On 30 June 2019, Cuba experienced its hottest day on record, reaching a searing 39.1C° in the town of Veguitas in the eastern province of Granma. With the hurricane season increasing in intensity each year, bringing greater costs in human life and to the economy, the effects of climate change are being felt by Cubans. Under a tightening US blockade and facing rising sea levels and temperatures, socialist Cuba is responding to scarcity and climate change by putting humanity first. Sam Mcgill and Will Harney report.
Climate change, a war by the rich against the poor
Internationally, CO2 emissions must be cut immediately to avoid a catastrophic 2°C temperature rise on pre-industrial times. A 3.5°C rise is considered ‘extinction point’. Despite this, global carbon emissions jumped by 2.7% last year. This ever-increasing output is not matched by improvements in global living standards, and inequality continues to soar. Capitalism produces commodities to circulate for profit, enslaving whole continents for the cheap extraction of minerals and natural resources, driving living and working conditions to rock bottom.
Socialist Cuba demonstrates a successful alternative to capitalist environmental destruction. In 2006 the World Wildlife Fund’s Living Planet Report identified Cuba as the only country in the world to have achieved sustainable development: a high level of human development coupled with a low ecological footprint.1 In 2015 Cuba was identified as the only country to provide a ‘very high’ level of human development at a cost of less than 1.7 global hectares per capita according to the Global Footprint Network and United Nations data (Global Footprint Network, 23 September 2015). By comparison, the average person in Britain consumes around eight global hectares (a figure which hides great inequality in consumption patterns between rich and poor within the imperialist nations).
In May 2019, Consuelo Vidal-Bruce, Cuba’s resident coordinator for the United Nations held up Cuba as a world reference point for sustainability. These achievements are possible because Cuba’s socialist revolution directs national production according to a central plan that is drawn up to meet the needs of the population and to safeguard the country. Cuba has managed to make huge advances in universal free healthcare, education and community development, without exploiting other nations, limiting its population’s demands on the biosphere while facing a crippling blockade that costs the nation $12 million per day. The climate emergency demands that we learn from Cuba’s history and the goals it sets itself today to create a fair, sustainable society.
Cuba’s ecological revolution
Prior to the triumph of the revolution in 1959, only 9% of rural Cubans had electricity. The Cuban bourgeoisie and big landowners had allowed US capital to plunder Cuba’s wealth, keeping the country in a state of underdevelopment. With the socialist revolution, US multinationals were expropriated. The exiled Cuban elites and US imperialism began attacking the revolution from abroad, but with the capitalist class overthrown in Cuba, the socialist government could invest Cuba’s wealth to electrify even the remotest communities. By 1989, 95% of the country was electrified. Cuban programmes were already experimenting with the use of renewable energy sources such as biogas. However, power was mostly generated using cheap oil traded for sugar, with the support of the Soviet Union and socialist bloc; the US blockade left few other options for trade and development.
The drive to reduce fuel consumption and improve efficiency assumed critical importance in the ‘Special Period’ after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Cuba lost 85% of its trade overnight and GDP contracted by 35%. Food, gas, and oil all became scarce as the US attempted to suffocate Cuba by tightening the economic blockade. Faced with the urgent need to preserve the socialist revolution, Cuba chose to restructure its agriculture, energy and transport systems along ecological and efficient lines. ‘This was such a successful turnaround that Cuba rebounded to show the best food production performance in Latin America and the Caribbean over the following period, a remarkable annual growth rate of 4.2 percent per capita from 1996 through 2005, a period in which the regional average was 0 percent.’2
With a shortage of fuel to transport agricultural products long distances from country to town, there was a big push to develop small-scale urban farming. The people of Cuba’s cities took up the tools of the farm, creating what is now a world-leading example: in Havana alone, 35,000 hectares of land are now used for urban farms (organiponicos) and approximately 70% of Havana’s fruit and vegetables are grown in Havana province.
Organic farming and permaculture methods were developed in the special period as man-made fertilisers and pesticides were scarce. During Rock Around the Blockade’s 2019 brigade to Cuba (see FRFI 270) we had practical lessons in organic farming methods on La Rosita farm run by the Union of Young Communists in Havana province, fertilising the soil for animal feed by laying last year’s sugar cane stalks in the ground. We also saw how they use the waste from cows and pigs for organic manure for vegetable plots. At the Leonor Perez agricultural cooperative in La Lisa, we saw how wormeries process animal waste to produce a very high-quality compost that can be mixed with lower grade soil. Agricultural cooperatives and small peasant farms have played a crucial role in building Cuba’s food sovereignty since the special period.
