The Viazul bus travels through ghost towns, where passengers get on and off by the light of their cell phones.
14ymedio, Olea Gallardo, Havana – Those without fans waved cardboard with their hands this Monday at the Viazul restaurant in the Havana municipality of Plaza de la Revolución while waiting for their buses to depart. “How cheeky! Of course we always had air conditioning before,” protested a woman with a ticket to Santiago de Cuba, fanning herself. “Now we have to make do with the air that comes in through the open windows.” One flimsy fan for the entire room was useless even though it was turned on.
The fact that the transportation company serving foreign tourists—or Cubans with families abroad who can afford the ticket in foreign currency—can’t even air-condition its facilities in the capital is just one of the many symptoms of the dire situation of the national electricity system (SEN) during this peak season. In the provinces, despair prevails.
Those traveling to the eastern part of the country experienced this in a radical way upon arriving in Santa Clara. “We only knew we had arrived because the bus made a left turn. Everything was blacked out!” a Havana resident spending a few days on vacation in Ciego de Ávila with her family told this newspaper. “It was just darkness everywhere: in the terminal, people were stumbling, we were almost scared. There was no light but the cell phones, even in the bathroom.”
“A woman got out in total darkness and a frightening silence, as if the town had been abandoned.”
The young woman wasn’t pleased to hear a joke from a Cuban who seemed to be visiting: “We’re in Apaguistan*, he said, as if expecting laughter, but I didn’t find it funny because the imagery is so powerful, it feels like you’re in the middle of a dystopian movie.”
The same scene was repeated in Cabaiguán: “A woman got off in total darkness and a frightening silence, as if the town had been abandoned.” At the next stop, she says, “All I could see were the silhouettes of buildings, so much so that I got lost: I didn’t know where I was, whether I had already passed Guayo and was I in Sancti Spíritus or what.”
And worse was to come, with yesterday’s shutdown for maintenance of the Antonio Guiteras power plant in Matanzas, the largest in the country.
Authorities estimate the work will last four days, although it was initially planned to last one less. According to official press reports , there will be three days of construction work and one day for the start-up and synchronization process. The first days will include repairing a leak in the boiler and a faulty feed pump, cleaning the regenerative air heaters, and repairing and replacing valves.
No fewer than 140 employees from the Cienfuegos, Felton, Santa Cruz, and Mariel thermoelectric plants (CTE) have been called in for maintenance at the Guiteras plant, which reflects the magnitude of the work. “At this time, all the workers and resources are scheduled,” boasted Román Pérez Castañeda, technical director of the Matanzas plant.
Along with Guiteras, five other units are out of service: two due to breakdowns—Felton Unit 2 and Renté Unit 3—and three for maintenance: Santa Cruz Unit 2, Cienfuegos Unit 4, and Renté Unit 5. This represents a deficit of 294 megawatts (MW) in energy generation.
Due to a lack of fuel, 75 distributed generation plants (662 MW) and 9 motors (150 MW) of the 12 of the Suheyla Sultan, the Melones patana [floating turkish power plant], are stopped, although the report this Tuesday from the Cuban Electric Union (UNE) predicts that 80 MW of the first plants as well as one hundred percent of the motors of the floating plant will come on during the hour of maximum demand, in the afternoon-evening.
According to the state-owned company’s report, during that peak period, an estimated 1,970 MW of available power is expected to meet a demand of 3,670 MW, resulting in a deficit of 1,700 MW. The actual impact will be 1,770 MW, almost half of the country’s energy needs, a figure higher than yesterday’s 1,673 MW.
“We are on the path to independence from imported fossil fuels.”
Given this, the statement made by the Minister of Energy and Mines, Vicente de la O Levy, this Monday almost sounds like a joke. “We are on the path to independence from imported fossil fuels,” he said before Parliament’s Industry, Construction, and Energy Committee.
The minister was referring, of course, to the solar farms that have been proliferating on the island with the help of China, which are, he insisted, “a viable strategy to recover the national electricity system.” The 21 already operating, however, currently provide only 544 MW at most, and only during full sun hours.
Vicente de la O Levy welcomed the fact that “an average of five photovoltaic parks are being installed per month” and “with resources already in the country,” but acknowledged that “the security of fuels continues without a sustainable solution.”
He also referred to the Turkish floating power plants, whose final departure from the country due to nonpayment was expected last June and which are still holding on by the skin of their teeth. “We had up to eight barges in the country, and five have been removed,” the minister recalled. “With scarce financial resources, minimum payments have been made to keep the barges generating through July and August.”
“With scarce financial resources, minimum payments have been made to keep the trucks generating during July and August.”
Without a hint of self-criticism, but presenting a picture just as bleak as other committees, such as the Economy and Health committees, De la O Levy said that the main causes of the energy shortage are the increase in imported household appliances – 17 million in recent years, he indicated – the lack of liquefied gas and the low “electricity rates that do not encourage savings.”
In second place, he cited the decline in domestic crude oil production (from 3.6 million to 2.1 million tons) and the decrease in fuel oil and diesel imports due to a lack of foreign currency. Regarding generators, he stated that “there is no progress due to a lack of access to financing,” and regarding transformers, of which the country needs 12,000 annually, they are also at a critical point.
Regarding the crimes suffered by the SEN, he said they are primarily thefts of cables, fuel, transformer oil, and various accessories, as well as “misappropriations” at gas sales points.
“In the life of a country, 60 years are nothing, but in the life of a person, they are everything.”
Ordinary Cubans don’t need the minister’s dire statistics to know how things are. On the bus to Santiago de Cuba, like someone traveling in the depths of the night, the air conditioning is barely noticeable, there are seats that don’t recline, and the ticket numbers are repetitive.
A few tourists mingled with Cubans, most of them emigrants. A Cuban woman and her Belgian partner were talking about visiting her family, laden with gifts. They were the only ones not ranting about the country, along with another Cuban woman from the east. Their topic of conversation: the misinformation on social media about violence in Cuba, which only “spreads lies.” The eastern woman boasted about having “a floor plan for the whole house,” a house she made available to the couple she was talking to.
Another passenger, carrying all her luggage up to her seat, complained about not being able to leave it downstairs. “It was all full,” she said. “But I don’t understand: a little while ago, three people arrived with a pile of suitcases. They handed a dollar bill to one of the lounge employees, but they didn’t get on. Maybe that pile of suitcases was for shipping.”
A university professor spoke bluntly and directly against Fidel Castro. “In the life of a country, 60 years are nothing, but in the life of a person, they are everything,” he lamented. In his diatribe, he proposed, directly, “rebuilding the nation from scratch.” Cubans, he continued, are “people without values” and “deeply damaged” by a system for which the current president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, was now being blamed. The responsibility, he asserted, “comes from before: Fidel was a mentally ill person who tried to compete even with God and lost in every way.”
Already in Ciego de Ávila, the young Havana woman reported only two hours of daylight that night. “Everything seems so depressing to me, people are so sad, what we’re all experiencing in Cuba isn’t life.”
*A play on words: ‘Outage-stan’
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