Energy Revolution with Carbon in Hand / Anddy Sierra Alvarez

Arroya Naranjo, a municipality of the Cuban capital, is affected by the cut off of cooking gas, broken electrical equipment, and no plans to fix them.

The citizens are upset because they don’t have anything to cook with, some are using wood and some are using more than 300 KW of electricity a month.

Alejandro Lopez, 32, says “We are a place where the government experiments and if things go wrong they don’t do anything because we are a poor municipality.” With the energy revolution, we exchanged our refrigerators, the old for new, and we’re in debt for it for ten years, and they same with the television, and “they give us the electrical equipment because according to the government we will save more,” says Lopez.

“What starts well, ends badly,” says Juan Carlos Vega, 28, “but this didn’t begin well… they give us the equipment without having any assurance of spare parts, and it didn’t occur to anyone — other than us — to the government to be precise,” says Vega.

Juan Carlos Vega commented that the parts are coming into the country, they say, but “we still have to wait, we are used to the delays because of the bureaucracy of the paperwork,” he says. “I have to cook with wood.”

May 21 2012