2025.1

Esta es la Hidroeléctrica del Volga aquí en Togghliati tiene 22 turbinas de 100,000 kilowatts cada una. ¡un fenónemo!

Printed (Russian): "Тольятти. Волжская ГЭС им. В. И. Ленина / Фото Б. Круцко"; "Издательство «Планета». Москва, 1972." Printed codes: "А02545-72 / 8в-174 / Ц. 3 к. / З. 1110 / Тип. № 5"; card number "10"; Planeta logo. Manuscript (Spanish, blue ink): "Esta es la Hidroeléctrica del Volga aquí en Toghliati tiene 22 turbinas de 100,000 kilowatts cada una. ¡un Fenómeno!" No signature, address, stamp, or postmark present.

Single postcard (one leaf, printed both sides).

The depicted hydroelectric is not the Volga HPP at Volgograd, but the V. I. Lenin Volga HPP at Tolyatti. This is worth clarifying because there are two hydroelectric stations on the Volga that are sometimes confused: this one — formally the V. I. Lenin Volga HPP (Волжская ГЭС им. В. И. Ленина), today officially named Zhigulyovskaya / Zhiguli HPP — sits between Zhigulyovsk and Tolyatti in Samara Oblast (then Kuybyshev Oblast). Construction began in 1950; the first turbine went online December 29, 1955; the station was completed in 1957 and renamed after Lenin on August 10, 1958. From 1957 to 1960 it was "the largest hydroelectric station in the world", and it remained one of the most heavily celebrated icons of Soviet industrial achievement throughout the postwar era. The downstream Volga HPP (at Volgograd, completed 1961) is the other — they are routinely conflated, including in postcard-text recall. The Tolyatti station's actual specifications differ slightly from the postcard message: - Turbines: 20 Kaplan-type units (not 22). Leopoldo Arús Caraballo may have been thinking of the downstream Volgograd Volga HPP, which does have 22 turbines — the two stations are easily conflated. - Per-unit output (1972): about 115 MW each (originally rated 105 MW; later upgraded). Leopoldo Arús Caraballo's "100,000 kilowatts cada una" (= 100 MW each) is a reasonable round-number for what an enthusiastic visitor might be told or remember. - Total installed capacity (1972): approximately 2,300 MW. Leopoldo Arús Caraballo's implied figure (22 × 100 MW = 2,200 MW) is close. These small inaccuracies illustrate what the station looked like through a Cuban technical visitor's eyes when scaled back to the back of a postcard, with the awed punch line "¡un Fenómeno!" doing most of the work the precise numbers would have done.

Tolyatti (Togliatti / Тольятти) is itself a noteworthy place. The city was renamed in 1964 from "Stavropol-on-Volga" after the Italian Communist leader Palmiro Togliatti died that year. It was massively expanded through the 1960s–70s as a flagship Soviet industrial city, especially via construction of the VAZ (Volzhsky Avtomobilny Zavod) automobile plant — built 1967–70 in cooperation with Fiat to produce the famous Lada — which made Tolyatti synonymous with Soviet consumer-industrial modernity. A Cuban technical visitor arriving in 1972 would have been encountering a city that was effectively the USSR's poster child for industrial achievement, with the V. I. Lenin HPP as its visual anchor.