During the brigade we met with Bruno Henriquez, one of the founders of Cubasolar, an association central to the use of renewable energy in Cuba. He showed us examples of social centres, hospitals and schools in rural areas electrified by solar panels as part of the 1993 National Energy Development Program. This was implemented to reduce Cuba’s energy imports and maximise efficiency with a drive to save energy and use more renewable sources. Despite the intense economic crisis of the Special Period, Cuba defended its flagship achievements in healthcare and education. Rural schools, health clinics, and social centres not previously connected to the grid were electrified with solar energy.
The 2006 Energy Revolution
Despite advances in developing new energy production, in the 2000s Cuba still faced an energy crisis. The country had seven large, and inefficient, thermoelectric plants. Most of the plants were 25 years old and only functioning 60% of the time. There were frequent blackouts and a high percentage of transmission losses along the electrical distribution grid. To add to the energy crisis, most Cuban households had inefficient appliances, and a majority of the population was cooking with kerosene.
In 2006 Cuba renewed its efforts to build a sustainable society through launching the ‘Energy Revolution’ (see ‘Cuba: stirring society at its roots’ FRFI 189 February/March 2006, available on our website). The first step was not to look for more ways of generating energy, but to decrease energy demand. As Fidel Castro explained at the time:
‘We are not waiting for fuel to fall from the sky, because we have discovered, fortunately, something much more important – energy conservation, which is like finding a great oil deposit.’
In a feat of popular power and community organisation, 13,000 social workers, recruited from young people who were not in education or employment, visited homes, factories and businesses, replacing incandescent lightbulbs with energy saving bulbs free of charge and teaching people how to use new cooking appliances, offering energy saving information. In six months, over 9 million incandescent light bulbs were changed, making Cuba the first country in the world to eliminate inefficient tungsten filament lighting.
Millions of energy efficient appliances were sold at heavily subsidised prices. This was all accompanied by a nationwide education programme. Cuba replaced its old electrical plants with nearly 2,000 micro-electrical diesel and fuel oil plants, promoting decentralised power production and improving efficiency. This alone allowed Cuba to save over 961,000 tonnes of oil. In capitalist countries, the paid representatives of oil and gas companies relentlessly lobby to promote the use of fossil fuels and create profits for private interests, while politicians accept corporate bribes as campaign donations; the entire system is corrupt. Cuba, with its holistic national plan and workers’ democracy, has no such problem. The energy revolution increased the installed capacity of energy production by 22% while only increasing fuel consumption by 4% and decreasing greenhouse gas emissions by 69%, an outstanding achievement.
Challenges for today, renewable energy and ‘Plan 2030’
The energy revolution continues today. In 2017 Cuba embarked on a drive to replace 13 million fluorescent lamps with LEDs and substitute 2 million electric resistance cookers for induction cookers. In its 10-year ‘Plan 2030’ the National Assembly of People’s Power plans to increase renewable energy sources to generate 24% of electricity needs by 2030 (in comparison, Mexico produces 16% of its electricity through renewables, and Argentina 11%). Around 5% of Cuba’s electricity is currently produced by renewable sources, as the focus has been on reducing usage and promoting efficiency. Much of Cuba’s renewable energy comes from biomass, a renewable source of energy from agricultural crops and waste, sewage, municipal waste, manure and industrial residues. Biomass can be burned directly to produce heat and electricity or can be converted into biogas that is burned as fuel.
Cuba’s main biomass use is driven by the nation’s sugar industry in which bagasse (pulp residue from the processing of sugar cane) is burned to turn turbines which generate electricity. This is used to power sugar processing plants. There are 54 sugar factories in operation that use bagasse waste to produce steam for turbines and electricity generation. Cuba needs to clear marabou (spikey weeds) from farmland, and this can also produce fuel and cooking oil. There are currently plans to install small power generation plants next to 67 lumber mills processing waste and chips from marabou plants to produce energy. The country’s first bioelectric plant is currently being constructed in Ciego de Avila, aiming to generate 157 kilowatts of energy (about 10% of annual consumption of the average Cuban) for every tonne of sugar cane processed by the neighbouring Ciro Redondo sugar mill.
Wind energy for small scale mechanical water pumping is fairly common in Cuba and its history goes back to the early 1900s. Today, there are more than 4,850 windmills installed which save approximately 340 tonnes of oil per year, but not all are in operation due to damage, lack of maintenance, and lack of spare parts. Large scale wind power is more expensive but there are four industrial wind farms in Cuba currently with a total capacity of 11.5 megawatts (MW), with one doubling up as a wind energy training centre.
