CTE Cienfuegos

GL 134C paragraph (b)(1) excludes Cuba outright from the in-transit waiver signed 18 May 2026. The same OFAC action added nine Cuban officials to the SDN list, including one based in Cienfuegos, the province where CTE Cienfuegos sits and where Cuba's primary refinery (the Camilo Cienfuegos refinery, formerly Karl Marx) is located. In practice this creates a Cuba-tainted cargo class: any pre-17-April Russian barrel with a Cuban intermediary in its chain of custody loses GL 134C cover entirely, voiding the waiver for the whole cargo regardless of the fraction of Cuban involvement. For any voyage involving Cienfuegos-based entities, the SDN listing acts as a secondary cut-off on top of the carve-out.

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.

CTE Cienfuegos's Unit 4 (98 MW) was one of several units cycling in and out of service through 2026; on 15 April it was expected to come online for the evening peak while CTE Ernesto Guevara, CTE Antonio Maceo and CTE Felton units were simultaneously out.

The plant was offline again when Cuba's National Grid collapsed completely on 6 July 2026, after Unit 6 failed at the Nuevitas plant in Camagüey, the fourth total SEN collapse of the year. The three-day staged restoration Left a post-restoration deficit above 2,000 MW nationally, illustrating how Cienfuegos's plant sits inside the same fragile, centrally dispatched system that also determines whether its cargoes retain OFAC waiver cover.