The Antonio Guiteras Thermal Power Plant, the largest in Cuba, experienced boiler malfunctions this Saturday as a direct result of the mechanical tensions caused by the total disconnection of the National Electroenergy System that occurred on Friday, marking the eighth general blackout of the year on the island.
The engineer Román Pérez Castañeda, general director of the yumurino block, reported that the cooling process of the boiler was immediately initiated and that the damage is believed to consist of "punctures at various points of the steam generator," according to reporter José Miguel Solís in a post on Facebook.
The cooling of the boiler takes almost 72 hours, so the teams from the Electric Power Plant Maintenance Company will not be able to start the inspection and repair until Monday afternoon.
At the time of the breakdown, the Matanzas plant had been online for 44 consecutive days with an average power output of 185 megawatts since its last integration into the system on August 4.
The contrast with the optimism displayed by the authorities just two weeks earlier is striking. On September 5, the same reporter Solís celebrated on Facebook that the Guiteras had been online for 30 consecutive days with the phrase “30 days online, who would have thought, right?”, which was presented as a milestone worthy of praise.
The longest streak of the year for the plant came to an abrupt end when the collapse of the national electrical system caused the tensions that damaged its boiler, closing a loop that the regime had tried to present as resolved.
The eighth general blackout of the SEN was triggered on Friday by the successive failure of two high-voltage 220 kV lines originating from Matanzas — the Matanzas-Cienfuegos and Matanzas-Santa Clara lines — exacerbated by unstable weather conditions, leaving over nine million people without electricity across Cuba.
The breakdown this Saturday is not an isolated incident. Between January and July, the Guiteras power plant accumulated at least 17 unscheduled outages of the electrical system, with the boiler economizer being the most affected component: over 293 hours out of service in the first five months of the year and more than 500 damaged tubes reported in June.
In July, the plant lasted only 26 minutes connected to the system before going offline again, and that same month, the regime chose to reward its workers with diplomas amidst the recurring breakdowns.
The structural deterioration of the facility has a fundamental cause that temporary fixes have been unable to reverse: the Guiteras has not received capital maintenance since 2010, and the technicians themselves have acknowledged that a comprehensive intervention would require about 180 days—an operation that the regime has admitted is necessary but has never carried out.
As the boiler cools down and Cuba awaits the slow restoration of electrical service following the eighth national blackout of the year, the Guiteras is once again out of commission just when it is needed the most.
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