CUBA: Severe Drought Now Threatens Entire Country

By Patricia Grogg Reprint | | Print |

Patricia Grogg

HAVANA, Jun 3 1999 (IPS) - A severe drought affecting eastern Cuba for over a year is now jeopardising western provinces, causing water shortages in the capital and tarnishing the government’s optimism over a slight rebound of the economy.

The scarcity of water suffered by eastern Cuba for the past 13 months has begun to affect Havana, the neighbouring province of Pinar del Rio and the Isla de la Juventud, an island on the western end of the archipelago.

Administrators of the Havana water supply said that since early April, water waggons were supplying several areas of the capital, due to the interruption of normal services.

The shortage of water has caused the deaths of thousands of heads of cattle in eastern Cuba. But the situation threatens to get even worse, and is jeopardising official plans for recovery from a nearly decade-long crisis of the economy, which remains dependent on the sugar industry, although to a lesser extent than in the 1980s.

Experts at the Institute of Meteorology told the official press that water reserves could continue to shrink in western Cuba, some areas of which have received only one-third of the rainfall normally registered at this time of year.

Rainfall stands at just 30 percent of the average for this season of the year on Isla de la Juventud, 50 percent in Pinar del Rio, and 59 percent in Havana, according to official statistics.

“The shortage of rain expected for the months of June to August could intensify the drought conditions currently suffered by several provinces and the Isla de la Juventud,” said Braulio Lapinel, with the National Climate Centre.

As a cause of the lack of rainfall, other experts mentioned the weather phenomenon ‘La Nina’, which follows ‘El Nino’, and “makes the dry period even drier.”

In Havana, home to more than two million people, several municipalities are experiencing critical water shortages.

“The drought, with its face of catastrophe, could be more serious than we even imagine today,” warned the local newspaper ‘Tribuna de La Habana’ this week. Insufficient water supplies figure among the chief complaints brought up by local residents at the so-called “account-settling assemblies.”

“What I cannot understand is how the building next to ours has water, while the tank of my building is empty,” said Maria Alvarez, a 60-year-old homemaker from the Havana neighbourhood of El Vedado.

According to ‘Tribuna de La Habana’, it is “very difficult” to explain the reasons underlying the scarcity to people who are not receiving water services, because “leaks where thousands and thousands of cubic metres of water are lost every day can be seen in the streets.”

An investment of half a million Cuban pesos – on par with the US dollar at the official exchange rate – has been announced to improve installations and the water supply system over the next few months.

But if it does not rain, water services could continue to fall short, authorities warned.

Experts say that a change has been seen in the second half of the century, with droughts in Cuba occurring every two years, rather than every four years as in the past.

Up to March, the drought had caused the deaths of 8,400 heads of cattle in the provinces of Camaguey and Las Tunas, 570 and 694 kms east of Havana, respectively, while 163,000 cattle had to be moved to better pastures. The rainfall registered in the east over the past two months was insufficient to revert that situation.

International experts who assessed the extent of the damages caused by drought in eastern Cuba last year concluded that if the shortage of rainfall continued, some 200 million dollars would be needed to tackle the emergency.