded with mockery on social media, a reflection of years of unfulfilled promises.
La Guiteras, with a 330 MW nominal capacity and in operation since March 1988, had a relatively stable performance in 2024: 323 days of operation and over 1.8 million MWh produced. The contrast with the extreme instability of 2026 illustrates the rapid deterioration of an infrastructure that the regime has neither been able to nor wanted to repair thoroughly for more than a decade and a half.
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