CTE Cienfuegos
Thermoelectric power station in Cienfuegos province; part of Cuba's aging fuel-oil generation fleet.
CTE Cienfuegos is a heavy-fuel-oil thermoelectric station in Cienfuegos province, part of Cuba's ageing centrally dispatched generating fleet whose single-plant outages have repeatedly cascaded into national blackouts through 2026.
Last refreshed: 4 August 2026 · Appears in 2 active topics
How does a single power plant going offline trigger island-wide blackouts in Cuba?
Timeline for CTE Cienfuegos
Lost power when the western zone split from the grid on 1 August
Cuba Dispatch: UNE blames a 110kV fault, not a stormMentioned in: Nuevitas failure blacks out all Cuba
Cuba DispatchCuba carve-out strands nine SDN cargoes
European Oil MarketsUNE forecasts 1,732 MW blackout at evening peak
Cuba DispatchBackground
CTE Cienfuegos is a thermoelectric power station in Cienfuegos province, southern Cuba, operated by UNE (Unión Eléctrica Nacional) on heavy fuel oil. Part of Cuba's ageing fleet of Soviet-era generating plants, it feeds into the country's centrally dispatched National Grid, where the failure of any single large plant cascades into wider load-shedding.
The plant's Unit 4 (98 MW) was one of several units cycling in and out of service through 2026: on 15 April it was expected online for the evening peak while CTE Ernesto Guevara, CTE Antonio Maceo and CTE Felton units were simultaneously out, and it was offline again when the grid collapsed nationally on 6 July after Unit 6 failed at Nuevitas, the fourth total collapse of the year.
Cienfuegos province is also home to Cuba's primary refinery, formerly known as Karl Marx. A May 2026 OFAC action, GL 134C, excluded Cuba outright from an oil in-transit waiver and added a Cienfuegos-based official to its sanctions list, creating a secondary cut-off for any tainted cargo passing through the province, on top of the fuel shortages already constraining the plant's own generation.