‘There is no money’: Cuba fears total collapse amid grid failure and financial crisis
Ruaridh Nicoll in Havana
Sat, October 26, 2024
Residents prepare a soup over an open fire during a blackout after the failure of a major power plant in Havana on 19 October.Photograph: Ramón Espinosa/AP
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.
Related: The Cuban Collapse – a photo essay
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 October, 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.
Related: Scarce food and stifling homes: sputtering grid pushes Cuba nearer collapse
“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
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
Cuba Struggles Amid Hurricanes, Sanctions, and Blackouts
Through days of blackouts and shortages, we report from Cuba, where ordinary people are paying the price for years of tightening US sanctions.
By Ed Augustin
A Crisis of Legitimacy
The ruling Communist Party of Cuba, meanwhile, faces its biggest political crisis ever. Four failed attempts to get the national grid back online have underscored a growing sense that the government is overwhelmed by the magnitude of the multiple crises, many of which are rooted in sweeping US sanctions. Economically, it’s bankrupt. Ideologically, it has not fully enacted its own reform program, formally agreed upon way back at the Sixth Congress of the Communist Party, in 2011.
In many senses, the expanded market economy is keeping the show on the road: more food is now imported by the private sector than by the withering state. But the increased inequality it has brought has also undermined a sense that everyone is facing the crisis together — a major difference between the Special Period thirty years ago and today. People who go without breakfast now see overweight officials on television exhorting them to further tighten their belts. Social justice has been eroded, and with it much of the government’s legitimacy.
Speaking about the outages In Washington, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said on Monday that the United States is “concerned about the potential humanitarian impacts on the Cuban people.” Laughing as if the claim were far-fetched, she added, “I just want to make clear that the US is not to blame for the blackouts on the island.”
In fact, US sanctions are a major driver of the island’s energy crisis. It takes impressive audacity to deny it.
Washington specifically targets tankers that deliver the fuel the island needs to keep the lights on. By freezing assets of ships delivering oil, the Treasury Department leaves Cuba with fewer suppliers, driving up the island’s energy costs.US sanctions are a major driver of the island’s energy crisis. It takes impressive audacity to deny it.
More broadly, over the last decade sanctions on Cuba have been ramped up to unprecedented levels. The Joe Biden administration has left in place the most potent sanctions enacted by the Donald Trump administration, including the powerful Helms-Burton Title III, which chills investment in the island, and the false accusation that Cuba sponsors terrorism, which cuts it out of much of the world banking system. Economists calculate that these new sanctions cost the state billions of dollars a year — leaving less money to import petroleum, repair obsolete infrastructure, and import solar panels.
“We are doing everything we can to make it as damn hard as possible for Cuba to keep the lights on,” said Fulton Armstrong, who previously served as the top US intelligence officer for Latin America who is now a senior fellow at American University’s Center for Latin American and Latino Studies.
He added that “people at the State Department have been alarmed by the efficiency of their threats” to the private sector. The thoroughness of sanctions enforcement by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) in the Department of the Treasury has created a culture of “overcompliance” in the private sector, he said, where companies steer clear of trading with Cuba because ambiguous regulations and the severity of the penalties make it not worth their while. “In the olden days, OFAC had twenty or twenty-five people devoted to Cuba,” he said. “But in the digital age, you have these large bureaucracies to hunt down people who could be violating our embargo and to harass the private sector in the US, Europe, and Latin America.”
During the Biden administration, there’s been an odd disconnect between the reality of sanctions and the way they are spoken about. Whereas the Trump administration bragged about how its “maximum pressure” sanctions would cripple the island, the Biden administration has kept the core of the sanctions regime in place but flat-out denies that it has anything to do with Cuba’s crises.
Window-dressing measures help this effort. Joy Gordon, an expert on sanctions at Loyola University Chicago, dubbed this the “theatrics of humanitarian concern” in an article last year. In what she describes as a “gushingly self-congratulatory” press release, OFAC announced “general licenses” for humanitarian goods in countries the United States sanctions. “The provision of humanitarian support to alleviate the suffering of vulnerable populations is central to our American values,” OFAC said. But the severity of the overall sanctions regime means that the general licenses do not really allow for more humanitarian goods to get in.For most of the island’s ten million people, the moment is perilous.
In the wake of the power outages and the latest hurricane, there’s been a flurry of organizing by people in the United States who demand a different relationship with Cuba. Hundreds of activists attended an online emergency meeting this week organized by Massachusetts Peace Action. Cuba experts with decades of experience signed an open letter to President Biden calling on him to ease sanctions and to provide American aid to the Cuban people during his final weeks in office.
But the island’s energy crisis isn’t going away anytime soon. Many of the Soviet-era power stations are nearing half a century old. The country can barely afford spare parts and is unable to import enough petroleum to keep the lights on. Getting the grid back online and going back to “normal” means millions of people, especially those outside Havana, enduring long power outages every day.
