The Current - Cuba's repeated power outages reflect deeper issues

Episode Date: November 1, 2024

Ruaridh Nicoll, Cuba correspondent with The Guardian, tells guest host Susan Ormiston how the island’s multiple power shutdowns point to the overall decline of the government’s services — it has few true allies, is financially strapped and is at risk of becoming a failed state. 

In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news, so I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with Season 3 of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy.

On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway and this is The Current Podcast. Cuba has been dealing with a series of countrywide blackouts in recent weeks and the longer people were left without power, well, the harder life got. Some took to the streets in protest. You can hear that woman saying that the food in her fridge is going bad and they have no cold water and her children are struggling. It took more than four attempts to restart the country's generators and keep the power on.

Rory Nickel is a Cuba correspondent with The Guardian newspaper. He's in Havana. Rory, good morning. Hi, how are you? I'm good, Rory. What's behind these island-wide blackouts? Well, the first thing that's behind it is many, many years of lack of investment. We're looking at very, very antiquated machinery that's working to its limit.

And for years now, it hasn't provided enough electricity to cover the whole island anyway. To that was added some bad weather that stopped fuel coming in and a general lack of fuel because the Cuban government is running out of money. What are people forced to do? I mean, describe what these blackouts feel like. What stops and how do they manage? Well, it's interesting because in truth, when it first happened, I was surprised that the world got so interested because people here in certain parts of Cuba have been enduring up to 20 hours of blackout a day anyway. There's been scheduled blackouts, there's been unscheduled blackouts. If you remember in July 2021,

there were protests on the street. It shocked the country because such protests are very, very unusual. Those were due to blackouts. So people are very used to blackouts, but what I discovered quite quickly is there's a very, very marked difference between 20, even 20 hours of blackout and 24 hours of blackout. It's unsettling in the extreme to lose power for that long. And more to the point, if you live in a Caribbean country where the heat is on all the time, you can lose your food, you can't sleep at night, and the water systems break down as well, which oddly and personally I find more disconcerting not having water than not having electricity.

Indeed. In this latest one, the worst, how did you and your family adapt? Oh, yes, this is by far and away the worst. This was terrible. My family, we adapted. I, you know, I'm Scottish. So I'm not suggesting that, you know, I'm Scottish. So I found it very, very unsettling. I'm not used to this. But however, I live a very privileged life here. You know, I have outside money. I do live with a Cuban family. I live, my wife is Cuban. I live a privileged life. I could cope. I find it very, very unsettling. But for the people that don't have outside money, who are the people that live on state salaries here, it's terrifying.

Just explain to me what happened to the water. So the water system is equally antiquated. So what happens is if you're trying to restart an electricity grid, it's a very, I've only just discovered this, but it's a very, very, very complicated process. You require enormous amounts of power just to get one of these things going one of these big electricity plants going so there are surges in the system this this causes pumps the antiquated pumps to break down surges in water supply that to break antiquated um pipes and this meant that water supplies pretty much we didn't get the water back till about four days after we got the electricity back. Gosh.

And as I was saying in a diary I wrote for a British publication, I actually, when I'm personal, I'm friends with the British ambassador and I phoned him up at one stage and said, could I come and charge my computer at the British residence, which is a very very fancy beautiful colonial building with this um a wonderful swimming pool that was designed by a banker in the 1890s to the uh to the along the

lines of a temple to aphrodite and he told me his generator had broken had blown up the day it started as well. And that he was, that meant he couldn't pump water from the well. And that meant that they were flushing the loose with water from this beautifully fancy swimming pool, which I have to say, I enjoyed that bit of news enough that it actually got me through the weekend. But I'm laughing. For most Cubans, this is not in any way funny. No, and not seemingly solvable at this time. I mean, tell us about the economy in Cuba. The power and water problems are a symptom of that.

