Cuban President Announces Measures to Face Short-Term Energy Crisis

Miguel Diaz-Canel, president of the Councils of State and Ministers of Cuba, announced short-term organizational measures to mitigate the impact on the population of the shortages of oil effects by the intensification of the U.S. blockade against Cuba.

In the TV prime show Roundtable, the President said that the country is not facing a new Special Period (hardship times in the 1990s after the fall of the Soviet Union), but that it is an energy crisis created by external factors that will require saving measures and the participation of the population to face the impacts.

Diaz-Canel specified that production activities will be adjusted to use efficiently the resources the country has. He also urged for greater efficiency in the transportation of merchandise from the ports, of people and implementing several measures that in the 1990s allow the country to navigate through a much worse crisis. He added that it is proposed to move the schedules in work centers, implement modalities of remote work, stop certain investments, avoid visits and events not essential to the territories and maintain the programs of food, housing, computerization, exports, renewable sources, tourism, transportation and national production.

We must bear in mind the contribution that young people can make, reject the hostile policy of the Empire that is mainly responsible for the economic siege against our country; encourage savings and altruism as an attitude; face opportunistic attitudes that tarnish the effort by raising prices, hoarding products, therefore we must maintain popular control, he added.

Diaz-Canel stressed that the country does not renounce to a growth of its Gross Domestic Product and that these decisions respond to analysis that have been carried out for several months from the highest direction of the country before the intensification of the economic siege of the United States.

The Cuban President explained that there will be no supply problems in the country since there are products to guarantee productions, although the lack of diesel will hinder the distribution of some products, worker and public transportation and the generation of electricity, especially at times of
maximum demand.

Díaz-Canel pointed out that Cuba is not in a new Special Period because there are strengths such as a strategy of economic and social development, a new Constitution that has generated a broad legislative exercise, among them the election of the main positions of the State next October.

He pointed out the potentialities of the island’s oil production, which covers almost 40 percent of the country’s current consumption, in addition to the contribution of tourism (with 70,000 rooms), the expansion of foreign investment, the diversification of markets and products and the strengthening of the private sector.

Díaz-Canel recalled that Army General Raúl Castro, first secretary of the Party, warned on July 26, 2018 about the risk of facing situations of this type due to the escalation of the new U.S. government against Cuba.

The U.S. administration,” said the president, “is acting more aggressively towards Cuba as part of a genocidal plan to affect the quality of life of the population, its progress and hopes and accuse the Cuban government of inefficiency to model a social outburst and make the social fabric more complex.

The Trump administration has failed in an attempt to overthrow the Bolivarian Revolution and that has led them to rage at Cuba by creating a matrix of opinion that holds us responsible for the situation in Venezuela, he added.

He denounced that the U.S. government insists on limiting the entry of fuels through threats to shipping companies, shipowners and governments and recently announced the implementation of new measures to prevent Cuba from having access to foreign currency and also limited family remittances affecting the freedoms of the Cuban and U.S. peoples.

We have a strategy to win and the Yankee administration is not going to achieve its goals of discouraging the Cuban people, he stressed.