|
FROM
CUBA
Power outages ib Cuba bring resentment to
the fore
PINAR DEL RÍO, Cuba, June 25 (Rafael
Ferro Salas, Abdala Press / www.cubanet.org)
- Cubans are reacting to frequent power
outages by openly voicing their resentment
of the ruling elite when they meet in the
streets.
"Those of us at the bottom are the
ones suffering," said one woman, who
added, "I'm going to say this and I'm
not afraid: the director of the power company
is a fat cat whose name is Rolando Catalá.
Do you know where he lives? In a place where
the power never goes out. The other higher-ups
live there too, near a factory that's never
affected by blackouts. The big chiefs had
a line run from there to the building where
they live, and they're never without power.
What a way to be a communist!
The woman was reacting to 14-plus-hour
blackouts in the province of Pinar del Río.
She pointed to an infant she was carrying:
"Look at this child, how he looks,
between the heat and the mosquito-bites.
Where I live the power has been going out
every day and I haven't slept in two days,
trying to fan the mosquitoes away from him.
And all for nothing, look at him, he's all
mosquito-bite. To top it all, they won't
tell us what the problem is. I think we
are going through another Special Period
and they are just afraid to tell us."
The woman was referring to the Special
Period, the years after the collapse of
the Soviet bloc left the Cuban economy in
shambles.
A young woman stopped to say: "What's
happening is they know things are getting
tight for Chávez in Venezuela, and
they are starting to save oil already. We
are going to lose the Venezuelan crude,
and that they can't tell the people."
"They are fooling the people,"
said a young man who works for a messenger
service. "Nobody slept in my house
last night. They cut the power at 5 p.m.
and didn't reestablish it until 5 a.m. Then
we had power for a few hours and off again
it was."
A call to the power company only yielded
the information that the province is limited
to a generating capacity of 50 megawatts.
Versión
original en español
|
