In March 2019, Prince Charles was front page news in Cuba. The royal visit to the socialist state – at one brief moment a British colony – received thorough coverage in Granma. Published by the Cuban Communist Party, the newspaper reported that Charles had driven a 1953 Morris T-type through the streets of Havana and inaugurated a solar park in Cuba''s new Special Economic Zone. In photographs, the president of Havana Energy, a British-Chinese utility, also flanked the prince. In a joint venture with the Cuban government, Havana Energy is investing in solar energy and biomass solutions for increased renewable energy use in Cuba.
The British state visit makes it evident how Cuba and the UK have normalised diplomatic relations in recent years. In the West, political and economic ties with Cuba were controversial until the rapprochement between Cuba and the United States under the Obama administration. While President Trump has backtracked on Obama''s policy, the UK and other EU countries are continuing to improve their relations with Cuba.
For itspart, the Cuban government is actively seeking to attract foreign investment inthe socialist economy. The electrical industry is a key sector where the CubanCommunist Party has adopted a strategy to achieve a 24 percent transition torenewable energy by 2030. The plan is motivated by Cuba''s overall highlyprogressive environmental agenda and, especially, the need to diminish thecountry''s dependence on oil imports.
Like allCaribbean island-states, Cuba has long maintained a high dependence on oil tofuel its economic and social development. The importance of oil to thesocialist economy became clear in the aftermath of the Soviet Union''s collapsewhen the country lost over 85 percent of its oil supplies in the course of afew years. Since 2005, Venezuela has supplied oil to Cuba and the Greater Caribbean inexchange for services and goods, but today, the crisis in Venezuela underscoresthe region''s energy vulnerability. This is the context in which the Cubangovernment now seeks joint ventures with companies like Havana Energy todevelop energy sources available on the Cuban islands.
Decarbonisationand Recentralisation
Thecurrent Plan 2030 is a continuation of Cuba''s remarkable ''Energy Revolution''. Launchedby Fidel Castro in 2005, this nationwide campaign contributed to reducing theenergy intensity of the Cuban economy by 44 percent and the carbonintensity by 32 percent.
In a recent article in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, I look closely at the Energy Revolution, drawing on long-term research in Cuban industry and households. The article documents Cuba''s partial low-carbon transition in the mid-2000s but also shows how the reconfiguration of Cuba''s energy systems did political work in the socialist state. In building and maintaining infrastructure, we shape the conditions for social, economic, and ecological life with far-reaching consequences for human action.
Before the Cuban Revolution in 1959, a private utility based in Florida held an almost complete monopoly over Cuba''s electricity infrastructures. With Che Guevara at the helm of industrial policy, a socialist logic instead came to underpin the efforts of national electrification. Under socialism, it was argued, energy would no longer be consumed as a commodity – a service to be extended and accessed based on profitability – but energy would be distributed by the state as an entitlement to the socialist citizen.
When Cubalost its oil supplies during the 1990s, the state''s ability to distribute electricity,cooking fuels, and other energy sources as entitlements to the population cameunder severe pressure. To stave off the crisis, the government started to scheduleblackouts in cities to manage supply and removed electrical appliances fromshops to manage demand. At the same time, informal energy supply networksappeared. Cuban small-farmers, for example, found a lucrative market in tradinghomemade charcoal for use as a cooking fuel. Transport and construction workerscould swindle diesel and petrol from state companies and trade it on the blackmarket. Parallel to the ailing state infrastructures, energy was again commodified,undermining the logic of Cuban socialism.
This was thesituation when the government launched the Energy Revolution.
The campaign''sprimary purpose was to bring stability back to the national grid, todecarbonise supply, and to make the electricity system more resilient tohurricanes. But there was a deeper logic to the Energy Revolution, closer tohome, so to speak. The Cubans daily realities changed, as I show in detail inthe article, when statecontrol over energy use was simultaneously re-established through an energytransition in Cuba''s kitchens.
While thegovernment radically redesigned the national electricity system, they alsoreplaced old household appliances with more efficient ones and, crucially, distributedelectrical cooking appliances to all Cuban households. This was the first timesince the early 1990s that new cooking appliances were widely available on theisland. At the same time, the government withdrew liquid cooking fuels fromcirculation and increased monitoring in state companies to undermine thepossibility of informal energy supply networks.
Pairedwith a decentralised, stable electricity supply, the electrification of cookingincreased the population''s reliance on state infrastructure. With power recentralisedin the state through an energy transition, the logic of socialistredistribution was resurrected in a key domain of everyday life: the quitemundane act of cooking. More widely, then, energy transitions – such as the oneunderlying Cuba''s current Plan 2030 – should be seen not only as acts oftechnical engineering, but also as acts to sustain social power.
About the author: Gustav Cederlöf is ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Geography at King''s College London
Cederlöf, G. (2019). Maintaining Power: Decarbonisation and Recentralisation in Cuba''s Energy Revolution. Trans InstBr Geogr. doi: 10.1111/tran.12330.
CederlöfG and Kingsbury D (2019) On PetroCaribe: Petropolitics, Energopower, andPost-Neoliberal Development in the Caribbean Energy Region. Political Geogr 72: 124–133. doi: 10.1016/j.polgeo.2019.04.006.
Sautié M (2019) 16 imágenes de sus Altezas Reales envisita oficial a Cuba. Granma, 26 March. D (2019) Trump''s New Cuba Crackdown PutsUS at Odds with Canada and Europe. The Guardian, 17 April. https://
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This is a pretty good news for Cuba ’s 2022 and look what China has achieved! Invested their own Sun.
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By Luis Brizuela (IPS-Cuba)
HAVANA TIMES – With dated infrastructure and problems with fuel supplies, Cuba''s electricity generation crisis has gotten a lot worse, which might speed up plans to increase the share of renewables.
Blackouts have become commonplace in recent weeks on the Caribbean island, further impacting and making families'' lives harder.
Damages at many of the country''s eight thermoelectric power plants and delays in maintenance works on 18 out of its 20 generating units are the reason for deficits in electricity generation, state government authorities.
Add to this, faults in distribution systems – cables, substations, transformers – due to a shortage of spare parts.
Cuba produces half of the fuel it burns at many of its power plants, but the other significant percentage depends entirely upon purchases abroad.
Forming part of bilateral agreements, the island should receive approximately 53,000 barrels of oil and derivatives every day from Venezuela, but this South American has sunk into its own crisis and deliveries are irregular, news channels report, while the local government hasn''t disclosed any figures on the matter.
Meanwhile, a drop in liquefied petroleum gas supplies has been reported, which is used for electricity generation at power plants on the north-western coast, and this deficit can only be compensated by the exploration of new hydrocarbon wells, leaders in the sector have recognized.
"The electricity system''s operating reserve is very low and is sometimes below what''s needed for the country to cover consumers'' energy demands, thus cuts in electricity are necessary and inevitable," the minister of Energy and Mines, Livan Arronte, pointed out during a TV appearance on September 14th.
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