Antonio Guiteras
Cuba's largest thermoelectric plant, Matanzas; shut down seven times in 2026.
Guiteras broke down for the 20th time in 2026 on 26 July, UNE's bulletin showed, leaving just 1,150 MW available against 3,250 MW of demand and 64.6 per cent of Cuba dark at peak, with seven other units already offline.
Last refreshed: 4 August 2026 · Appears in 1 active topic
Why does Cuba's biggest power plant keep failing, and who pays the cost?
Timeline for Antonio Guiteras
Suffered its 20th stoppage of 2026 on 26 July
Cuba Dispatch: Guiteras stops a 20th time, 64.6% darkMentioned in: Felton trips, and the grid falls again
Cuba DispatchMentioned in: Nuevitas failure blacks out all Cuba
Cuba DispatchMentioned in: 64% of Cuba goes dark at once
Cuba DispatchMentioned in: SEN splits east from centre at 06:09
Cuba DispatchBackground
Antonio Guiteras is Cuba's largest single thermoelectric generating unit, sited in Matanzas province, and the clearest public gauge of the state of the National Grid: when it is running, roughly one-tenth of Cuba's generating capacity is online; when it fails, the deficit UNE publishes each evening jumps immediately.
The plant was built in the 1980s with Soviet-era engineering assistance and named after the revolutionary Antonio Guiteras Holmes. Its boiler system, now more than 36 years without a comprehensive overhaul, is the chronic failure point. Guiteras burns heavy fuel oil, supply of which has run through Russian tankers since Venezuelan crude was cut off by US sanctions, tying the plant's reliability directly to the island's fuel-import position.
Plant management has said the boiler needs roughly six months of continuous maintenance to fix properly, but Cuba's fuel situation has made taking the unit fully offline for that long impossible. The result is a pattern of repeated short-notice failures rather than a single decisive repair, with each restart understood internally to shorten rather than lengthen the interval to the next breakdown.
It failed for the 20th time
Guiteras broke down for the 20th time in 2026 on 26 July, UNE's bulletin showed, with only 1,150 MW available against 3,250 MW of demand, leaving 64.6 per cent of Cuba dark at peak. Seven further thermal units were already out alongside it, UNE's figures showed, leaving the grid almost no spare capacity to absorb another failure.
The 20th outage extends a run that has accelerated through the year: the plant's ninth failure came on 14 May after a boiler leak, when its director said the unit needed 180 days of maintenance it cannot be spared for. Each restart since has shortened, rather than lengthened, the interval to the next breakdown.
Its reliability tracks fuel supply
Guiteras's Unit 1 was among the plants already offline on 6 July when a separate failure at the Nuevitas plant in Camaguey tripped Cuba's National Grid, the fourth total collapse of 2026. Restoration took three days; Matanzas, the province that hosts Guiteras itself, went dark for up to 87 hours, the longest local outage of the whole restoration.
Guiteras runs on heavy fuel oil that has depended on Russian tanker deliveries since the US Treasury's 18 March carve-out cut off Venezuelan crude, tying the plant's reliability directly to the island's fuel-import position. By late July it had failed at least 20 times in the year, each restart understood internally to shorten rather than lengthen the interval to the next failure.