Havana Cuba. – “Our life is hell: every day there is a different problem. The leaders don’t care about us and their indolence is killing us,” laments a neighbor who is distressed by the lack of liquefied gas for cooking. And it is that for more than two weeks the necessary fuel did not reach the points of sale in the country, nor was the population given an explanation of what was happening.
It was not until February 28 that the Liquefied Gas Company advertisement on the official site cubadebate the resumption and stability of its services. Parsimonious and symbolic resumption and questionable stability, since the quantities of cylinders supplied to the points of sale are so insufficient that users are forced to remain for hours in long queues waiting for the truck, at the risk of not reaching it.
As usual, due to the lack of information, the population comments on both what is true and what is not. For this reason, when it was announced that a ship loaded with oil had arrived in the country, many believed that the problem had already been solved. However, this has not been the case, since another major obstacle is the shortage of cylinders (more than 500,000 units, according to the Cuba Petroleum Union, CUPET), in addition to the shortage of valves and trucks to transport them.
This is not new, because in this regard Lidia Rodríguez Suárez, commercial director of the Fuel Marketing Company of that organization, recognized in mid-2022: “The only cylinder factory that exists in the country has a breach in its delivery plan, both new and repaired, which makes the supply cycle difficult.”
But it is that in addition to the lack of cylinders and valves, the deterioration caused by mistreatment and the lack of maintenance of the existing ones has constituted one of the fundamental causes of this deficit: instead of repairing the empty containers before reincorporating them into the sale, they fill them up again and again dented, eaten away by rust, with defective valves, even with leaks, even knowing the danger that this implies and the occurrence of not a few accidents. On the other hand, if we do not accept them, what do we cook our food with? Negligence and governmental and institutional abandonment, as in all aspects of Cuban life, are revealed in this case, but who to demand?
The present crisis of the item has come to particularly affect the nuclei that for various reasons were not yet registered as liquefied gas customers and were awaiting the contract to acquire a cylinder and buy the gas legally. This service was offered by the Liquefied Gas Company until it was recently suspended without explanation, which leaves these people no other option than to buy it at exorbitant prices on the black market, something that very few can afford and which is also made difficult due to own scarcity and persecution.
with the wrong call energy revolution The consumption of liquefied gas increased, but as we have seen over many years, in our country there is no project, company or program that remains in operation for a long time. For almost a year now, consumers have been noticing that, although the containers appear to contain content, the 20-pound serving lasts much less than usual. Despite this, a government campaign – rife with the usual manipulative puns – has recently begun to get customers who own two cylinders to hand over one. At the moment it is a voluntary resignation, although it is undoubtedly a premonitory of a forced rationing in the future.
On the other hand, the electrical cooking equipment that was sold in 2007 stopped working a long time agoand the ones offered on MLC are out of reach for most citizens, plus even with the money they are generally hard to find.
The induction cooker distribution program was not efficient either, on the contrary, it was marked by corruption, not to mention that only a few copies went on sale sporadically in certain markets. Currently they only sell them at high prices in MLC, or in national currency at relatively affordable prices in a few “select” workplaces, whose employees sometimes do not need them. Due to all these incorrect handlings, few nuclei have been able to acquire them, which is why 1.7 million Cuban families still depend on liquefied gas for cooking today.l