Cuba has one large central hydroelectric plant at Hanabanilla, which supplies 74% of the total hydroelectricity generated in the country. There are several old hydroelectric plants, some of them in need of reconstruction. By 2009, Cuba had developed 180 micro-hydro systems including gravity aqueducts, windmills and hydraulic ram pumps to supply water and generate electricity in rural communities. This represents a saving of 12,970 tonnes of oil a year and supplies electricity to nearly 35,000 people, 138 schools and 78 community clinics mainly in rural areas.
Sustainability is also applied to manufacturing. The Cubay rum distillery in Santa Cruz has become the first rum production plant to produce net positive energy, eliminating 600 tonnes of CO2. Using solar panels and biogas digesters, the plant treats the wastewater of the distillation process, producing fertiliser and water for agriculture. In June 2019, the first low-carbon cement plant of its kind in the world opened in Santa Clara Province, where it will operate continuously to produce 8-10 tonnes of cement daily, vital for meeting the challenge of providing affordable housing to all Cubans.
For the entire island to reach its goal of 24% renewable generation by 2030, Cuba plans to add 640MW of wind, 700MW of solar power and 750MW of biomass power capacity. While some of these projects will be 100% Cuban-owned, the nation is looking for over $9bn in foreign investment for more than 200 new renewable energy projects. Cuba is a nation that was systematically underdeveloped by Spanish colonialism, then US imperialism, and since 1961 has been targeted by a suffocating economic blockade, so if it wants to develop its renewable energy infrastructure it needs to attract foreign direct investment.
A recent example of this is the inauguration of Mariel Solar, a Cuban-British solar panel collaboration with Hive Energy at Mariel Port. Due to be completed this December, the solar farm will cost $60m and will produce 50MW of electricity (for comparison, Britain’s largest solar farm produces 72MW). The energy generated at Mariel Solar will be 100% bought by the Cuban state utility enterprise, Union Electrica, for domestic use. Cuba is not producing cheap electricity for other countries; this is for its own development. A further 40 solar farms are in the pipeline, with 21 already under construction, to be owned and operated by the Cuban state. Similar plans are underway to build more bio-electrical plants and wind farms.
Democratisation of energy
Discussions around climate change, energy and ecology have taken place across all municipalities on the island in 2018-19, focused around a nationwide three-month consultation process in which nearly 9 million Cubans participated across 133,000 meetings in order to produce a new constitution (see FRFI 269). The approved constitution includes the commitment to ‘promote the conservation of the environment and the fight against climate change, which threatens the survival of the human species’. Central to this is democracy, placing energy and planning ‘in the hands of the people’ under the control and organisation of municipalities, made up of Committees for the Defence of the Revolution (CDRs) which alongside other community-based mass organisations promote renewable energy use and ecology house by house, block by block.
More than 8 million Cubans participate in their local CDRs, each of which organises 100 or so residents, in relation to everything from vaccination and public health plans, to consultations on the new constitution, and attending to individual residents’ problems. We visited CDR 1, Zone 102, Altabo, Havana, where the Municipal Coordinator Maryeila explained how these neighbourhood committees form the building blocks of popular power in Cuba, with each municipality made up of CDRs working together. The CDRs and municipal assemblies are central to developing a systematic response to energy inefficiency from the bottom up.
Building on such structures, Cubasolar promotes the use of local popular power to achieve energy independence. Bruno Henriquez explained, ‘With the promotion of energy efficiency and use of renewable energy sources, we can make each house, school, health area, office, retail, hotel, small local industry, and cooperative become energy positive, producing more energy than it consumes and in this way achieve a municipality of positive energy.’
An example of this is Bartolome Maso municipality with a population of 54,000 in Granma province, the mountainous far east of Cuba. Since 2003 it has been the focus of a ‘territorial solarisation’ project to increase municipal production of renewable energy and work towards self-sufficiency. A sugar mill generates electricity from the bagasse of sugarcane, feeding any excess energy into the national grid. The municipality has an installed hydropower potential of 2,700 kilowatts, which benefits 2,600 residents, two primary schools, six clinics, three bakeries, two stores, four coffee pulpers and 18 other state entities. In addition, 10 mini- and micro-hydroelectric systems operate in mountainous parts of the municipality.
