Economy & Trade, Headlines, Latin America & the Caribbean

CUBA: Six-Hour Power Cuts Make for a Long, Hot Summer

Dalia Acosta

HAVANA, Jul 5 2005 (IPS) - Cuban authorities have had to break their promise of a summer free of blackouts due to a severe crisis facing the country’s electric power stations.

The current situation was described as "complex" by Cuban Minister of Basic Industry Yadira García during a special television appearance on two state-owned networks Monday night.

García stressed that efforts are being taken to resolve the problem and that power outages could decrease in the coming weeks. However, she added, even if an improvement in service is achieved, there is always the threat of further breakdowns at any given moment.

"The majority of the installations have been in operation for between 25 and 35 years, and their poor technical condition poses a considerable risk to the National Electric Power System (SEN)," she noted.

When the lights go out, water and gas supplies are cut off as well in areas of the country where these basic services depend on the SEN. Many Cubans complain of the damage suffered by electrical appliances as a result of sudden interruptions and resumptions of the power supply, not to mention the amount of food spoiled by long hours without refrigeration.

"You go to work and you can’t do anything because the electricity is off, but you have to hang around, wasting time, in case it comes back. If the power goes off at night, you die of heat or boredom," commented a 37-year-old computer technician from Havana.

Official sources confirm that power outages in some parts of the capital have reached a length of six to seven hours, while in other regions of Cuba they can stretch out for up to 10 hours.

In some places there is even more than one blackout in a single day. "There have been many times when I’ve had no electricity all morning, and then it goes off again all night," said Noemí Herrera, a 42-year-old craftswoman who lives in the heart of Havana.

Meanwhile, in some eastern Cuban provinces like Santiago de Cuba and Guantánamo, power outages have lasted up to 12 hours or even more.

"The government publishes a blackout schedule, but they often last much longer than they are supposed to. At night, half of the city is completely in the dark," a worker at the Hotel Guantánamo, 970 km east of Havana, commented to IPS.

Once the country had pulled out of the most critical stage of the economic crisis of the 1990s, when power outages could last over 12 hours, the Cuban authorities managed to avoid the explosive mix of sky-high temperatures in July and August and cuts in the electric power supply.

June is typically the hottest month on the island, but from the end of June to the beginning of September, millions of students of all ages are out of school, and a large number of parents schedule their vacations in order to be off work at the same time.

This year, the Ministry of Basic Industry decided to carry out the scheduled maintenance of the plants that make up the SEN during the months of April through June, in order to guarantee electric power service throughout July and August.

But these plans were dashed by a string of breakdowns in three thermoelectric plants, and the situation became even more critical over the last weekend owing to a breakdown at the Antonio Guiteras power station, which generates 15 percent of the electricity consumed in Cuba.

The power deficit during the 27 hours that the Guiteras station was out of service was close to a thousand megawatts (MW), García reported.

Juan Manuel Presa, director of the National Electric Union, the state-owned power company, stated that by the end of this month, the available generation capacity will reach 1,850 MW, if no further breakdowns occur.

Cuba has an installed capacity of 3.200 MW. It is estimated that between 60 and 65 percent of this capacity needs to be available in order to provide adequate service. In 1988 and 1989, this figure averaged 80 percent.

But after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent loss of this stable supply of oil, Cuba’s available generation capacity dropped 50 percent in 1993 and 1994.

Gradual recovery was achieved between 1997 and 2000 with the installation of new plants and the modernisation of others, and by 1998, available capacity had risen to 69.5 percent, only to fall abruptly once again in 2004.

A breakdown at the Antonio Guiteras power station led the government to adopt emergency energy saving measures, which included the temporary closure of major industries during the second half of last year.

While the energy crisis of the 1990s was sparked by a severe oil shortage, the current crisis is the result of serious problems in electric power generation, García explained.

The main culprits are the "obsolescence" of the country’s thermoelectric plants and difficulties in acquiring replacement parts due to the closure, privatisation or modernisation of the companies that manufacture them.

The policy adopted for the development of the sector includes investments to modernise the electric power generation system, the upgrading of transmission and distribution networks, and the implementation of energy saving measures that involve the entire population.