Seeing them come and go in and out with their work uniforms or full of grease is very common. They laugh and tell stories among themselves; they are made of steel, because that is what their work is all about, making new parts, fixing broken ones, innovating, and welding. The workers in the workshops of the base business unit of the Territorial Fuel Marketing Division (CUPET in Spanish) are men who for a long time have remained anonymous.
Eberto Núñez Velázquez, a welder in the Transport area there, is one of the oldest innovators in the company. His performance goes beyond the eight working hours, and although 26 talked to him some time ago, we went back to his steps, because he does the impossible to keep the work of the Revolution there.
In 2023, his major inventions are directed to the solutions made to the distributor cars, with which he participated in ExpoANIR in June. At the event he presented two works, always looking for ways for UEB to get ahead in fuel distribution.
"Among the adaptations made are two cages for the cars that bring the liquefied gas cylinders from Santiago de Cuba. They were paralyzed and I started them up because that's what we are here for," says Eberto with total tranquility and confidence in his work, while touring CUPET's workshops with the press team.
"I also have another of my most important jobs here, and that is on the car that they call "el pimientón", with a capacity of 500 bullets, because it lost its differential. I fixed it and recovered it, and it is already making its trips to Santiago de Cuba, which saves the company a total of 10 million 877 thousand pesos."
He has inventiveness in his hands and no matter what the failure is, he looks for a way to provide a solution, and this is because the parts enter the workshop, but they are different to the needs of the vehicle, so it is necessary to adapt them and Eberto is very good at that.
A few years younger, but with the same desire to do this is Osley Cutiño Jorge, an industrial mechanic since 2008 who works in the Industrial Maintenance Workshop, where he is dedicated to the repair of pumps, meters, filters, conservation of tanks, fire pumps, compressors; because in this area the repair of everything that moves the fuel is attended.
"Here we worked in teams, we took on the task of executing the assembly of the fire pump, adapting the pump of the cars. We also made the water cannon for the fuel tanks, an invention that is going to be generalized in the country."
"It is a cannon that will cool the fuel tanks in case of fire and it works in the form of a fan. In Cuba this type of tank that we have in the UEB Comercializadora did not exist, it only had hoses in the normal piping system. Now it has a lance and rotates 360 degrees," says Osley.
As a result of the fire at the Matanzas Supertankers, the protection measures in each unit of the country were reviewed, and this was a problem that was detected in all of them, the cooling system. From there the task arose, the innovators had to find a way to make an adaptation that would help dampen a phenomenon of this type.
Osley explains that these are pipes used to load the trucks. We serviced the turning systems and made adaptations to cool the tanks," he says. This innovation replaces imports, in 2018 this same equipment, in Europe, had a cost of €928 per barrel."
These new types of equipment are already approved for use if necessary, they have a range of 20 meters and it is enough to open the valve so that the man does not have to approach the fire.
These innovators are among the most outstanding within the UEB of Fuel Commercialization in the province, and their incentives are always based on solving real problems not only in the territory's entity but also in the nation.
 Water cannon, Osley's innovation, and his work team. |
