In Havana's still dark corners, a protest erupts
Cuban police remove debris used to block a street during a protest against a blackout, in Havana
Tue, October 22, 2024
By Dave Sherwood
HAVANA (Reuters) - Just three or four city blocks in all of Central Havana remained without electricity on Monday evening - an island of darkness in the Cuban capital's sea of flashing lights, pounding reggaeton and jammed bars and cafes.
That is where an unusual protest broke out.
Near the intersection of Campanario and Salud streets, dozens of residents chanted "We want light!" while banging pots with metal spoons. They were angry, they said, after four days without electricity in their homes following a near-unprecedented collapse of Cuba's grid on Friday.
Cuba's grid operator restored power to Havana by nightfall on Monday, days after a grid failure cut power for the Caribbean country's 10 million people.
Officials on Tuesday said around 90% of Havana - a city of around 2 million people - had seen light return by midday. The government has warned that despite progress, blackouts will continue.
Cuba's oil-fired power plants, already obsolete and struggling to keep the lights on, reached a full crisis this year as oil imports from Venezuela, Russia and Mexico dwindled.
"We've gone four days without electricity. Our food is going bad. Our kids are suffering. We don't have ... water," said Marley Gonzalez, a resident who banged a pot in protest, surrounded by her neighbors.
Blackouts as long as 18 or 20 hours a day have become the norm in the past month across Cuba's outlying provinces, where tensions have flared amid an unprecedented economic crisis that has also made food, water, fuel and medicine scarce.
But the latest all-day blackouts in Havana, densely populated and long protected from the worst outages, marked a sudden change for the capital's residents.
Reuters spoke with seven people during and after the protest on Monday evening. Most described the prolonged blackouts as a last straw, another in a growing list of problems.
Housewife Ramona Martinez, 37, said she could not afford to feed her four children on the 2,600 peso monthly stipend ($8 based on Cuba's widely used unofficial rate) she received from the government. Prices have soared in Cuba over the past three years, while wages and benefits have barely budged.
"It's not even enough for a bag of (powdered) milk," said Martinez as her 6-year-old son, who has cerebral palsy, retched on the bed in her one-room home. "This is crazy."
Martinez's refrigerator, standing with its doors open, housed only a pill bottle of Vitamin C, a bag of thawed chicken and several empty plastic bottles.
"They haven't put on the electricity and they don't give us any response," she said. "So we took to the streets as a community."
The neighborhood around Campanario Street, where the protest took place, is stark. Heaps of trash line some intersections. Roads have deep potholes. Many families are crammed into small spaces in decrepit buildings whose facades and terraces are crumbling.
FAIR WARNING
During the protest, many residents, their patience worn thin, shouted in anger at their predicament.
"My 85-year-old grandmother has been asking me for cold water since Friday when we lost power" said Alcer Alfonso, a young man in a ragged white T-shirt, as he rallied the crowd to chant "light!"
Street protests in Communist-run Cuba are rare. On July 11, 2021, anti-government rallies rocked the island, the largest since former Cuban leader Fidel Castro's 1959 revolution. Those protests followed months of isolation during the pandemic, but also, growing anger over shortages and blackouts.
President Miguel Diaz-Canel spoke on national television on Sunday, just prior to the Central Havana protest, encouraging Cubans to air grievances with "discipline" and "civility."
"We are not going to accept nor allow anyone to act with vandalism and much less to alter the tranquility of our people," Diaz-Canel said. "That's a conviction, a principle of our revolution."
Police gathered on Monday at a nearby intersection in Central Havana, observing protesters from a distance but not confronting them.
Resident Leyke Milay Puentes, 42, sat on her doorstep a few paces from the protest, pointing up and down the road at others just a city block away walking lit streets.
"There's electricity over there and over there," she said, shaking her head. "Everywhere but here."
(Reporting by Dave Sherwood, additional reporting by Mario Fuentes and Carlos Carrillo, editing by Rod Nickel)
Cuba keeps schools closed, workers home during recovery from power failure, hurricane
Reuters
Wed, October 23, 2024
HAVANA (Reuters) - Cuba said on Wednesday it would keep schools closed and non-essential workers home through Sunday as the crisis-racked Caribbean island nation struggled to recover from the collapse of its power grid last Friday and Hurricane Oscar this week.
The island's far eastern province of Guantanamo was particularly hard hit by Oscar, which made landfall as a category one hurricane and unleashed more than 15 inches of rain in some areas. The cyclone was downgraded to a tropical storm before veering north to the Bahamas earlier this week.
The storm, combined with a nearly unprecedented electrical grid collapse on Friday, created a nightmare scenario in a country already suffering dramatic food, fuel and medicine shortages.
The crisis prompted scattered protests throughout Havana and elsewhere in the country.
Officials said late on Tuesday seven people had died as a result of the storm. Cuba's armed forces had rescued nearly 500 people from remote areas isolated by floodwaters or landslides, with upwards of 4,000 residents still housed in shelters.
Flash floods destroyed homes, roads, agricultural lands and already decrepit infrastructure throughout the major coffee-producing region. Wind and rain had damaged at least 2,280 homes, state-run media reported.
Communications were still spotty in rural areas, and most of the eastern province remained without power as emergency workers cleaned up tangles of downed power lines.
The United Nations said on Wednesday it would support Cuba in recovery efforts following Oscar.
The storm had also complicated the recovery of Cuba's already precarious electrical grid. Cuba stabilized its electrical service on Tuesday, but warned that outages would continue as before the grid collapse.