And the events of this week have kicked off a vicious cycle that will be hard to break. In the wake of the national outages, Canada, from which more tourists visit Cuba each year than anywhere else, updated its travel warning for the island. Reduced tourism revenue would make it even harder for the government to dig itself out of the energy crisis.
Ultimately, analysts say that modernizing Cuba’s power grid will require external assistance. There’s not much on the horizon. US pressure prevents Cuba going to the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, or Inter-American Development Bank for support. Deliveries of Venezuelan oil, sent to Cuba in exchange for doctors, nurses, and teachers working in Venezuela ever since 2000, have dropped markedly in recent years. Mexico has offered technical assistance to keep the grid running. But Russia and China, bigger players who have surely been consulted this week, have not shown signs of decisively stepping in.
For most of the island’s ten million people, the moment is perilous.
Through days of blackouts and shortages, we report from Cuba, where ordinary people are paying the price for years of tightening US sanctions.
By Ed Augustin
October 27, 2024
Source: Jacobin
To say that Cuba has had a trying week would be an understatement. After a grid failure last Friday caused four days of nationwide blackouts and a Category One hurricane smashed into the eastern province of Guantanamo on Monday, killing seven, the lights are back on most of the time and things have steadied on the island.
Nilza Valdés Núñez, sixty-one, from Guanabacoa, East Havana, feels a bit of a relief. I spoke to her on Monday, the day after her eighty-one-year-old mother cooked all the defrosting meat in their freezer that her brother in Florida had bought for them.
“The lack of electricity, of gas, and all the other problems we have here,” said, pausing with tears in her eyes but fury in her voice, “make you feel so bad.”
To say that Cuba has had a trying week would be an understatement. After a grid failure last Friday caused four days of nationwide blackouts and a Category One hurricane smashed into the eastern province of Guantanamo on Monday, killing seven, the lights are back on most of the time and things have steadied on the island.
Nilza Valdés Núñez, sixty-one, from Guanabacoa, East Havana, feels a bit of a relief. I spoke to her on Monday, the day after her eighty-one-year-old mother cooked all the defrosting meat in their freezer that her brother in Florida had bought for them.
“The lack of electricity, of gas, and all the other problems we have here,” said, pausing with tears in her eyes but fury in her voice, “make you feel so bad.”
Nilza Valdés Núñez’s empty freezer. (Ed Augustin / Jacobin)
At a time when over a million Cuban homes are already going without running water, the power cuts compounded the problem by disabling pumps. People carried water to their houses in buckets from nearby cisterns and wells.
Before the blackouts, the street price of a bag of ten bread rolls in her neighborhood was about 50 cents (150 pesos). In their aftermath, it shot up to nearly a dollar (280 pesos).
Once all but vanquished, hunger has returned in Cuba in recent years, as state guaranteed food rations have been cut. With scarce food spoiled and prices rising this last week, some who rely on state salaries or pensions and don’t have relatives to help them out from abroad are now feeling the pinch as much as people were in the Special Period following the Soviet Union’s collapse.
At the same time, the country’s resilience is striking. Massive outages like this would terrify people in other countries, but many I met took them calmly and even with nonchalance.
Playing on her phone in old Havana, next to a crumbling three-story building with a tree growing out of its roof, Anyeli Imbert told me, “It’s not scary for us when the lights go out because we’re used to it. It’s not a big deal.”
At a time when over a million Cuban homes are already going without running water, the power cuts compounded the problem by disabling pumps. People carried water to their houses in buckets from nearby cisterns and wells.
Before the blackouts, the street price of a bag of ten bread rolls in her neighborhood was about 50 cents (150 pesos). In their aftermath, it shot up to nearly a dollar (280 pesos).
Once all but vanquished, hunger has returned in Cuba in recent years, as state guaranteed food rations have been cut. With scarce food spoiled and prices rising this last week, some who rely on state salaries or pensions and don’t have relatives to help them out from abroad are now feeling the pinch as much as people were in the Special Period following the Soviet Union’s collapse.
At the same time, the country’s resilience is striking. Massive outages like this would terrify people in other countries, but many I met took them calmly and even with nonchalance.
Playing on her phone in old Havana, next to a crumbling three-story building with a tree growing out of its roof, Anyeli Imbert told me, “It’s not scary for us when the lights go out because we’re used to it. It’s not a big deal.”
Anyeli Imbert in Havana. (Ed Augustin / Jacobin)
Other people’s resilience came out in humor. “These things happen,” said Yosvani Valdés, on the same block. “The lights go out in Japan when there are typhoons. The lights went out in Houston a few weeks ago when there was a cyclone there. People blow these things out of proportion, but we Cubans face adversity with laughter, and we always find a way through.”
Other people’s resilience came out in humor. “These things happen,” said Yosvani Valdés, on the same block. “The lights go out in Japan when there are typhoons. The lights went out in Houston a few weeks ago when there was a cyclone there. People blow these things out of proportion, but we Cubans face adversity with laughter, and we always find a way through.”
