By Dalia Acosta
HAVANA, Sep 30 2004 (IPS)

After months of frequent, lengthy and unexpected power outages, Cubans will now at least be able to plan their lives around the weekly blackout schedule to be published in local newspapers.

This measure, adopted in response to public demand, is just one part of a much broader government programme to ensure power supplies during the country’s worst energy crisis in a decade.

“I could never have imagined that one day I would be nostalgic for the worst moments of the early 1990s, when you knew exactly when you would and wouldn’t have electricity,” commented Marta Sánchez, a 31-year-old academic who said she has been living in “true agony” over the last weeks.

“You go to work and waste time because if there’s no electricity you can’t use the computer. You get home and you don’t know whether or not you should turn the washing machine on. But the worst is when the power goes off in the middle of the night; with this heat, it’s just impossible to sleep without an electric fan,” she said.

These unannounced power cuts had begun to last between six and 12 hours, and in some areas there were more than one in the same day. The specialists contacted by IPS noted that while the situation has been difficult in Havana, it has been even worse in other parts of the country.

The schedule for the city of Havana will include six-hour blackouts during both daytime and evening hours, but none are planned for the early morning hours, according to a document from the provincial power company to which IPS had access.

However, since the outages are due to electrical power generation problems rather than fuel shortages, unplanned interruptions in service could still happen at any time, Cuban Vice President Carlos Lage warned on Wednesday evening, on the Cuban current affairs television program Round Table.

Since Monday, the show has devoted more than two hours daily to discussing the country’s energy problems. President Fidel Castro himself has attended every broadcast.

The package of measures adopted by Cuba’s socialist government includes the temporary closure of 118 factories, including steel, cement, paper and citrus fruit processing plants. There are also plans to tap the power generating capacity of 12 sugar mills.

Although daylight saving time usually ends in Cuba in late October, when clocks are turned back one hour, this year it will remain in effect to avoid the increased demand for electricity that traditionally accompanies the return to standard time.

In addition, because “the sun rises later and later” at this time of year, and parents are concerned because “it’s still dark out when kids have to leave for school,” the beginning of the school and work day will be moved forward half an hour throughout the country, Lage announced.

This means the work day will be shortened from eight to seven and a half hours, but salaries will not be reduced as a result, Castro stated during the presentation of the new measures.

But in addition to now being scheduled, the blackouts will affect a larger number of people, because the number of “protected” circuits – in which electrical power is never cut – has dropped from 411 to 196. This guaranteed power service mainly applies to hospitals and other high-priority facilities.

The lost production from the factories being temporarily shut down and the use of local diesel oil-fuelled generators to reduce the demands on the power grid will translate into additional state expenditures of over two million dollars.

The new measures join a series of others that are already being implemented in Cuba, ranging from shorter store hours and restrictions on the use of air conditioners to limiting agricultural irrigation to the times of day when demand for electricity is lowest.

The energy crisis erupted on May 5, due to a major mechanical breakdown at the Anonio Guiteras thermoelectric plant, 100 kilometres outside Havana. At one point it was believed that the problem had been solved, but the plant went down again, and a final solution could still be months away.

In the meantime, the inactivity of this plant – which normally generates 15 percent of the electricity consumed in the country – has led to increased demand on the country’s other thermoelectric plants, where the usual schedules for cleaning and maintenance have been delayed, leading to a steady decline in production.

The Cuban electrical power generating system is currently operating at 54 percent of capacity, which will drop to 50 percent when another plant is shut down for long overdue maintenance, according to Juan Pruna, the director of Unión Eléctrica, the national electrical power authority.

For his part, Castro warned the public not to be overly optimistic, because a return to normal levels could take up to three or four months, or even longer.

In recent years, Cuba had gradually overcome its former dependence on imported oil, and had reached the point where 90 percent of the country’s electricity was generated using domestically produced crude oil.

This shift, however, could turn out to be more costly for the country in the long run, because Cuban crude is heavy and high in sulphur content, and so its use requires the regular cleaning and maintenance of power plants to ensure efficient production.

One of the measures announced by Lage was a return to the usual schedule of cleaning and maintenance at the power plants, which has not been kept up since the crisis erupted in May.

Many of the country’s power plants are equipped with obsolete technology in desperate need of modernisation or replacement. Also needed are major investments in the power transmission and distribution grid, according to sources at Unión Eléctrica.

A full 95.6 percent of the island’s 11.2 million people have access to electrical power. Lage pointed out that in spite of the severe economic crisis that broke out in the early 1990s and the lack of foreign credit, electrical service was extended to a total of 923,821 homes between the years 1990 and 2003.

The vice president also noted that more than 6.1 million new home appliances and electronics were acquired by the Cuban population in the last eight years, leading to a considerable rise in the demand for electricity.

Residential electricity consumption grew by 58.7 percent between 1989 and 2003, while industrial consumption decreased by 14.7 percent, thanks to power-saving and modernisation measures.

The current energy crisis “will take time to solve” but it is both “solvable and temporary,” Lage stated.

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