On March 17, citizen protests were registered in various parts of Cuba, mainly in Santiago, Matanzas and Bayamo. The images documented a significant participation of women, some of them mothers who, accompanied by their children, chanted “food and electricity” and “freedom” among the crowd.
Long blackouts have returned to Cuba in the midst of a crisis that is also political. In this scenario in which food, medicine and basic goods are scarce, Cuban women are, once again, responsible for navigating the context and supporting families.
But this is not an unprecedented chapter. In 2022, towns such as Nuevitas and Caimanera staged protests due to the number of hours they remained without electricity per day, the Prosecutor’s Office noted in its accusatory petition. Several protesters were imprisoned and prosecuted.
But the most impactful precedent of the March protests of this year is, without a doubt, June 11, 2021. Thousands of protesters took to the streets to protest, spurred on by the effect of the blackouts. Until 2022, the Cuban State had recognized the criminal prosecution of 790 participants in that mobilization.
However, the worst energy crisis experienced in Cuba took place in the 1990s, during the so-called Special Period, a kind of nightmare from the past that, it seems, is still near.
About those years the researcher and professor Velia Cecilia Bobes wrote: “The arrival of the Special Period and its adjustment policies have impacted women more severely than men…the persistence of the unequal division of roles within the family has meant that women have seen their overload of work, efforts and worries multiplied and the quality of their life has deteriorated more than that of any other group.”
Cuba is not the only country that has perceived a differentiated impact of the energy crisis on women. The UN Women agency itself has insisted on the need to address energy crises and poverty as problems with special repercussions for women and girls. The lack of electric power causes interruptions in the supply of cooking gas and renders cooking appliances unusable.
Given this circumstance, families look for elements that can burn for cooking. This caused more than 4 million deaths in 2012 due to air pollution generated in homes. 60% of these deaths correspond to women and girls. In South Africa, since 2007, recurrent power outages have hit hard those who take care of household chores: women. These patterns are repeated in Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, countries in armed conflict or invaded (Ukraine and Palestine).
As for Cuba, the country today has the same electricity generation capacity as it did in 1994. Three decades later and after several economic comebacks, we wonder why women continue to bear the brunt.
Memories of darkness
Before the 1990s, the USSR and its CMEA associates provided around 95% of the oil that Cuba consumed. With the dissolution of the socialist camp, the agreements were canceled. With the economic crisis that arose, together with the U.S. blockade, it was extremely difficult for Cuba to obtain oil and buy it from exporting countries, according to Joaquim Sempere in “El colapso energético en la Cuba de los años 90.”
Cuba’s oil dependence was not only manifested in the disappearance of the main ally, but also because the internal economy, including agriculture, depended on the so-called black gold.
During the first 30 years of the revolutionary government, tractors were used in agriculture: before 1959 there were about 9,000 tractors in the countryside, while in 1989 there were 180,000; multiplying their number almost ten times. Mechanical irrigation by that same year had doubled and covered 26% of the country’s land, while water impounded for agricultural purposes multiplied by 137, compared to before 1959.
Due to these conditions, in the run-up to the Special Period, the food crisis hit Cuban families hard.
With the energy crisis, transportation suffered great damage. The circulation of cars and buses was reduced by two thirds between 1989 and 1994, and that of trains by half. 70% of the buses and 50% of the locomotives were unusable. This led to the purchase by the Cuban State of more than a million Chinese bicycles mainly for the working sector, as well as the adaptation of animal-drawn carts (for personal, public transportation and even as ambulances) and large buses for collective transportation in the capital (the so-called “camels”). The population was forced to travel long distances on foot or by bicycle, in a scenario in which poor nutrition was common.
The energy matrix (set of available energy sources) depended almost 75% on oil; the sudden drop in its supply caused constant power cuts of between 16 to 20 hours a day.
This was not only disruptive for households, but also for industrial refrigeration chains and the distribution of perishable foods. The usual supply of cooking gas was rationed, which was substituted in homes with any combustion element.
The crisis had a special impact on Cuban women. Researchers who experienced the vicissitudes of the Special Period confirm this. When remembering that time, they said: “Each woman has become an architect to ensure that the entire family is fed and ― almost without soap and detergents ― that they attend school or work clean and neat” (“Mujer, período especial y vida cotidiana,” collective of authors).