Cuba's outdated power plants, struggling to keep the lights on, reached a full crisis this year as oil imports from Venezuela, Russia and Mexico dwindled, culminating in last Friday's grid collapse.
A generation deficit of about one-third total demand was expected on Wednesday, the national electric company said, leaving many Cubans still in the dark.
(Reporting by Marc Frank and Dave Sherwood; Editing by Richard Chang)
Sweeping blackouts in Cuba raise the question: Why has the island's solar buildout been so slow?
ALEXA ST. JOHN, INGRID LOBET and ANDREA RODRIGUEZ
Wed, October 23, 2024
Residents prepare a soup over an open fire during a blackout following the failure of a major power plant in Havana, Cuba, Oct. 19, 2024. (AP Photo/Ramon Espinosa, File)
HAVANA (AP) — Cuba’s large-scale blackouts that left 10 million people without power this month may not have happened if the government had built out more solar power to boost its failing electric grid as promised, some experts say.
In a nation with plentiful sunshine, Cuban officials have long had the opportunity to encourage solar power as one solution to national energy problems. But October’s sweeping outages — the island’s worst power failure in years — show little progress has been made.
“If you had extensive buildout of solar, solar farms, residential solar and storage, for the most part, you could avoid the problems they have,” said Dan Whittle, associate vice president of the resilient Caribbean practice at the Environmental Defense Fund, an advocacy group. “But they haven’t really built the policies to get there.”
Cuban officials blame the blackouts on the U.S. trade embargo and other sanctions, the pandemic's effect on tourism, and emigration all inhibiting Cuba's economy.
But experts say the government hasn’t updated its internal policies regarding foreign ownership and private financing, especially for critical solar projects, and are still focused on petroleum fuels. That's despite the fact that as part of the 2015 Paris Agreement, the Cuban government committed to 37% of its power coming from renewable energy by 2030, an ambitious increase from an initial 24% target.
John Kavulich, president of U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council Inc., said there was much hope in the business community two years ago when the U.S. changed policies enabling U.S. investment in private Cuban companies. But the Cuban government has failed to issue regulations necessary to allow the money to start flowing to the private sector, he said.
“So all of this investment and financing, not just from the U.S. but from other countries ... that are ready to take a chance in Cuba, sit idle, and that is hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars," he said.
The share of Cuba's electricity that comes from renewable sources like solar and burning sugar cane waste has increased only slightly, from 3.8% in 2012 to 5% as of 2022, according to research from the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School and EDF. That's a very small change during a time when solar and wind have ramped up sharply globally and costs have come down.
Nearly all of the country's power — 95% — comes from burning fossil fuels. Much of that is from burning crude oil, a particularly polluting form of generation.
One of Cuba's biggest trading partners, China, makes 80% of the world's solar panels, according to the energy data and analytics firm Wood Mackenzie, and they are inexpensive. China committed in March to building 92 solar farms on the island that are expected to add more than 2,000 megawatts of energy, and reports in June said China donated three solar parks expected to add 1,000 more. But that trade relationship has not yet led to a buildout that would at least keep the lights on during the day. The whole country had only 252 megawatts of solar power at the end of 2022.
Kavulich said even China has its limits. The view of China's private sector, he said, is that Cuba “seems to make no effort whatsoever to pay money that it owes.”
“The Cuban utility is the only buyer and it’s a risky investment,” said Whittle. European leaders tell him they “just can’t in good faith encourage businesses in their countries to invest in Cuba.”
Cuban officials acknowledged in recent days that more widespread solar power would have helped alleviate some of the misery from the recent outages. The minister of energy and head of the nation's electric utility encouraged Cubans to buy rooftop solar systems paired with batteries, instead of the gas and diesel generators purchased by Cubans who can afford them.
“We are thinking about” some regulations that would stimulate these solar purchases, the chief of the nation’s electric utility, Alfredo López, said.
Cuba has struggled with frequent power outages for decades. Besides the U.S. economic embargo, officials have cited aging and insufficiently maintained power plants, increased demand for air conditioning and a lack of fuel for the lack of electricity. The nation relies on imported fuel to meet electric needs, including from oil-rich ally Venezuela, Mexico and Russia.
This month’s crisis, which shut down institutions including schools, closed gas stations and left people cooking their food on wood stoves on the streets, began with one of the island’s major power plants failing.
Human-driven climate change has contributed to extreme weather events that also regularly affect Cuba’s electrical grid. Desperation over the inability to carry out basic activities has sparked recent street protests.
Whittle noted the country has no shortage of good climate scientists. Korey Silverman-Roati, senior fellow of carbon management and negative emissions at the Sabin Center, said the Cuban government is trying. “There certainly has been a will and attempts to build out renewable energy infrastructure,” he said. “It just hasn’t happened.”
On the island, technicians are working to install 26 solar projects in different provinces, López told official media last week.
Installations will ramp up fivefold over the next decade, said LÃdice Vaillant, head of the Photovoltaic Research Laboratory at the University of Havana.
Besides the strong sunlight, there is another way that Cuba is a good candidate for solar. A significant share of its electricity comes from smaller power plants distributed around the country. Solar could be added or switched out in those locations. But it hasn't happened yet.
“There is still sort of this, I think, this lingering belief at the highest levels of government that, you know, fossil fuels is really the best solution,” Whittle said.
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Rodriguez reported from Havana, St. John from Detroit and Lobet from New York.
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Read more of AP’s climate coverage at http://www.apnews.com/climate-and-environment
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