Cuba is particularly vulnerable to this kind of catastrophe. As a Caribbean country, it’s exposed to high temperatures and extreme climatic events. October is a winter month here, but thanks to climate change temperatures haven’t dropped as fast as they should, and energy demand is off the charts for this time of year. Cuban infrastructure is also technologically backwards, dating to the late 70s and 80s, and the country doesn’t have the money to import enough fuel or properly maintain its electricity infrastructure. Much of this is because of the us’s tightening grip on the economy, especially since Trump’s 2019 executive orders, which placed further restrictions on fuel, spare parts and new technologies. Similar power cuts have recently happened elsewhere in the region, in Panama, Ecuador and São Paulo. But when you combine these hostile climatic conditions with attempts to obstruct Cuba’s insertion into regional and global trading networks, you get a perfect storm.
Everything comes to a standstill, waiting for the power to return. In the meantime, food rots; it’s difficult to cook, especially when it comes to using domestic appliances—most people use rice cookers or electric pressure cookers; it’s hard to sleep without electric fans or air conditioning. Schools are usually shut, all the way from kindergartens to universities. Health facilities operate with very limited capacity and most small businesses are forced to close. People developed certain strategies to cope with the lack of electricity after Trump’s measures severely limited the oil supply. But it still comes as a shock, especially in Havana, which isn’t as accustomed to power cuts as other regions. The private sector and some richer households have been importing their own generators, which is quite different to what we saw during the Special Period in the 1990s, when the collapse of the ussr caused a prolonged economic slump. Back then, it was only certain state-sector facilities—like hospitals or factories or critical infrastructure—that had autonomous power sources.
They have become more visible in general, both at the upper and lower ends of the spectrum. After the liberalizing Reform process initiated by the Sixth Party Congress of 2011, the housing market was loosened up, and those who could afford it started buying better houses as well as building or renting properties for private businesses. There has been a proliferation of security devices, from private cctv cameras to sophisticated fences. High-end vehicles have begun to appear around Havana, imported by the private sector, and some parts of the city have become more expensive—dominated by a tiny, solvent minority. At the lower end, meanwhile, you can see things that either weren’t there or weren’t as noticeable before, such as street begging. There is more trash cluttering the neighbourhoods hit by oil shortages. And there has been a marked deterioration in some public services and social guarantees. These were once universal, the social grounding of a certain way of life. But with rising inflation and material deprivation, they have given way to more individual solutions, which exist for some but not others. For example, a lack of guaranteed medications has caused the black market to boom, but at prices that were unheard of even five or six years ago: up to thirty times more than they were in public pharmacies.
This reflects a dynamic, typical of capitalist societies, in which access to good and services is increasingly mediated by income level—rather than by, say, people’s political access or position in the state economy, as tends to be the case in highly centralized economies like the former ussr and Eastern Bloc, where there is a political distribution of the social surplus. Along with this shift, we have seen a change in the expectations of the wider population, whose wellbeing often relies on sheer luck: on remittances from family members in foreign countries or opportunities in the new private sector.