Although their economic participation rates oscillated between 1990 and 2000, with periods of increase and decrease, the truth is that during the Special Period many changed their occupation, migrated to emerging non-state sectors, or found themselves in the need to participate in illicit or marginal activities such as the informal market and prostitution.
In the area of health, sexual and reproductive rights were significantly affected. In 1996, of the total contraceptive methods used, the use of intrauterine devices (which prevented pregnancy with relative effectiveness, but not STIs) predominated in 47%; followed by contraceptive pills, which do not exceed 14% of the total; and condom use only covered 5% (although by that year its use had increased five-fold since 1991 thanks to HIV/AIDS prevention campaigns).
The Special Period also affected access to studies. In “La mujer joven: inserción y proceso social,” researcher María Isabel Domínguez highlights that, although universities registered a predominance of women at that time, evidencing the feminization of professional groups (between 1990 and 1995, 57% of all the university students in the country were women, and in Havana they represented 61.6%), this occurred for those young women who lived near the university campuses (girls living in remote areas were more impacted by the lack of fuel and transportation), were the daughters of professionals and were white. However, young women with high levels of education only represented one fifth of the total number of young women inserted in the labor force; more than half (mostly racialized and residents of the periphery) did not achieve professional qualifications and worked in unskilled positions or were registered as “housewives.”
The fuel and energy crisis conditioned the reduction in admission places for university studies that was experienced in those years, along with the expansion of technical-professional education specialized in construction, agriculture and others associated with engineering. This caused a high dropout rate among girls upon finishing junior high, which encouraged marriages and motherhood at an early age; women took refuge in “household chores,” as Domínguez said.
According to what was noted in the study “Mujer, período especial y vida cotidiana,” not all territories suffered the crisis equally. Women residing in eastern provinces were more distant from market centers, job offers and foreign exchange. Residents in rural areas received fewer subsidies and free benefits from the State, so precariousness was doubly acute for them.
Internal migration and, with it, housing, labor and subsistence problems in the receiving territories, which were fundamentally urban, were also reflected at this time. Thus, migrant women were more likely to engage in marginal activities and sex work.
During routine blackouts, Cuban women spent entire nights fanning their children, barely making food, inventing lighting means to illuminate themselves, replacing missing medications with brews made with medicinal herbs, mending clothes, inventing sanitary pads for menstrual hygiene after the disappearance of sanitary napkins or other similar ones from pharmacy counters, and a long etcetera.
After the reduction in the supply of cooking gas, they faced firewood, charcoal or any element that made fire. Devices with bright lights or kerosene were used to cook food and caused quite a few accidents.
Many homes were vandalized and others sacrificed their window frames to use them as firewood. The same thing happened with the railroad ties and with the mangroves. According to Cuba’s statistical announcements, household firewood consumption multiplied almost fivefold between 1991 and 1995: from 6.8 to 46.1 cubic millimeters.
In Cuba, at that time we experienced what would happen worldwide after an energy collapse due to the depletion of crude oil; and Cuban women experienced the great gender inequalities that crises imply.
The situation today
The energy crisis is part of the Cuban present. Today’s young women have no record of that bright, fair and egalitarian Cuba (in 1986 Cuba had a Gini coefficient between 0.22 and 0.25; and a poverty rate of 6.6% of the population, placing it as one of the most equitable societies globally).
The desire of young women to emigrate in search of progress is accompanied today by the memories of mothers, grandmothers, aunts and neighbors who survived the energetic prelude of what the new generations have now had to carry out.
In thirty years we have been able, as a country, to become aware that replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy sources could help us achieve energy sovereignty. Being among the priorities of the economic agenda, more efforts should be concentrated on its implementation. Especially when since 2006 it has been known that energy obtained from renewable sources is the only possible way out and generator sets began to be installed.
In the Special Period the margin of operations to achieve this objective was practically zero, but during the last decade the State has used renewable energy sources (RES) to replace oil dependence.
In 2014, the implementation of a transcendental policy was approved to prevent new crises like the one we are experiencing. I am referring to the Policy for the prospective development of renewable sources and the efficient use of energy (2014-2030), supported by Decree Law 345 of 2019 “On the development of Renewable Sources and the Efficient Use of Energy.”
