Man kan inte säga något annat än att Kubas diktator Fidel Castro, som tyvärr fyllde år häromdagen, är en innovativ person. Den nuvarande energikrisen, den värsta på tio år, ska lösas med lågenergilampor.
Cuba’s energy crisis is the product of an aging and deteriorated power structure hit by several hurricanes in the past few years. There are seven power plants on the island, which together have a capacity of 3,200 megawatts. They are currently running at about 50 percent capacity, Piñon said, but need to be at 65 percent to meet demand.
Daunting energy challenges have hit the island since the early 1990s, when the collapse of communism cut off the flow of cheap Soviet oil. Cuban officials then started to run power plants with lower-quality oil that ate away at the already decaying plants, Piñon said.
”It’s driving people nuts,” said Dan Erikson, a Cuba expert at the InterAmerican Dialogue in Washington. “The electrical grids just don’t work. They haven’t invested in their infrastructure. It’s back to the bad old days that people thought faded into history.”
This month the Ministry of Basic Industries announced that 400,000 incandescent bulbs were being replaced by lower-wattage bulbs as part of ”Operation Save Energy.” Roberto González Vale, a ministry specialist, said the goal was to replace 1.2 million bulbs in Havana alone, the EFE news agency reported.
Det hela är lite underhållande, och sorgligt på samma gång, med tanke på att Castro lagom till mors dag lovade elektriska riskokare till de kubanska kvinnorna. Riskokare förbjöds nämligen vid förra energikrisen. Konsekvens och långsiktighet ingår förstås inte i någon diktators vokabulär.
President Fidel Castro gave Cuban women some good news on International Women’s Day: rice cookers are coming to every household.
In a five-hour 45-minute speech to cheering women on Tuesday night, the Cuban leader announced 100,000 pressure cookers and rice cookers would be available each month at subsidized prices.
“Those of you who like rice cookers, raise your hands,” Castro said to applause from hundreds of women. The 78-year-old leader spent two hours talking about the merits of pressure cookers.
Castro’s gesture may have carried some irony, coming on a day commemorating women’s battles for equality. But many Cuban women, who do the vast majority of domestic work despite advances toward equality under Castro, were only too happy to hear the Chinese-made rice cookers were on their way.
The electric rice cooker is a treasured appliance in communist-run Cuba, where the basic diet is black beans and rice. The cookers were among appliances banned to save energy a decade ago when Cuba was plunged into economic crisis and power outages due to the loss of Soviet aid and oil.
The cookers could be distributed now, Castro said, because Cuba was emerging from the crisis and had resolved its latest energy crunch, caused by a failure of the island’s largest power plant last summer.
Jorge R. Piñon som citeras i den första artikeln skrev förra året en artikel om Kubas energisituation, Cuba’s Energy Challenge: Fueling the Engine of Future Economic Growth [pdf].
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