Cuba has endured one of its toughest weeks in years after a nationwide blackout which left around 10 million Cubans without power for several days. Adding to the Caribbean island’s problems, Hurricane Oscar left a trail of destruction along the north-eastern coast, leaving several dead and causing widespread damage. For some communities in Cuba the energy crisis is the new normal.
As Cuba approached its fourth day without power this week, Yusely Perez turned to the only fuel source left available to her: firewood.
Her neighbourhood in Havana hasn’t received its regular deliveries of liquified gas cannisters for two months. So once the island’s entire electrical grid went down, prompting a nationwide blackout, Yusely was forced to take desperate measures.
“Me and my husband went all over the city, but we couldn’t find charcoal anywhere,” she explains.
“We had to collect firewood wherever we found it on the street. Thankfully it was dry enough to cook with.
”Yusely nodded at the yucca chips frying slowly in a pot of lukewarm oil.
“We’ve gone two days without eating,” she adds.
Speaking last Sunday, at the height of what was Cuba’s most acute energy crisis in years, the country’s energy and mines minister, Vicente de la O Levy, blamed the problems for the country’s creaking electrical infrastructure on what he called the “brutal” US economic embargo on Cuba.
The embargo, he argued, made it impossible to import new parts to overhaul the grid or bring in enough fuel to run the power stations, even to access credit in the international banking system.
The US State Department retorted that the problems with energy production in Cuba did not lie at Washington’s door – but argued that it was due to the Cuban government’s own mismanagement.
Normal service would be resumed soon, the Cuban minister insisted. But no sooner did he utter those words than there was another total collapse of the grid, the fourth in 48 hours.
At night, the full extent of the blackout became clear.
Havana’s streets were plunged into near total darkness as residents sat on the doorsteps in the stifling heat, their faces lit up by their mobile phones – as long as their batteries lasted.
Some, like restaurant worker Victor, were prepared to openly criticise the authorities.
“The people who run this country are the ones who have all the answers,” he says.
“But they’re going to have to explain themselves to the Cuban people.”Specifically, the state’s decision to invest heavily in tourism, rather than energy infrastructure, frustrated him most during the blackout.
“They’ve built so many hotels in the past few years. Everyone knows that a hotel doesn’t cost a couple of bucks. It costs 300 or 400 million dollars.”
“So why is our energy infrastructure collapsing?” he asks.
“Either they’re not investing in it or, if they are, then it’s not been to the benefit of the people.”
Aware of the growing discontentment, President Miguel Diaz-Canel appeared on state TV wearing the traditional olive-green fatigues of the Cuban revolution.
If that message wasn’t clear enough, he directly warned people against protesting over the blackout. The authorities would not “tolerate” vandalism, he said, or any attempt to “disrupt the social order”.