With little fuel and too much heat, Cuba faces a serious energy crisis

For Cubans, the heat has arrived and the power could run out at any moment.

Hot summer temperatures and a fragile electrical grid have long been a part of life in Cuba, but now the island is dealing with severe fuel shortages, failing power plants and widespread blackouts that are testing even the most patient.

The energy crisis is of particular concern to government officials following last year’s widespread protests, the biggest since the Cuban revolution, which began after residents tired of the blackouts and took to the streets.

Last week, people in the city of Los Palacios angrily banged pots and pans in a demonstration against a nighttime blackout. Residents reported that internet service was cut off for several hours and that local authorities were able to calm the protesters. At least for a while.

“Cuba looks like a powder keg that could explode at any moment,” said Miguel, who lives in the same province where the most recent protests took place. He asked that his full name not be used for fear of reprisal.

In response to the growing power crisis, authorities provide regular updates on power outages, but the news is rarely good.

“The situation is complex and tense right now, but there is a solution, even if it doesn’t happen immediately,” said Energy and Mines Minister Livan Arronte Cruz during an appearance on state TV on Monday (18), where he admitted that blackouts will continue through the summer.

Cuban officials say US sanctions, which increased dramatically during the Trump administration and were largely maintained under Biden, make buying replacement parts for power plants and even fuel difficult and more expensive.

But analyst Jorge Piñon, director of the Latin American and Caribbean Energy Program at the University of Texas, said the Cuban government was producing less oil than needed to run the island’s power plants and was increasingly facing a deficit of energy.

Investments in renewable energy so far have not borne fruit. A proposal by a Chinese joint venture to build a wind farm has been delayed, and a British project to turn sugarcane milling waste into energy has been hampered by the recent bad harvest, the worst in Cuba in more than 100 years. said Pinon.

Even more damaging was the government’s failure to invest in maintaining the fragile power grid.

“I’m not an alarmist, but for the first time in a long time I’m really worried,” Piñon told CNN . “You have a series of cumulative effects that cannot be resolved with band-aids. We are talking about massive, billion-dollar structural investments that could take years to solve this problem.”

Cuban officials recognize that significant repairs are not on the horizon and the best they can do is continue to improvise existing plants and import whatever fuel they can.

“The mills have consumed more of the small amount of fuel we have,” Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel said in a televised speech in June. “Fundamentally diesel, which costs us a lot of work to get and means our power generation is affected, as are important economic activities.”

Amid power cuts, Cubans complain that public transport is increasingly scarce and government fumigators do not have the fuel needed to widely spray the mosquitoes that transmit dengue.

Drivers who use diesel fuel in their cars and trucks now wait days at state stations to fill up. At a gas station in Havana, a long line of cars and trucks was ready for the next shipment of diesel.

People played dominoes or slept in their cars to pass the time. Drivers at the front of the queue said they had waited more than eight days to fill up and created a system using WhatsApp to virtually organize a queue, but that Cuban police had said they needed to wait there in person.

“We can’t go,” Iván said as he waited to fill up his 1958 Buick. “If you leave, someone else will take your place and you’ll have to go back to the beginning and start all over again.”