A Crisis of Legitimacy
The ruling Communist Party of Cuba, meanwhile, faces its biggest political crisis ever. Four failed attempts to get the national grid back online have underscored a growing sense that the government is overwhelmed by the magnitude of the multiple crises, many of which are rooted in sweeping US sanctions. Economically, it’s bankrupt. Ideologically, it has not fully enacted its own reform program, formally agreed upon way back at the Sixth Congress of the Communist Party, in 2011.
In many senses, the expanded market economy is keeping the show on the road: more food is now imported by the private sector than by the withering state. But the increased inequality it has brought has also undermined a sense that everyone is facing the crisis together — a major difference between the Special Period thirty years ago and today. People who go without breakfast now see overweight officials on television exhorting them to further tighten their belts. Social justice has been eroded, and with it much of the government’s legitimacy.
Speaking about the outages In Washington, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said on Monday that the United States is “concerned about the potential humanitarian impacts on the Cuban people.” Laughing as if the claim were far-fetched, she added, “I just want to make clear that the US is not to blame for the blackouts on the island.”
In fact, US sanctions are a major driver of the island’s energy crisis. It takes impressive audacity to deny it.
Washington specifically targets tankers that deliver the fuel the island needs to keep the lights on. By freezing assets of ships delivering oil, the Treasury Department leaves Cuba with fewer suppliers, driving up the island’s energy costs.US sanctions are a major driver of the island’s energy crisis. It takes impressive audacity to deny it.
More broadly, over the last decade sanctions on Cuba have been ramped up to unprecedented levels. The Joe Biden administration has left in place the most potent sanctions enacted by the Donald Trump administration, including the powerful Helms-Burton Title III, which chills investment in the island, and the false accusation that Cuba sponsors terrorism, which cuts it out of much of the world banking system. Economists calculate that these new sanctions cost the state billions of dollars a year — leaving less money to import petroleum, repair obsolete infrastructure, and import solar panels.
“We are doing everything we can to make it as damn hard as possible for Cuba to keep the lights on,” said Fulton Armstrong, who previously served as the top US intelligence officer for Latin America who is now a senior fellow at American University’s Center for Latin American and Latino Studies.
He added that “people at the State Department have been alarmed by the efficiency of their threats” to the private sector. The thoroughness of sanctions enforcement by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) in the Department of the Treasury has created a culture of “overcompliance” in the private sector, he said, where companies steer clear of trading with Cuba because ambiguous regulations and the severity of the penalties make it not worth their while. “In the olden days, OFAC had twenty or twenty-five people devoted to Cuba,” he said. “But in the digital age, you have these large bureaucracies to hunt down people who could be violating our embargo and to harass the private sector in the US, Europe, and Latin America.”
During the Biden administration, there’s been an odd disconnect between the reality of sanctions and the way they are spoken about. Whereas the Trump administration bragged about how its “maximum pressure” sanctions would cripple the island, the Biden administration has kept the core of the sanctions regime in place but flat-out denies that it has anything to do with Cuba’s crises.
Window-dressing measures help this effort. Joy Gordon, an expert on sanctions at Loyola University Chicago, dubbed this the “theatrics of humanitarian concern” in an article last year. In what she describes as a “gushingly self-congratulatory” press release, OFAC announced “general licenses” for humanitarian goods in countries the United States sanctions. “The provision of humanitarian support to alleviate the suffering of vulnerable populations is central to our American values,” OFAC said. But the severity of the overall sanctions regime means that the general licenses do not really allow for more humanitarian goods to get in.For most of the island’s ten million people, the moment is perilous.
In the wake of the power outages and the latest hurricane, there’s been a flurry of organizing by people in the United States who demand a different relationship with Cuba. Hundreds of activists attended an online emergency meeting this week organized by Massachusetts Peace Action. Cuba experts with decades of experience signed an open letter to President Biden calling on him to ease sanctions and to provide American aid to the Cuban people during his final weeks in office.
But the island’s energy crisis isn’t going away anytime soon. Many of the Soviet-era power stations are nearing half a century old. The country can barely afford spare parts and is unable to import enough petroleum to keep the lights on. Getting the grid back online and going back to “normal” means millions of people, especially those outside Havana, enduring long power outages every day.
And the events of this week have kicked off a vicious cycle that will be hard to break. In the wake of the national outages, Canada, from which more tourists visit Cuba each year than anywhere else, updated its travel warning for the island. Reduced tourism revenue would make it even harder for the government to dig itself out of the energy crisis.
Ultimately, analysts say that modernizing Cuba’s power grid will require external assistance. There’s not much on the horizon. US pressure prevents Cuba going to the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, or Inter-American Development Bank for support. Deliveries of Venezuelan oil, sent to Cuba in exchange for doctors, nurses, and teachers working in Venezuela ever since 2000, have dropped markedly in recent years. Mexico has offered technical assistance to keep the grid running. But Russia and China, bigger players who have surely been consulted this week, have not shown signs of decisively stepping in.
For most of the island’s ten million people, the moment is perilous.
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