Project Life: confronting climate change
In Britain, coastal villages under threat from erosion and rising sea levels are being abandoned by the state. The residents of Fairbourne in north Wales, for example, have been told the government is under no obligation to compensate them for their forced displacement or the collapse in the market value of their homes caused by the changing climate (The Guardian, 18 May 2019). Compare this to Cuba, where in April 2017 the government approved Project Life (Tarea Vida): State Plan for Tackling Climate Change, a 100-year plan to protect the island and its population from the effects of global warming. Preparations have already begun; for the threatened settlement of Tunas de Zaza-Médano in Sancti Spiritus province, the state has started looking for alternative locations, taking into account the jobs and customs of the inhabitants (Escambray, 3 March 2019).
Cuba’s Project Life plan consists of five strategic actions and 11 tasks. It starts with identifying risk, vulnerable areas and predicted effects then sets out actions to be taken to mitigate them. It incorporates a programme of progressive investments categorised into short- (2020), medium- (2030), long- (2050) and very long-term (2100). The plan focuses on disaster reduction by using the country’s scientific capacity to reduce the danger, vulnerability and territorial risk.
The Cuban government has not wasted time on fulfilling the ecological commitments of the new constitution. On 14 July, Cuba’s National Assembly signed in a new fisheries law with provisions to curtail illegal fishing, preserve coral reefs, recover fish populations and protect small-scale fishers (Environmental Defense Fund, 14 July 2019). This is the first major policy shift on fisheries in more than two decades, drawing on the expertise of scientists, conservationists and coastal communities. The government has also announced that it will conduct a one-year trial in Havana of distributing subsidised 90-litre solar powered water heaters, manufactured in Cuba, for use in residential buildings (Juventud Rebelde, 27 August 2019). If successful, the scheme can be rolled out nationally to further reduce energy consumption.
The Five Strategic Actions
- Prohibit construction of new housing in vulnerable coastal settlements under threat of disappearing due to flooding and receding coastlines. Reduce population density in low-lying coastal areas;
- Adapt infrastructure in low-lying coastal zones to the threat of floods;
- Adapt agricultural activities, in particular those with the greatest impact on the country’s food security, to changes in land use as a result of sea level rise and drought;
- Reduce crop areas near the coast or affected by saline intrusion. Diversify crops, improve soil conditions, develop and introduce varieties resistant to rising temperatures;
- Set deadlines for planning processes of relocation of threatened settlements and infrastructure, in accordance with the country’s economic conditions. Start with lower cost measures, such as induced natural solutions (beach recovery and reforestation).
Humanity’s ‘Special Period’
Cuba has overcome immense challenges: it survived the collapse of its main trading partner the USSR; it is surviving a 58-year-old US blockade and constant imperialist aggression; on top of this it has made world-leading advances in environmental sustainability. It has been able to do so thanks to its socialist planned economy and workers’ state. This is a lesson for environmental movements across the world as humanity is faced with its own ‘Special Period’ of reduced consumption forced by decades of inaction on climate change. We can no longer afford to sustain a bloated, parasitic ruling class. We must rapidly reorganise society along sustainable lines. The Cuban Revolution demonstrates the need to overthrow capitalism in order to achieve this system change.
The foreign policy of imperialism is driven to crush Cuba’s vital example: since 1961 the US has imposed a unilateral, illegal blockade costing Cuba more than $138 billion. The US has recently tightened the blockade through the full implementation of the Helms-Burton Act Title III, ramping up the pressure further (see FRFI 269). As Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel explained in his closing speech to the National Assembly of People’s Power on 13 July, the tightening of the blockade has created a deficit of fuel imports, increasing the importance of projects that are developing renewable energy (Granma International, 19 July 2019).
At the Rio de Janeiro UN Earth Summit 27 years ago, Fidel Castro urged world leaders to take action:
‘Unequal trade, protectionism and the foreign debt assault the ecological balance and promote the destruction of the environment. If we want to save humanity from this self-destruction, wealth and available technologies must be distributed better throughout the planet… Enough of selfishness. Enough of schemes of domination. Enough of insensitivity, irresponsibility and deceit. Tomorrow will be too late to do what we should have done a long time ago.’
Tomorrow was already too late in 1992. We need to defend the example of Cuba, not just for Cuba’s sake but for the future of humankind. Nowhere else in the world better illustrates the need to fight for socialism to defend the environment.
- In 2006 Cuba had a 0.8 UN human development index score and consumed less than 1.8 global hectares of resources per capita (WWF Living Planet Report 2006).
- ‘The Paradox of Cuban Agriculture’, Miguel Altieri and Reinaldo Funes Monzote, Monthly Review Vol 63 No 8, January 2012.
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 272 October/November 2019
