Cuba Goes On An Electricity Diet
Cuba Wednesday night announced measures to cope with its prolonged energy crisis. With national output down to 54 percent, Havana's 2 million residents have been experiencing daily outages of five hours or more since August.
Those blackouts, announced Vice President Carlos Lage, will now be institutionalized throughout the island. But he warned that the steps are being taken not to reduce the current blackouts but to prevent even more failures in the electricity supply.
Appearing on state-run television, along with President Fidel Castro and specialists from the energy sector, Lage read a list of power-saving steps that include the closing for at least one month of 118 industrial installations, among them Havana's important Antillana de Acero steel mill and the Artemisa cement plant.
Also, from now on retail stores will close their doors at 7 p.m.; state-owned entities will reduce after-hours security lighting to a minimum; and air conditioners will be turned off in most government offices and factories during peak hours of 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. and 7 p.m. to 11 p.m.
Two of the new measures will be felt by everyone: daily nationwide rolling blackouts and the keeping of Daylight Savings Time this winter.
The announcements cap a summer of bad news for ordinary Cubans, already feeling the pinch provoked by President Bush's harsh new measures that limit family visits to once every three years and restrict cash remittances back home.
American refrigerators from the 1950s have struggled to keep cool despite the fluctuating electricity flow but tension among their owners prompted Castro to appear on national TV for the past three nights to painstakingly explain the problem. He told viewers of the "Round Table" political talk show that the crux of the problem was a lack of generating capacity, not current high oil prices of nearly $50 a barrel.
Office worker Matilde Velazquez watched the "Round Table" with her family. "Everyone knew there was a problem but the information as to why was missing," she says. "My youngest son kept asking, 'why is there no electricity if we're getting petroleum from Venezuela.' Fidel answered his questions."
Cuba imports 53,000 barrels daily of Venezuelan crude oil and derivatives. That's nearly half of all the oil consumed by the country. The other half is supplied by domestic production. Over the past 10 years, the island's oil and gas production has risen from under 20,000 barrels per day to some 75,000 barrels, enough to meet 90 percent of the electric industry's demands. That solution is also part of the problem. Cuban petroleum is high density and high in sulfur, which tends to clog up the machinery and force the thermoelectric plants to close down for maintenance as frequently as three or four times a year, instead of just once or twice.
The crisis began last May after a major break at one of the island's main generating stations, the Antonio Guiteras in Matanzas province east of Havana. That power station remains closed and leaves Cubans with 15 percent less electricity.
After spending three nights glued to her television, auditor Nidia Cuevas concluded, "There is a deficit in generating capacity that will last a long time." The measures, she says, "are extreme" and she doesn't like the idea of getting up for work while it's still dark. "But what are we going to do?" she asks.
On the plus side, Cuevas concedes Castro's long, detailed explanation was necessary. "There were so many rumors flying around. Some people said there'd been sabotage at the Guiteras plant. Others said Venezuela had stopped sending oil."
Castro called for the residential sector to cooperate in efforts to save energy. But he took the self-employed, particularly those running private restaurants in their homes, to task for their high consumption patterns.
"The socialist state is subsidizing this electricity, which costs them 10 percent of what it costs us to produce," he said disapprovingly.
Listening to him read a long list, apparently obtained from the last census, of electrical appliances in the home of one private restaurant owner, retired veterinarian Caridad Fuentefrias exclaimed, "That's what gets my goat. By consuming so much electricity those people are exacerbating differences that already exist. Maybe the government should raise their electricity rates or make them pay in U.S. dollars."
The Cuban president, however, accepted blame for not realizing the seriousness of the problem earlier. "An electrical system that has all these problems is a weak system," he said.
Castro pledged investments to increase Cuba's generating capacity but admitted the crisis could last for months to come. Other specialists taking part in the televised appearance warned that it could take from six to ten years and more than $20 million to bring the nation's entire power grid up to standard.
Cuba has seven large thermoelectric plants scattered across the island but because the grid is completely integrated, a problem or even maintenance at any one plant reduces the supply of electricity to the whole system.
As of Thursday the local press across the island is expected to publish the timetable of blackouts but pilfered copies of the scheduled outages for Havana residents were already circulating Wednesday morning. The capital, according to Castro, is the "Gold Medalist" of energy consumption, leading all the other provinces by a wide margin.
By Portia Siegelbaum