Common people a Cuba spends more than a third of his life in coda. After special period in the 90s, following the collapse of the Soviet empire to which the island was inextricably linked, this trend continued chronicled in a pejorative sense, especially after the end of the second term of Obama and the rise to the presidency of Trump who tore up his predecessor’s reforms, including half-hearted attempts to end the secular embargo American.
The novelty is that since last year this plague, limited to the difficulty of finding the foodstuffs assigned in supply notebook state – a rationing system that guaranteed the citizen the minimum requirement a popular prices – extended to fuel. And the infamous Cuban queues today also involve means of transport, not just pedestrians.
The mystery of Cuban oil
And yet, Cuba has crude oil. And of good quality. It is estimated that its geological reserves mapped in the EEZ (Special Economic Zone) in front of the Gulf of Mexico amount to 10,000 million barrels concentrated in the province of Mayabequealong the highway from East Havana arrives at killings. It is very heavy crude oil, which lies deep underground, so techniques have had to evolve over the years in order to exploit at least 70% of the available deposits.
Since sea wells have also been drilled, unconventional extraction is preferred: it involves horizontal drilling at certain depths through which micro-channels are created into which water is pumped at high pressure which, generating steam, liquefies hydrocarbons facilitating the ascent to the surface. On the oil route the collection tanks are located Cupet (Cuba Petroleum Union), the thermoelectric plantthe many extraction pumps scattered along the territory and the chimneys of the refinery. There are four active in Cuba, but with frequent maintenance problems that generate breakdowns. The main one is the Nico Lopeznear the capital.
Already after the coast of Guanabo, the smell of oil it is unbearable. Some operators confirm that due to the heaviness of the raw material and the inadequacy of the refining plants, most of the extract goes electricity production and what is left is sold to Belgium for almost 10 million dollars annually. But Cuba, just to complete its internal energy needs, is forced to import more than 70, from Colombia and from Spain.
The causes? In addition to the embargo there is the lack of synergy between Cuba and its historical allies, Chinese, Venezuela e Brazilexcept the parenthesis Bolsonaro. This is essential to make up for his shortcomings. With Venezuela, Castro’s regime has never gone beyond the “trade in nature”: crude oil and fuel in exchange for medical staff. The Chinese plan to invest 6 billion to modernize the raffineria of Cienfuegos in 2011 it did not go through, unlike the joint ventures with EcuadorBrazil and Venezuela which gave excellent results.
The resurgence of the embargo towards Venezuela implemented by Trump in 2017 gave the final blow to the Petroleos de Venezuelathe state enterprise – and consequently to its political referent -, forcing it to halve supplies to Cubawhich have gone down since 2018 from 90,000 to 55,000 barrels per daycontinuing to decline until May of this year.
As a result, not only petrol is missing, but all public services they are affected, starting with the thermoelectric plants that the local heavy crude is no longer enough to feed. So at present they follow the blackouts, that is, the interruptions in the electricity supply which leave the central districts of Havana, the ones that consume the most, in the dark in turn. The spark of popular protests of July 2021 arose precisely from these blackouts.
Interviewing the Minister of Energy at the time and the heads of the Sistema Eléctrico Nacional, an inquiry by Greenreport of 2021 ascertained that the continuous blackouts are due “to the limited operating reserves of the system, in addition to the distribution which has technological limits. So negative effects are inevitable.” In addition to this, “the difficulties encountered in structural maintenance and thermoelectric plant maintenance determine the high rate of breakdowns eh unexpected peaks of production”. This is why the crude oil is almost entirely used for energy and the little that remains for fuel runs into problems related to refining, which force the island to depend on imports, despite the deposits available. From the Mexico and above all from Russia. An unwelcome return to the past, when the island was the Caribbean variant in theSoviet Union.
The Juice (He Sucks)
Louis George He’s a collector of vintage utility cars. His fuchsia-colored 126 from 1974 is well-kept and in perfect working order. It is he who explains the mechanism of petrol black bag which in Havana today is the street business (street business) most profitable of all: “This crisis is a boon for those who make the speculation your own profession. The government sells Super 94 gasoline to 30 MN (Moneda Nacional, the old weight, nda) per litre. However, due to the shortage linked to supplies and traffic in the capital which has tripled in recent years, he must necessarily organize one rotation at the pumps. Every Monday I can book myself at a Cupet distributor of my choice, once the data has been entered into the system I am assigned a code and when my turn approaches, like 50 or 100 numbers beforeI get a message via Telegram with notice to line up at the chosen station on the assigned day. The trick is to book every Monday at different distributors, so that when they start calling, I show up to the first one with an empty tank, I have it filled (I have the right to a full tank) ready to sell it to those who have an urgent commitment and cannot wait their turn. The price of gasoline for resale fluctuates from 400 to 500 pesos per litre (basically a markup that goes well over 1000%). Once in front of the ‘customer’ car, I take out a rubber sleeve, insert it into my tank, suck, and with the jet arriving due to the pressure, I discharge the petrol into the tank until it is full, and from there I draw the quantity that the buyer needs. If in the meantime I get a call from another pump, I empty the tank again and go back in line to refill it. And so on”.
This commercialization means that not only is fuel not enough for everyone, since there are those who hoard it beyond the amount due to them, but it also clogs the files in front of the vending machines. Such a brazen business that often the “juice” ceremony already begins during the queue itself, with hurried people approaching and asking for a few liters to buy “off the books”. Jazel “He Sucks“as the taxi drivers call it, in the evening it stands near the Cupet Riviera petrol station equipped with a tank and hose, sucking from its Lada for the occasional customer regular 87 petrol at 500 MN per liter (at the current exchange rate, 2.8 euros). I ask him for some: “How much do you want amigo? The minimum price I can give you is this, gasolina is very expensive”. However to the black market for that amount you buy Super 94, not 87 which is low octane. At the station Guanabo, the only one near the capital that allows foreigners to get supplies by skipping the kilometric queues, paying 620.70 MN they give you 20.69 litres. Exactly 30 MN per litre, at the exchange rate of 0.16 euros.
However, waiting is a luxury that those in a hurry cannot afford, much less they can wait for taxi drivers for whom it is vital to always have a tank with enough fuel for the rides, especially if they are headed for José Marti airport, which is the better paid: 20 dollars or 2,000 pesos. So submitting to this energy usury is a inevitable “lace”. to be paid for those who work there. As always belatedly, the government is trying to put a patch on this illicit traffic. We have been working on an app named for a couple of weeks Ticket which, once operational, will replace the current procedure, obliging the customer to register only on a Servi Cupet, automatically blocking any tricksters.