MEXICO CITY.- The Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) of Mexico removed thousands of parts and specialized equipment, valued at more than $700,000, from its facilities to send them as a donation to the regime. Cuba, according to media reports from the Aztec country.
Latin A Mexican news portal based in the US, detailed that the state company made a first delivery of materials with the argument of helping the dictatorship of Miguel Diaz-Canel after Hurricane Ian hit the Island on September 27, 2022, the website reports Cuban Diary.
However, five months later, when electricity service had already been restored throughout the island, the CFE made two new deliveries with the justification that the emergency continued.
The three donations included 112 tons of equipment and more than 5,500 pieces.
According to Latinus, which accessed documentation requested through Transparencia, on February 27 the CFE sent a valve worth 4.7 million Mexican pesos from the Adolfo López Mateos thermoelectric plant to the Antonio Guiteras plant in Matanzas.
Two months later, on April 21, the CFE made a new donation from the same plant located in Tuxpan, Veracruz. In this case, a thousand square meters of metal roofing and 16 pieces including regulators, gates, industrial switches and hydrogen coolers, all with a value of 482,300 Mexican pesos.
In addition to the delivery of the goods, Mexico’s Federal Electricity Commission sent 16 specialists to Cuba to help restore power after Hurricane Ian. The workers traveled to the island on September 28 and 29, 2022, and most returned to Mexico on October 10, according to several CFE reports.
The documents also revealed that 16 flights were made to ship the 112 tons and 5,500 pieces with an estimated value of 7.6 million pesos: 69 thousand meters of cable valued at 3.5 million pesos and 9,606 insulators for electricity poles with an estimated value of 3.2 million.
The CFE Board of Directors said in its report that this material was not “indispensable” and that its delivery did not affect the system.
The CFE processed the electricity supplies as donations to the company ENERGOIMPORT, owned by the Ministry of Energy and Mines of Cuba. In this way, it avoided the commercial and financial embargo that the United States has on Havana. In recent years, electric companies in Europe and North America have stopped doing business with ENERGOIMPORT for fear of sanctions.
Cuban power plants are beyond their useful life cycle, with more than 35 years of operation.
Jorge Piñón, director of the Energy Program for Latin America and the Caribbean at the University of Texas, said in a recent article published in DIARIO DE CUBA that “there is no short-term solution. The total recapitalization of the system is the only solution, and (the Government of) Cuba does not have what it needs for that: time (three to five years) and money (five to eight billion dollars),” he emphasized.
Source: EDITORIAL/With information from Diario de Cuba