Yes. I mean, this is due to years and years, as I said, of years and years of underinvestment. The problem is that Cuba is basically bankrupt now. It can't afford to feed its own people. It doesn't have the foreign earnings that allows it to buy the food and import the food for its own people now. Depending on who you talk to, there are various reasons for that. But this is one of the world's last. I mean, I have to hesitate because obviously I'm talking to you as Canadians and the Canadians know more about Cuba than almost anyone else because every time I meet a Canadian, they've usually been here for sort of 20 times on holiday. But this is obviously a centrally

organized, centrally planned communist state, one of the very last that exist. That meant that when they wanted to buy food, no private individual could do that. The state would buy the food, it would import it, it would put it in things called bodegas, where people could get their rations of meat, of rice, of beans. That is all breaking down. They haven't been able to afford to import these things. The bodegas are beginning to empty. So they have in the last two years allowed small private businesses. Those small private businesses are now importing. But that

food is very, very expensive. At the same time, you have inflation. The inflation means that people's state salaries, most people are employed here by the state because it's a communist state, state salaries now have dropped to about, the worth is about five Canadian dollars a month, pensions slightly less than that. You cannot afford to buy anything in these private shops, so you're relying on the little bit you can get from the bodega or you're relying from outside money. Wow. Five dollars a month. Yes. So if you manage to get a little bit of meat, sometimes the bodegas offer a little bit of meat for people that are in vulnerable positions, say. If you get a little bit of that meat, you put it in your refrigerator and and then you have a four to 60 hour power cut, that meat is spoiled, that is gone, and that is a disaster. In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news. So I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with season three of On Drugs.

And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy. On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. We spoke to an associate professor of history at the University of Miami. Have a listen to Michael Bustamante. There have been times when the Cuban economy has been doing better than it is now. Why was not more effort made to sort of bring about investments in upgrading the electric grid when it's been kind of a rolling disaster for a long time. The Cuban government has gotten a lot of flack by continuing to invest in hotel development. So, you know, what I see is a sort of a lot of finger pointing, you know,

the government sort of pointing to outside factors as solely responsible, but internal responsibility matters too. And I think Cuban citizens would like to see their government take more responsibility. You know, for decades, Cuba had been controlled by the Castros. Who is running the country now? Well, no, there's a question. Who's running Cuba? It's a very, very good question.

I've spent my life, I'm getting on a bit now, I've spent my life as a foreign correspondent and other things. And I have traveled to countries and tried to, my job has been to understand countries quickly and on the hoof. And I have to say, having lived here for eight years, I have found this the most opaque country I have ever come across. If you speak to diplomats, if you speak to academics, if you speak to journalists, and they tell you they know what's going on at the top of this government, they're lying to you. It is very, very difficult to tell. I can tell you what the official thing is. The official thing is that Miguel Diaz-Canal is president. He's been

president since 2018. He's been head of the Communist Party since 2021. He's working two terms. He has been voted in by a national assembly and that he is at the head of a politburo that runs the country and the council of ministers that actually runs the country day to day. That is officially who's running the country. It is very difficult to know who, where the power is, who controls the money, and what's actually happening. The army is a huge part of Cuban life. The army has a section called Gaessa that runs the finances of the army, allows it to be self-supporting. They control a lot of the hotels. So power is a very difficult thing to judge. Who actually controls the country is very, very difficult to judge.

But on paper, it's Miguel Diaz-Canel. And you talked about the protests back in 2021 after those blackouts. Has there been much protest this time? And if not, why not? No, there's been incredibly little, actually. Incredibly little. There's a bit of banging pots and pans on the streets. The issue now is that people have left.

There's been a huge exodus of mainly the young with at least 10% of the population. That's over a million people. It's very difficult to know what the current population of Cuba is, but it used to be 11 million. Now the lowest estimates have it at 8.5 million. Most people think it's between 9 and 10. have it at 8.5 million. Most people think it's between 9 and 10. So those people have left and they're sort of encouraged to go because it's a release valve. It's a release valve that has been used by the Cuban state over many years to see off any potential protests. You know, Rory, we're facing another election in the US.S. in days.

