Maria Elena Cárdenas is 76 and lives in a municipal shelter on Amargura Street in Havana’s colonial old town. The building has an elegant past, but for the last few days Maria has been cooking with sticks she had found on the street.
“You know, we Cubans manage the best we can,” she said. She lives in the shelter because her home collapsed, a regular occurrence in the poorest, oldest parts of the beautiful city.
Cuba’s government has spent the last days attempting to get the island’s national grid functioning after repeated island-wide blackouts. Without power, sleep becomes difficult in the heat, food spoils and the water supply fails.
Parts of Cuba’s communist system still function: the municipality sent Maria food. “We are three families here,” she said. “I live alone, the lady who lives next to me [does] also, and there are two children, the children’s mother, her aunt and an elderly man.”
A week after the blackout, the island has returned to the status quo ante with regular power cuts of up to 20 hours a day. But the crisis has left a deep, melancholy dread about the future.
“Cubans have a cheerful idiosyncrasy,” said Julio César Rodríguez, 52. “Even when things are bad we laugh. But this is really bad.”
This current crisis began on 17 September, when an order went out for all non-essential state workers to go home.
The effort to save power didn’t save the system, and a day later, the island went dark. Antonio Guiteras, one of the main power stations, shut down, crashing all the other big generating stations in the system.
“It’s very hard to restart a power station,” said a retired engineer from Antonio Guiteras, who asked to remain anonymous. “You need to produce a lot of electricity just to get it going.”
Antonio Guiteras was built in 1989, and is now battered and obsolete. “The truth is that it was built rotten,” said the engineer. He told harrowing stories of working with faulty safety equipment, political management who would disappear when problems arose and a system long pushed to its limit.
“There was a scheduled maintenance programme, but it was never followed,” he said. “The requirements were too tight. We were told: ‘The factory has to produce, so patch it up.’”
The government acknowledges the parlous state of its system, blaming the 62-year old-trade embargo imposed by the United States. President Miguel Díaz-Canel said “financial and energy persecution” made it difficult to “import fuel and other resources necessary”.
For most of its existence, Cuba’s government has relied on the largesse of allies – first Russia and then Venezuela. But those countries, facing their own difficulties, have cut supplies heavily. “It’s like trying to keep a sinking ship afloat with corks,” said one European diplomat.
In a televised address, Cuba’s prime minister, Manuel Marrero, said the emerging private sector would have to pay more for its power, while the government looks to renewables to secure its future energy needs.
The island is blessed by sunshine, but the multiple attempts to start solar projects have nearly all failed when the companies involved failed to get paid. “The government isn’t stupid,” said a foreign businessman. “But there is no money.”
Instead a deal has been cut with a Chinese firm to provide the materials for a slew of solar farms in return for access to Cuba’s nickel deposits. But with well over 10% of Cuba’s population having fled the economic crisis on the island in the last two years, there is scepticism whether the expertise remains to build such systems.
Joe Biden has said that while he’s “tough” on the Cuban government, he supports the Cuban people. But Washington could do much more help Cuba, argued the US academic William LeoGrande in the latest issue of Foreign Policy magazine.
“The proponents of regime change should be careful what they wish for,” he wrote. “A collapse of the regime would be a humanitarian disaster, spurring an emigration tsunami far larger than what we have seen so far. A breakdown of social order could unleash a surge of criminal violence.”
Unlike during previous power cuts, there has been very little protest this time , beyond the bashing of some pots and pans. People seem exhausted and government ministers have made it clear that the government will come down hard on any “indecent” behaviour.
Recent months have seen a new round of intimidation of journalists, with several forced to flee the country. On Wednesday, Amnesty International declared four people currently in Cuban jails – the journalist Félix Navarro and his daughter, Sayli Navarro, as well as protesters Roberto Pérez Fonseca and Luis Robles – as “prisoners of conscience”.
Meanwhile, one crisis begets another. Failures have been reported in the equally obsolete water supply system. Six hundred thousand people lack regular running water, but the blackouts appear to have multiplied that number by damaging pumps and pipes. Much of Havana is dry.
Dariel Ramírez was sitting on his stoop in the old town. He didn’t have much to eat because he had shared his stored food with others before it spoiled.
Asked how he was preparing for any repeat of the power crisis, he pointed towards the Museum of the Revolution, where the central symbol of communist rule is displayed: the boat on which Fidel and Raúl Castro arrived from Mexico in 1956.
“If this happens again, we need to prepare the Granma yacht,” he said. “So we can all sail away.”
Additional reporting by Eileen Sosin