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WE ARE AND WE SHOULD BE SOCIALISTS
Related to country: Cuba

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Reflections of Fidel:



LAST October 2nd we discussed the international price of the fuels that we are consuming. I am under the impression that its significance attracted the attention of many leaders and cadres.

There is a general debate about the percentage of the population with access to electricity and other common services of modern life. This may vary from 40% or less to 60% or a bit higher. It depends on access to hydroelectric resources and other elements.

Before January 1, 1959, almost half of the Cuban people had no access to electricity. Today, with a population twice the size and broad access to that energy, its consumption has increased several times over.

In our country, as in a large part of the world —except for the super-rich nations— that electricity is brought to the people by air through the use of electricity pylons, posts, transformers and other means, many of which were knocked down by the strong winds of Hurricanes Gustav and Ike throughout the island.

An article in Granma signed by Maria Julia Mayoral outlines the devastation of the power grid by both natural phenomena. But she adds that while the hurricanes were moving through [the island], generators provided electricity to "966 bakeries, 207 food processing centers, 372 radio stations, 193 hospitals, 496 polyclinics, 635 water-pumping stations and 138 senior citizens’ homes, among other basic facilities."

"Assuring this meant that…it was necessary to quickly dismantle hundreds of emergency units located in production and service centers to set them up in places that were not connected to the national electric power system. This was possible thanks to the coordinated actions of work brigades from various agencies and transportation companies, with the support of local authorities. The equipment that was temporarily moved will be returned to its original centers as soon as the situation is back to normal."

These words, which I am quoting exactly, show the devotion dedicated by local and national Party and government cadres to finding solutions.

The headline of the article written by Maria Julia reads: "Millions spent to bring light to the people."

I think that this is the right time to recall that the generators were set up for the following purposes:

•To guarantee crucial services such as health care or food preservation under any circumstances;

•Industrial food production, such as bread, milk and others;

•To ensure steelworks, which cannot be halted because that would seriously damage the industry;

•To guarantee defense and information services which are indispensable at all times. Suffice it to mention the meteorological centers and their radars, which track the course of hurricanes;

•To ensure the progressive generation of electricity with minimum consumption, much more efficiently than the available thermoelectric plants.

Having said this, we should remember that the generators range from small motors that can produce 40 KW/h to those that can generate 1,000 KW/h or more. Sometimes it becomes necessary to put together several of these generators; for example, in a hospital with advanced technological equipment and an indispensable air conditioning system, which tend to be high energy consumers.

These generators use diesel to operate and their efficiency grows as their capacity for electricity generation increases to a certain point. They require appropriate grease, a stock of spare parts, maintenance, etc.

A growing number of generators have motors that operate without interruption and use a different type of fuel.

The ideal thing would be for every production or service center to receive electricity from the national electric power system using more efficient machines that operate on fuel oil, which is much cheaper than diesel and is obtained from oil refining and is a fuel that is being increasingly used for passenger and cargo transport, tractors and other farming equipment.

If, for any reason, diesel-operated generators are used to provide electricity for housing and are operated for 20 hours or more, the consequences are negative. Their main purpose is for emergencies and, at the present stage of Cuba’s development, for a limited number of peak hours.

Among the different types of generators that use hydrocarbons, nothing compares to the ones that use fuel oil, even if the investment is more costly. Because of their weight and complexity, they cannot be moved from one place to another at any time. In this sense, they are second only to the combined-cycle plants that use gas, which is previously filtered for sulfur and other contaminants.

We should be mindful that no cadre should forget the advisability of not wasting a minute to return all diesel-consuming generators to their regular functions in neighboring provinces and municipalities as soon as the emergency is over. We have a serious shortage of that fuel; the country is spending too much and it has been necessary to reduce the allocations required.

Production and distribution of food and construction materials, I repeat, have absolute priority at this time. We are not a developed capitalist country in crisis, whose leaders are going crazy looking for solutions amidst depression, inflation, a lack of markets and unemployment; we are and we must be socialists.



Fidel Castro Ruz
October 4, 2008
7:35 p.m.

October 10, 2008 | 11:18 AM Comments  0 comments

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