By Dalia Acosta
HAVANA, Aug 10 2000 (IPS)

The scheduled blackouts that have made life difficult for Cubans since the early 1990s are supposed to end in September, although there is widespread scepticism that they will really become a thing of the past.

“Starting at the end of this summer, there will be no more programmed outages, but we must continue to work on saving energy,” said Roberto González Vale, the head of the ministry of basic industry’s Programme of Energy Savings in Cuba (PAEC).

González Vale announced that as of Aug 31, the power supply would be cut off only in the case of problems or reparations.

The “miracle,” as people have begun to dub the announced end of the blackouts, is to be the result of a seven percent rise in Cuba’s capacity for generating electricity, the result of investment aimed at upgrading power plants and the electricity grid.

In the first half of the year, power cuts occurred on 51 days, compared to 140 in the same period of 1997, said González.

A total of 51 outages is insignificant when compared to the first years of Cuba’s decade-long economic crisis, the product of a combination of the effects of the United States embargo, the disappearance of the East European socialist bloc, and economic policy errors committed by the government of Fidel Castro.

The announcement of the imminent end of scheduled blackouts was received with some scepticism by local experts who differ with government projections and believe that in the next few months the economy will go downhill once again, and the frequency of outages might actually increase.

Rumour has it that from September, there will be more outages, closures of factories, and a reduction of fuel quotas assigned to companies and workers in some sectors of the state.

“There’s no smoke without fire,” quipped a 42-year-old Cuban who drives his own taxi.

Concern over future energy supplies has been on the rise in the past few months, as the government waged its campaign demanding the return of Cuban shipwreck boy Elián González, the centre of an intense custody battle between his father and his Miami relatives from his Nov 25 rescue to his Jun 28 return to Cuba.

The campaign involved enormous demonstrations throughout the country, and observers say it required huge spending on fuel, electricity and other resources that are scarce in a country still in crisis.

Half of the electricity consumed in Cuba is generated from local oil and other natural resources. But at the current exchange rate, Cuba pays 1.3 million dollars a day on fuel imports.

Vice-President Carlos Lage said in a recent televised interview that in the first six months of the year, high oil prices pushed government spending on fuel up by an additional 500 million dollars.

He added, however, that the economy was on the road to recovery, and that Gross Domestic Product grew 7.7 percent in the first half of the year.

Among the positive advances seen in the past five years, Lage pointed out that the blackouts have become merely “occasional,” government sales of foodstuffs to the population have increased, and prices have dropped.

Since 1995, one million people got running water in their homes, 50,000 families obtained cooking gas installations, and 60,000 new telephone lines were installed annually, he added.

“The policy seems to be to keep the people from feeling the problems as little as possible,” an economist who preferred not to be identified told IPS.

In the first half of the 1990s, programmed power cuts became a source of major tension among the population of more than 11 million. The press reported the schedule for blackouts, which lasted up to 12 hours a day, in each municipality.

“You had to buy the newspaper to see when you would have electricity. Instead of blackouts there were ‘light-ins’,” commented Yunisleisis Pérez, a 28-year-old engineer who says she prefers not to recall the nights she spent “sitting in the street, waiting for the electricity to return.”

In the summer months, when there were “night-time power cuts, people hauled their mattresses out to the sidewalks or slept by the sea, because there’s no way you can stand the heat inside without a fan,” she said.

Things began to improve in the capital in 1995, although local analysts say Havana, a city of more than two million, cannot be taken as a reference point for what was happening in the rest of the country.

“Havana has top priority, we all know that,” a local resident of Gibara, in the municipality of Holguín, some 700 kms from the capital, said in a telephone interview. “Maybe there you don’t have outages, but here they still cut off the power frequently.”

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