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The Cuban Government’s Latest Salvation Plan: Domestic Oil

HAVANA TIMES – The blockade Cuba is currently facing on fuel imports has the dictatorship experimenting with every possible avenue in search of some breathing room, and one of them is trying to use the Island’s own oil, traditionally too heavy to be used in the country’s aging thermoelectric power plants.

For some, extreme financial strangulation is only the most visible aspect of current US policy toward Cuba, but with the US embroiled in a war with Iran, any other use of force is apparently off the table.

For the first time, the regime truly knows what a blockade is, because for decades it found lifelines in the Socialist Bloc, China, Venezuela, Iran itself, or Russia, and now nobody wants to get on board, among other reasons because payments are not being made and debts keep piling up.

With great fanfare, the official newspaper Granma published an article a few days ago about the tests being conducted on domestic crude oil, particularly at the Hermanos Díaz Oil Refinery in the eastern province of Santiago de Cuba.

According to the article, the third experimental run was a “decisive step” toward replacing imports and optimizing the country’s energy resources.

The results yielded encouraging figures, reported the newspaper. Not only improving on those of the two previous tests (in March and May) but also introducing key technological adjustments for handling this high-density crude, with its high acidity and significant sulfur content.

This is just one more experiment, of which we have long since lost count among the scores inventions of the Fidel era and those that came afterward, from moringa, as a food substitute, to the “monetary reordering” (the 2021 economic reforms), this time involving an oil that for decades was shown to be useful only for producing associated gas.

Now the........

© Havana Times