The thermal power plant Antonio Guiteras, the largest in Cuba, could be reconnected to the National Electric System (SEN) next Saturday, as estimated this Thursday by the plant's technical deputy director, engineer Elmer García Romero, in statements reported by journalist José Miguel Solís and shared on social media.
García Romero specified that the critical path for the ongoing maintenance involves completing around thirty welding seams, conducting metallographic verification, and performing pneumatic and hydraulic tests on the high-temperature reheater, an area that is difficult to access where work is carried out continuously, 24 hours a day.
"If everything goes as we expect, after noon on Friday the work will be completed and the pressure testing will begin, which may take up to six hours; from that moment, the startup process will commence," stated the technical deputy director.
In addition to welding tasks, the personnel work simultaneously on several fronts: electrical, automation, and valves, with special care given to all the involved components.
The current breakdown in the high-temperature heater presents six identified defects that require cutting pipes, replacing them, welding, and subjecting them to metallographic inspection and hydraulic testing. The plant director, Román Pérez Castañeda, had previously indicated that the startup could occur at some point on Friday if the tests went well; the estimates from the technical deputy director now push that expectation to Saturday.
This is the second breakdown in just a few days. The Guiteras managed to synchronize briefly with the SEN on September 27 with about 150 MW, but went offline again a few hours later due to a failure in the reheater. The chain of problems was triggered after the eighth national blackout of the year, which occurred on September 18 and 19, collapsing the SEN from Matanzas to Guantánamo and causing mechanical stress in the plant's boiler.
The details of the breakdown at Guiteras reveal the structural fragility of a facility that has experienced at least 17 unscheduled outages so far in 2026 and has not undergone major maintenance since 2010. Technicians and managers have repeatedly warned that a definitive solution would require a shutdown of about 180 days to replace approximately 500 tubes and execute between 1,000 and 1,200 welds, something that the authorities acknowledge has not been feasible to carry out.
While the plant remains out of service, Cuba begins October with persistent blackouts: this Thursday, Havana reported 267 MW affected and 100 distribution circuits interrupted, with additional impacts in other provinces due to a generation deficit.
The reaction of Cubans to the successive announcements of an imminent start has been one of skepticism and mockery on social media, reflecting the public's exhaustion in the face of an energy crisis that lacks a fundamental solution.
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