The Policy aims to increase energy efficiency and the development of RES to, among other purposes, reduce the emission of Greenhouse Gases (GHG), mitigate the adverse effects of climate change and promote economic development less dependent on carbon. It sought to comply with the implementation of the National Economic and Social Development Plan 2030 (NESDP), specifically Sustainable Development Goal 7 (SDG 7), referring to guaranteeing access to “affordable, reliable, sustainable, modern and non-polluting energy.”
State bodies such as the Ministry of Science, Technology and Environment (CITMA) led by the Ministry of Energy and Mines (MINEM) participate in its development.
The implementation of the policy has provided some data related to the national situation regarding energy generation and, in addition, has allowed projections to be calculated. It is expected that an electricity generation of 820 GWh at the end of 2019 will grow to 9,961 GWh by 2030. This would mean an increase in the RES in generation from 4% to 37%.
The goal includes a series of objectives designed to transform the energy generation matrix, stated as follows in the Policy:
- Transform the structure of the energy sources used by increasing the participation of the RES;
- Reduce dependence on imported fossil fuels for electricity generation;
- Increase efficiency in the generation and saving consumption of electricity and;
- Increase environmental sustainability.
So far very few results have been able to be measured. One of them is that the proportion of people living in households that use clean fuels and technologies for cooking and lighting increased from 27.9% in 2015 to 44.1% in 2019.
Until that year, the greatest growth in RES installed capacity has been experienced by solar photovoltaic technology due to lower investment costs and the availability of the resource of solar radiation throughout the country. The rest of the technologies, such as hydroelectric and bioelectric, have not changed their capacity in the last five years.
The contribution of RES to electricity generation had a modest growth in four years, from 704 GWh in 2015 to 820 GWh in 2019, mainly due to the increase in hydroelectric and solar photovoltaic sources. There is no more updated data available for consultation.
In 2020, the first bioelectric plant was incorporated with an installed capacity of 62 MW, which would contribute with an annual energy contribution to the country close to 350 GWh. This technology is expected to provide the largest contribution of electricity among all RES in the year 2030, concentrating 46.5% of the energy generated. Solar photovoltaics and wind power, together, should have a similar contribution to bioelectricity in 2030.
For its part, in the year 2000, 94.5% of Cuba’s population had access to electricity; in 2015, 99.5% electrification was achieved and since 2018 this indicator has reached almost 100%. The rural population has been described as the main beneficiary population of the Program, to which 15,924 photovoltaic solar modules were installed and which, as we saw, is one of the most affected by the crude oil crisis.
They are projections not only necessary but vital for the country and for Cuban women. However, the population continues to have the perception that the current power outages due to the fuel crisis are comparable to those of the Special Period. The Policy for the development of the RES has not demonstrated substantial changes for the country, nor for Cuban women.
Last March, there were blackouts of 6, 12 or 18 hours a day in most of the country’s territories, with greater effects in the provinces. The situation has been progressively normalized based on the Russian supply of oil.
During the social outbreak referred to at the beginning of this text, the cooking of food with firewood and petroleum derivatives such as kerosene increased considerably. These alternatives affect women’s health, expose them to risks, injuries or death from accidents and, in general, the quality of life deteriorates.
Crises are not gender-neutral. Women, teenagers and girls carry on their backs the weight of domestic and care roles, which are transmitted from generation to generation and which have become a social expectation. Hence the feminist motto of “if we women stop, the world stops.”
Who is in charge of preparing the food, washing the dishes, cleaning the house, maintaining hygiene, educating and helping the children with their homework, preparing their snacks, and ensuring their health and well-being? In short, who is responsible for reproducing life? In a vast majority, women.
The fuel shortage affects ―even more so― access to education and employment; as well as family and reproductive relationships; it also potentiates the marginalization of Cuban women, as occurred in the Special Period.
If in periods in which electricity generation has remained stable, women move in public spaces (streets, parks, avenues, neighborhoods, trails) taking precautions to avoid dark passages and prevent street violence, in times of blackouts many times the option will be not to leave home, even in the event of an emergency, which limits circulation in public spaces and the normal development of life.
Gender inequality in crises exists and is accentuated. It poses threats to the health (physical and mental) and safety of women, girls and feminized bodies. It is not in vain that women are the ones who mainly participate in neighborhood protests demanding drinking water, electricity and food.
Author
Alina Herrera Fuentes
