By Nike
HAVANA TIMES – The daily power outages we Cubans endure have disastrous consequences.
A few days ago, a neighbor was getting ready to go to work when suddenly the electricity came back on for her “allotted share”, because even electricity is rationed. To make the most of it, she started cooking some beans she had left soaking overnight, put rice in the rice cooker, and began charging everything that could be charged (as I like to say): lamps, flashlights, her cell phone, and a rechargeable fan. She also flipped the circuit breaker for the water pump, since she has an underground cistern and an elevated water tank.
She turned on the television to prevent moisture from building up inside the set, since most of the time there is no signal. Without electricity in Vedado, where the television studios (ICRT) are located, they cannot broadcast anything, so the television is hardly ever used. The ordinary Cuban’s solution is to copy series, movies, documentaries, or soap operas from the weekly package (paquete semanal) you can buy onto a USB drive, so that if their allotted electricity comes on during the day or at night, they can watch something to escape, at least for a little while, the hell we are living through.
My neighbor, trying to take advantage of the brief period of electricity, even started the washing machine. Of course, those few minutes were not enough to finish everything she had begun. The power went out again, and she left for work. When she returned that afternoon, she discovered that she had forgotten to turn off the water pump, and the tank had overflowed until the cistern was completely drained. Now she has a burned-out pump motor and an empty cistern.
With her miserable salary, she will have to start saving money to have the motor rewound by a private repairman who specializes in that work. In the meantime, she has to carry water, although fortunately her cistern has since filled up again.
I ran into the neighbor who lives on the corner at the produce market. He told me that the constant switching of the electricity on and off, along with voltage drops and surges, had ruined his refrigerator. With a mixture of indignation and sadness, he told me, “Now I’ll have to live without a refrigerator. Not that it matters much, since all I have in it is water anyway, because chicken is so expensive.”
Something has been happening on my block for about two months now: a transformer broke down, the electric company comes and repairs it, and then it breaks down again.
This is how it goes: night falls, and the electric company’s truck arrives to see what is wrong. The workers repair the damage but warn that the fix will not last long because they lack the resources to do the job properly. All they could manage was a patch-up job. One of the electrical workers explains to the residents that he will turn the power on for just a few seconds to test his repair. The neighbors then tell him that they have been without electricity all day.
But it makes no difference. The man performs his test, climbs down his ladder, gets into the truck, and drives away. The more defiant residents remain there protesting, but in the end, they too have to go to bed without eating.
The stories of these disasters are endless. Even so, we continue to survive despite all the hardships, because Cubans are strong, and when one door closes, they quickly open another. That is why I admire them.
To solve the problem of the lack of electricity, some people, “with the help of relatives abroad,” are buying solar panels and batteries. This allows them to disconnect from the national electricity grid, which provides little or almost no service.
I am happy for those families who have refused to resign themselves to living in darkness.
I have wondered whether this is some macabre experiment designed to measure the resilience* of an entire people.
*Resilience: “The ability of a living being to adapt in the face of a disruptive agent or an adverse state or situation.”
Read more from the diary of Nike here on Havana Times.
