“We are preparing for the blackouts this summer,” says Liudmila Echevarría, a resident of the Los Olivos neighborhood of Sancti Spíritus. Distrustful of the official announcements, which promise fewer power cuts than last year, the family of this 42-year-old woman preferred to seek solutions to the lack of electricity that already affects them for more than eight hours each day.
In the house that Echevarría shares with her husband and their two children, they have just bought a fan that is recharged with solar energy and also connected to the current. For the price of 16,500 pesos, the sum of four her monthly salaries, they acquired the peculiar appliance so that “the children can at least sleep for a few hours at dawn without so much heat and without being eaten by mosquitoes,” she describes.
“My husband marked in the queue since dawn in the Gelma store [Grupo Empresarial de Logística perteneciente al Ministerio de la Agricultura]”, details to 14ymedio echevarria. “They were also selling larger solar panels for people who are interested in lighting part of the house, but we were only looking for the fan that is what we need the most.”
The Gelma group was initially conceived to supply farmers with inputs and machinery, but over time its premises have become similar to imported electrical appliance stores. The products most in demand for work in the fields, such as fertilizers, wire, wooden boxes or boots are sold in foreign currency, while the offer in Cuban pesos “is pure hardware,” Echevarría says.
For the price of 16,500 pesos, the sum of her four monthly salaries, they acquired the peculiar appliance
The same afternoon the solar-charged fan arrived at the house, the couple carefully read the instructions for use. “To be able to put it in the first speed, which is the most powerful, we need to charge the fan for eight hours but here they take away our electricity every four hours,” laments the woman from Sancti Spiritus. “Charging with the solar panel is much slower.”
That same night they had to put the new device to the test. “The power went out at eight o’clock at night, so we knew that part of the early morning we were going to have a blackout. In the first three hours the fan worked well, but when it had been going on for longer, it started to slow down. the blades”, describes Echevarría. “It can alleviate the heat and the mosquitoes, but this is not a solution.”
This Friday, the Cuban Electric Union estimated an affectation to the service of 735 megawatts (MW) at night. The numbers translated into hundreds of thousands of homes throughout the entire Island that had to spend part of the night and early morning with a blackout.
To get around the darkness, the Echeverría family also bought a couple of rechargeable light bulbs. “The fan is very expensive, this is almost a luxury for many families here in Sancti Spíritus,” says the woman. “We have been able to buy it because my father, who owns a cattle farm, helped us with part of the money, but for many people this is like having a spaceship: unthinkable.”
Temperatures have been rising significantly in recent days and in some parts of the Island they have exceeded 35 degrees Celsius, a heat that is more difficult to bear without electricity. “My house has a zinc roof and when summer arrives there is no one here,” explains Elvira Ruíz, a 71-year-old retired teacher from Contramaestre, in Santiago de Cuba.
“Here the blackouts are already lasting up to ten hours a day,” laments the woman, who is in charge of her mother, a bedridden old woman who needs a lot of care. “The food spoils for us due to lack of cold. The little that one gets to cook has to be eaten immediately because it rots in this heat and without electricity for the refrigerator.”
Ruíz has no hope that the situation will improve. “I see that this is going the same as the previous summer and the previous one. We have been in this situation for more than two years and people here have already lost the illusion of having electricity again without blackouts,” he says. “In the towns it’s worse, in the cities they don’t remove it as much.”
“The little you get to cook you have to eat right away because it rots in this heat and without electricity for the refrigerator”
During the tour of the Cuban Prime Minister, Manuel Marrero, through Russia, it was announced that Moscow and Havana are preparing an intergovernmental agreement for the Russian Rosneft to supply 1.64 million tons of oil and hydrocarbons per year to the Island, but Ruíz considers that “That is going to take time, if it is achieved. This summer we are going to cook over low heat.”
Power outages have been one of the triggers for popular demonstrations throughout the island, protests to which the Cuban regime has responded, in most cases, with repression and the arrest of numerous participants. A background that fails to completely silence the spirits.
“When you’ve spent all day sweating, you can’t even put a fan on your sick mother and you have to cook the only chicken you got and that you paid dearly for because you can’t save it for tomorrow, then you don’t understand. they close all the understandings”, emphasizes Ruíz.
Unlike Liudmila Echevarría’s family in Sancti Spíritus, this woman from Santiago and her mother cannot even dream of a rechargeable fan. For them what remains is “a piece of cardboard to fan themselves and scare away the mosquitoes”, that and the “patience not to go screaming to the Party headquarters [Comunista]”Bosun’s.
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