In May, the Antonio Guiteras plant in Matanzas, which supplies 15 percent of Cuba’s electricity, was shut down for routine maintenance, which was scheduled to last four weeks. During the shutdown critical parts of the generating apparatus were damaged. The plant is still off line, although a restart has begun. This delay left Cuba with a shortage of electrical capacity as other plants had to be shut down for maintenance.

This is a serious problem in a country that is so highly electrified. Cuba added more than 900,000 households to the electrical grid between 1990 and 2003, bringing electrification up to 96 percent of the country—compared to 86 percent for Latin America as a whole, and 34 percent for Africa. As a result, demand for electricity has jumped and the generating system has not been able to keep up despite major conservation efforts in recent years. The resulting unplanned blackouts disrupted education and many aspects of daily life, in addition to threatening the functioning of hospitals, schools, industry, and transportation.

Cuban president Fidel Castro made three recent TV appearances in order to lead a national discussion of the electricity problem. Castro’s presence on the Round Table TV show September 28, along with leading Cuban experts on the country’s electrical system, signaled the Cuban leadership’s concern and its intention to deal with the problem in an organized way that involves the entire population. “People need to know as much about the electrical system as they do about hurricanes,” Castro said.

The current problem is largely a technological one. To confront the pressures of high prices for oil in the world market and Washington’s economic war, Havana began using Cuban crude oil for electrical generation in the 1990s. About 90 percent of domestic electrical demand is now met by using domestic crude. The problem is that Cuban crude is high in impurities, particularly sulfur, which requires that the plants be shut down frequently for cleaning and other maintenance. A related problem is that many of the older plants are of old Soviet technology, which is inefficient and unreliable. These plants were converted with difficulty to use Cuban crude and have not functioned well since that time.

Appearing with Castro one evening was Carlos Lage, a government official who is often assigned responsibility for disaster planning and recovery. Lage announced a series of measures aimed at prioritizing electrical service for the most critical facilities, while work is being done to solve the technical problems.

Factories whose production could be made up later were shut down in October, even if this meant using hard currency for imports. Efforts are being made to move crucial activities out of the hours of peak demand, which are from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. and from 7 p.m. to 11 p.m. The use of air conditioning was also discouraged during these hours as well. Stores will now close no later than 7 p.m.

The city of Havana was divided into five “circuits,” each of which was scheduled to be blacked out five or six times a week about six hours each time. The schedule was published and widely distributed, so that the population knew what to expect. This marked an improvement over the previous weeks when power cuts came at all hours of the day and night. No area was to be cut between midnight and 7 a.m. Electricity distribution in the rest of the country was organized similarly.

Cuba will maintain “summer time” (or daylight savings time) until the end of October 2005. Since this shifts the sunrise to a later time, schools open half an hour later so children don’t have to walk to school in the dark. Consequently, the work day now begins half hour later so that parents can take their children to school. The end time was not changed, however, resulting in a half-hour shorter workday. The latter step may not be applied universally.

Workers in the plants that shut down in October continued getting their normal rate of pay. Likewise, those whose hours were shortened continued getting the same wages.

These measures, Lage said, are aimed not at ending the blackouts but at preventing the situation from getting worse. He noted that as the situation with generating capacity improved, some scheduled blackouts could be skipped. He also said that unscheduled blackouts would still be a possibility due to possible unexpected outages of generating stations. By the end of October, conservation measures had reduced electrical demand significantly and the number of blackouts in Havana was minimal.

In Havana, these measures appear to be applied universally. Half of the section of the city known as La Rampa was dark one recent Saturday night. This includes some tourist hotels and a major jazz club. On top of the planned blackout, an unscheduled one hit the other half of the area that night, emptying a movie theater and several bars.

The situation has sparked a national discussion. Many Cubans say that it will be necessary to buy new technology to replace the outmoded Soviet-era equipment.
 
 
Related articles:
Havana bars U.S. dollars in cash transactions
UN General Assembly: 179-4 against U.S. embargo of Cuba  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home