Cuba’s power crisis intensifies amidst economic turmoil

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Cuba spent its fourth straight day on Monday in an almost island-wide blackout — and the few Cuban-Americans here in South Florida who can contact family there in Cuba are hearing only despair.

They say people there, in fact, tell them the collapse of the severely cash-strapped island’s electricity grid simply punctuates the worst economic crisis they’ve ever dealt with, at least since the implosion of the early 1990s known as "the Special Period."

“The feeling I’ve had from everyone is — hopeless," says Reuben Rojas, a Cuban-American in Miami Beach who is a program manager for Church World Service and has spent years working with Cubans on the island.

As food rots and nights turn pitch black, Rojas says Cubans are telling him they're hearing little if anything reassurance from their bewildered communist officials.

As a result, he says, they fear that "there’s no solution in sight. They don’t know what’s going to happen — and even if they have family in the diaspora here, if they can’t contact that family because the power and internet and phones are down, you just cut off their main lifeline.”

"Cubans so often tell me, we're not living here, we're just surviving. Now, in this moment, they say they're headed from 'just surviving' to 'we don't know even know about that.'"

READ MORE: Cuba suffers second power outage in 24 hours realizing years of warnings

The epic blackout began Friday morning when a major thermal electrical plant at Matanzas, Cuba, failed. The entire national electricity system failed again on Saturday and Sunday.

Some power was restored on Monday to Havana, where residents had begun taking to the streets banging pots and pans in protest — chanting insulting epithets for Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel, who angrily suggested they were "drunk." The power restoration situation for the rest of the island was complicated as Tropical Storm Oscar began pounding eastern Cuba on Monday.

The bigger bottom line, says Andy Gomez, former director of the University of Miami’s Cuba studies center, is that the bankrupt regime is unable to fuel or maintain its decrepit electrical grid — but it's also unwilling to change its equally decrepit statist economic system.

“This is as bad as I’ve seen it," Gomez told WLRN.

"Some of the best Cuban economists on the island, a couple of whom I spoke with when they visited Miami this month, are calling for a complete reform of the system."

"But by opening up the system, the regime knows it's going to lose political control — and maintaining political control is its only objective.”

Gomez speculates the blackout catastrophe could lead to even further military takeover of Cuba's government — now technically headed by civilians Díaz-Canel and Prime Minister Manuel Marrero — especially since the armed forces already runs tourism and other critical economic sectors.

"It would not surprise me," says Gomez, "because right now they have be worried about things getting to the point that they lose social control if this sort of thing keeps up."

Adding insult to injury, the Cuban regime over the weekend suggested that impoverished Cubans buy more solar panels, or at least urge their relatives in the U.S. to ship them more of that expensive renewable energy equipment.

The Cuban government blames the trouble on the more than six-decade-old U.S. economic embargo.

Cuba's regime says it wants to make renewable energy sources like solar and wind account for at least a quarter of the country's electricity generation by the end of this decade. But so far it hasn't even reached 5% — and solar represents a scant 2%.

Cuba relies on oil and other fuel to generate its electricity. But while it produces only 40,000 barrels or its own oil each day, it consumes three times that much, relying on allies like Venezuela, China and Russia to make up the difference — even though it often can't pay for the imports.

The Cuban government has taken measures to make sure only necessary services like hospitals are using electrical power at the moment. Schools will be shut until Wednesday.

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