“We live like our grandmothers, with sooty cauldrons and houses full of smoke,” says Rebeca, one of the mothers who have returned to the wood stoves to face he domestic electricity and fuel deficit in the city of Santiago de Cuba.
Cooking with dry branches and sticks inside the house “is the only option that blackouts, shortages and abusive prices leave us to the families who have empty pockets,” adds this resident of Los Pinos
Dora was 25 years old when the Special Period came into her life and she says that “returning to underdevelopment” stresses her out, alluding to returning to the same situation she experienced when He raised his children “with firewood and burning rags.”cardboard and even the window slats”.
Without nails and with a scarf on her head to “fight” with her stove of sawdust and slices, goes Liudmila, whose husband invented a stove in the patio of the apartment “until she repairs the oil stove that her uncle left her before emigrating.”
“I have a horror of firewood, but there is no remedy. All my equipment is electric and they turn on the power on the Micro 9 when the devil screams four times. Besides, I don’t have gas and I didn’t get coal on the first lap either.“argues Liudmila, who works as a receptionist and is sad that at school they “stink of smoke.”
Patricia is one of those kitchen at the time they restore the electrical service“it doesn’t matter that it’s early morning; the thing is that the boys have a plate of food on the table when they come home from school.”
Almost all of those consulted by DIARIO DE CUBA They have skipped a few meals a day due to the price of food and the lack of fuel to prepare it.. Most people wonder what they will do when they can’t even solve firewood.
For neighbors like Darío, people begin to take out of the relief rooms, and burn, the old junk that they keep from their grandparents. “It’s embarrassing to see the people of Santiago cooking on the street, in the doorways, in the apartments. and even at the entrance of the buildings, full of smoke.
“The energy revolution was a disaster. The workshops do not have parts. Kerosene fell off the map. The queens and rice cookers are broken. “I don’t quite understand what part of the task the Government talks about is the regulation,” he says.
“Induction cooktops cannot be substitutes for liquefied gas in the midst of blackouts. In addition, the nuclei that benefited from gasification were excluded from the purchase of electrical equipment,” Roxana pointed out.
The resale of liquefied gas It has become one of the most lucrative businesses in Santiago de Cubawhere hoarding and bartering challenge the pricing policy set by the State.
Panic and restlessness spread not only because long queues at points and fuel shortagesbut because A 10-kilogram balita of liquefied gas is priced on the black market at 5,000 pesos. Almost none of the 176,000 clients in the province reach the quota approved by the Ministry of Energy and Mines.
The sale of coal announced by Mayor Manuel Falcón does not solve the problem either.because the Government has no way of guaranteeing the six kilograms, at 25 pesos each, promised to the nuclei, and the Ministry of Agriculture is refusing to give up one of its exportable items, coal.
A director of the ELF Gas Company confirmed to DIARIO DE CUBA that in mid-April 300 tons were processed, which were distributed at the rate of three harrows—with a thousand cylinders—to each province of the eastern region, although most of them remained. in Santiago de Cuba.
According to the official, They have not met the 14,000 cylinders that the plant can produce for months daily, due to the lack of raw materials and the insolvency of the State to pay for the ships that anchor in the bay and many times they leave due to lack of money.
At the beginning of 2015, the first 80,000 induction cookers were sold in Cuba and their household items to families assisted by social assistance. In October of that year, another 284,000 modules manufactured by the three Cuban plants were sold, two in Havana City and one in Pinar del Río.
Then the official press assured that its energy efficiency was 30% higher than electric resistance burnersbut its useful life was five years, precisely the date on which the Government undertook the salary reform and modified its pricing policy.
In the midst of this context—and with high rates of breakages—some 200,000 families from Las Tunas, Holguín, Granma, Guantánamo and Santiago de Cuba faced the Ordering Task, synonymous with shortages, shortages and opportunity to profit from the scarcity of resources and food.
Another 400,000 centers in eastern Cuba receive the supply from Empresa Mixta ELF Gas SA, located in the territory of Santiago, with marked instability in its production and subject to an investment process with Chinese technology to incorporate the 45-kilogram cylinders.
According to the statistical yearbook, Santiago de Cuba produces 38.3 million cubic meters of firewood and 1.7 million tons of charcoal, insufficient figures to use both lines as an alternative to the energy debacle. Its massive use would threaten the territory’s forest reserve.
In August 2019 The State regulated the sale of liquefied gas. Now it is almost impossible to guarantee it in a stable way, to the point that families leave their consumption only for the basics, when this form of energy was the fastest growing in Cuban homes and represents close to 60% of the variant that It is used in stewing food.
