By Dalia Acosta
HAVANA, Oct 4 1995 (IPS)

Following a welcome break this summer, regular power cuts are on their way back in Cuba, trying the patience and the new-found hope of the population.

“There is nothing more distressing than the power cuts,” sighs 38-year-old Natalia Gomez, a public office employee and mother of two who does not see how she will get used to a refrigerator that defrosts every two days, and to long evenings without television.

Regular blackouts, the length and frequency of which varied depending on the season and the area in question, had become a daily occurrence since the economic crisis set in early this decade.

But during July, August and part of September, the government reduced the power cuts, leading many to hope that the incipient economic recovery being experienced had led to a real solution to the island’s energy problems.

Sources close to the Ministry of Basic Industry told IPS that in July and August the government stretched the country’s capacity to generate electricity in order to keep levels of tension down during the school vacation period.

The government added more hours of television and a significant reduction in power outages to measures designed to flexibilise the economy, to avert a repeat of the unrest that led to the “rafters crisis” in the summer of 1994, when thousands of Cubans poured out of the country on precarious rafts, seeking to reach the United States.

But last month both announced and surprise power cuts returned, which can interrupt anything from a theatrical performance to a press conference being given by a visiting government minister.

In spite of signs of economic recovery, including a two percent growth of the Gross Domestic Product in the first six months of this year, experts say the blackouts “are a symbol of the economic crisis that has already lasted five years.”

A recent report by the parliamentary Energy Commission reveals that the country’s electric power plants were acting at 56.2 percent of capacity in late March, “insufficient to respond to maximum demand.”

The document, however, states that there has been a “small improvement” in the supply of electricity compared to last year, when plants were operating at 51.6 percent of capacity.

Experts at the Centre of Studies on the Cuban Economy say the power cuts, which lasted more than 10 hours a day at their peak, had dropped to 5.5 hours during the summer of 1994, and to less than four this year.

Official sources attribute the energy crisis to the disappearance of the Soviet Union, and the resultant abrupt fall in fuel imports from Russia – from 10 million tonnes a year in 1989 to six million by 1992.

According to a study by the National Institute of Economic Research, the “growing loss of efficiency in the use of available resources, especially in terms of energy” is one of the weakpoints of the economy.

The nearly 20 percent drop in the coefficient of energy intensity in the 1990s has meant that “hundreds of thousands of tonnes of extra petroleum derivatives are consumed to produce more or less the same amount of energy,” the report points out.

Local economists say a cutting of current levels of imports of foodstuffs and petroleum derivatives, which absorb nearly 70 percent of the country’s foreign currency expenditures, is indispensable for economic recovery.

During a conference last February, economists agreed that it will be impossible for the economy to get back on its feet while carrying the dead weight of such imports.

They stressed that what is needed is the reconversion of an industrial sector based on large-scale machinery imported from the vanished socialist bloc, which consumes high levels of petroleum- derived fuels.

To put an end to that squandering of resources, the government has given priority to investment in the areas of sugar, electricity and nickel – but only the last two have shown improvements so far.

The problems that continue to plague the sugar industry – the motor of the Cuban economy – counteract progress made in other branches.

Experts see the opening of the sector to sources of foreign financing as a possible route to getting sugar mills to improve their capacity to generate electricity.

Estimates indicate that the country could have 4.5 million tonnes of sugarcane stalks in a single harvest season, which as an alternative source of energy would be equivalent to more than 1.2 million tonnes of oil.

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