And, of course, presidents influence what happens in Cuba. President Obama tried to normalize relations. President Trump pushed that back. Biden didn't do either, really, in most people's estimation. So do you think anything would change if someone new takes the White House, as in Donald Trump? Yes. Yes, probably. Now, Reuters did ask both candidates what their plans were, and both said that they were going to continue to be hard on the Cuban government. So it will be a matter of degrees.

Donald Trump really did change things. He did two main things. He really hammered down on the 60-plus year embargo that the United States has held Cuba under. But he sort of stopped the cruise ships coming. He made it much more difficult to do any banking here for foreign companies. He really did sort of harden things up. The second thing he did was that he put Cuba back on the list of state sponsors of terror, which I try not to express my opinion too much here because I'm a foreigner and Cubans should speak for themselves. But that was frankly ludicrous.

The government can't afford to feed its own people, let alone sponsor any terror. But it did have a profound chilling effect on tourism because it meant that anyone other than Canadians and Americans who could use the ESTA system in the US can't come to Cuba and then go to the States without having a visa. You cannot use the visa, the ESTA system to go to the States if you've been to one of those countries on that list. That has pretty much killed European tourism to this country. And that was one of the biggest foreign earners. So depending on how Trump feels, and he is not difficult to, he's a very extremely difficult to read, he has the capacity to make things much more difficult. He could stop all the flights to Cuba,

for example. Russia and China have historically been allies of Cuba. Are they still? And what are they doing to help the people of Cuba in this situation? The historic allies are Venezuela, Russia, China, up to a point, Mexico. Mexico has a ship of oil coming at the moment, I believe. China is still doing business with Cuba up to a point. I believe there's a deal where a Chinese company will get more access to Cuba's nickel deposits in return for solar power equipment. But a European diplomat said to me the other day that this is like trying to keep a leaking ship afloat with corks.

And there's not enough will out there. Venezuela has got, is now enjoying selling its oil on the open market to the US and therefore is less willing to send it for much less money to Cuba. Russia has all its own problems, which are well known. And the help that comes is not enough to keep things bubbling away here. So if Cuba can't fix its own problems, even with some help, how far away do you think the country is from being a failed state? Well, there's a question um

it has had the capacity to keep going for a very long time uh it got obviously with the fall of the soviet union it it went through extraordinarily difficult times in the early 90s, difficulties that still mark the people in profound ways. I watch people eat and how they eat. Those people that experienced that eat in a way of people that experienced proper hunger. The way that they, what they require on the table, how they eat. It's, these are people who have been through very, very bad times. And still, it goes on. I know lots of foreigners that have invested in property here for 20 years ago on the basis, Cuba will change and I'll make a fortune.

And those people have not made fortunes. In fact, they've lost money. And if they'd put that money in New York or London or Montreal, they would have made an absolute fortune. How long it will last, I don't know. What I will say, though, and this is me repeating a Cuban academic speaking to me, what does America, what does the US want?

Because if this place becomes a failed state, we are beginning to see a slow, but this is one of the US at points as close as 125 kilometers offshore. At the moment, drugs don't go through Cuba. What if they do? It's difficult to understand what happens if it does become a failed state. And there are examples. Next door is Haiti. Just over there is Venezuela. It seems a baffling policy on that basis

because it's difficult to see now which other direction it goes in. Well, we'll have to end it there. A rather pessimistic final note. Well, one last thing. The hotels had their lights on for the whole time during the blackout. So for any Canadians wanting to come on holiday, they shouldn't worry that there's not going to be any electricity. I can't vouch for the quality of the food, but there will be electricity. They all have their own generators.

All right. Thank you very much. Okay. My pleasure. Rory Nickell is a Cuba correspondent with The Guardian newspaper, and we reached him in Havana.