Million-dollar Robbery at the Cienfuegos Refinery

Million-dollar Robbery at the Cienfuegos Refinery / Juan Juan Almeida
Posted on August 25, 2015

Juan Juan Almeida, 24 August 2015 — More than 500 barrels of fuel
disappear daily from the terminals or storage tanks of the Camilo
Cienfuegos refinery, located in the province of Cienfuegos on the
south-central part of the island.

The theft, in addition to being really ingenious, has an organization
that shows even seasonal patterns, revealing that there are fewer
robberies in summer than in winter.

The Cienfuegos industrial enclave, after being shut down in 1995 and
later materializing in the ALBA accords, with a remodeling and
modernization project that cost over $83 million, reopened its doors in
October 2007, as part of a large, mixed binational business between Cuba
and Venezuela. However, with a processing capacity of over 8,000 barrels
a day, the thefts are crippling and, let's say it, frightening.

The authorities say that the Cienfuegos Polo Petrochemical project
continues being a priority for both Governments, that they are
consolidating their methods and doing everything possible to lower the
statistics for fuel theft that continue to emerge. It's known that part
of the leakage occurs in "vampire operations," which are nothing more
than premeditated perforations in the pipes, where farmers clandestinely
take small quantities of diesel for local farming activities and/or
private provincial transport.

But those filterings are minimal and controlled by a systematic
cross-checking of plant security, an efficient anti-theft offensive in
conjunction with the national police.

The more important, apocalyptic, robbery, which doesn't seem to interest
any authority nor be suspected of being committed by a criminal with a
Robin Hood complex, and whose distribution is the result of misdeeds and
illegal gains at the service of the community, is centered on industrial
quantities of refined gasoline being taken out of the refinery.

With the same notoriety as a polar bear hibernating in a Holguín park,
"without anyone seeing anything," hundreds of daily barrels of gasoline
are packed in waterproof bags that normally are used for industrial
waste or to guarantee the organoleptic stability of specified products.

There's nothing discrete about it. The packages continue to mock the
sophisticated security system, and they hop, like lice on the heads of
babies, until they fall into the channel that flows into the Bay of Jagua.

Gasoline has a less specific weight than water; the packages float and
the tide finishes the work. Of course some bags break, and the spill
becomes a contaminant that directly affects the ecological equilibrium
of the zone. But that, it appears, isn't important either.

What's interesting, or at least surprising for an illegal traffic
impossible of being executed by a common criminal without having help is
that, as in a Spartan task of extraordinary implications, it's the
efficient members of the border troops who finally pick up the floating
bundles on the sea.

Who receives so much stolen gasoline? I don't know; I couldn't find out,
and the more I asked, the more no one wanted to answer. Only one
informed person told me:

"It neither returns to the refinery, nor is it lost in the black market."

Translated by Regina Anavy

Source: Million-dollar Robbery at the Cienfuegos Refinery / Juan Juan
Almeida | Translating Cuba -
http://translatingcuba.com/million-dollar-robbery-at-the-cienfuegos-refinery-juan-juan-almeida/