The Low-Carbon Contradiction: Energy Transition, Geopolitics, and the Infrastructural State in Cuba

Abstract

“Energy is an instrument of power. What did the United States do when it broke off relations with Cuba? Take away our oil supply. What did the USSR do? Give us oil.” So stated, in an interview with me in 2017, Luis Berriz, president of the Cuban nongovernmental organization Cubasolar, set up during the acute energy crisis in the 1990s to promote renewable energies on the island.Gustav Cederlöf's work interrogates this statement through an examination of the dynamic between energy transition, geopolitics, and the infrastructural state in Cuba, as the title indicates. In doing so he makes a valuable contribution to the “geographies of knowledge about energy,” which, as he recognizes, are shaped by research on countries in Europe and North America (p. xi). Thus, this book provides a fresh angle within Cuba studies, in which discussions about energy (almost exclusively oil) have been tangential to a focus on Cold War–style geopolitics. It also engages with debates around energy politics, development studies, degrowth, and eco-socialism. In Cuba, where development is shaped by centuries of colonization and imperialism, the issue of energy is intrinsically linked to the struggle for sovereignty, development, and the commitment to social justice, as Cederlöf recognizes.The book is based on Cederlöf's doctoral research, drawing on interviews and analysis of documentation and policy, theoretical framing, and lived experiences in Cuba. He argues that the core contradiction of Cuban development is that life in revolutionary Cuba has been shaped by both “a political project embroiled with fossil-fueled economic growth” and “political efforts to create a low-carbon economy resting on non-growth-based social values” (p. 8). The analysis is presented over five main chapters. Necessarily, Cederlöf starts with a chapter of historical contextualization, fittingly titled “Against the Energy Empire,” which underscores Cuba's oil dependence from the mid-twentieth century, initially on US interests and then, post-1959, following the shift in trade, investment, and alliances, on the Soviet Union. Key themes are Cuban efforts to reduce oil dependence and to expand and democratize access to energy as part of the broader political economy transformations underway with the adoption of a socialist centrally planned economy.Chapter 2, “Electrification or Death,” discusses the efforts of the post-1959 socialist government to expand the National Electricity System (SEN). As Cederlöf argues, “Two basic assumptions underpinned Cuban Marxist debate: first, that increasing energy use was definitive of development, and second, that a centralized, nationally integrated infrastructure was a requisite material condition for social justice—or in more contemporary terms, ‘energy justice’” (p. 16). The SEN was expanded with Soviet assistance, including abundant oil imports. Nevertheless, in the 1980s the Cubans began working on the Project of the Century, a nuclear power plant, to reduce the island's dependence on oil and facilitate development of its productive forces. Little has been written in English about this endeavor, and Cederlöf provides a useful account. Both Soviet oil imports and the nuclear power plant construction came to an abrupt end, however, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, which by then supplied 86 percent of Cuba's crude oil supplies.The third chapter is aptly titled “Blackout,” a term that characterizes the Special Period of economic crisis in the 1990s, which was fundamentally an energy crisis. Cederlöf shows how Cuba responded by developing a low-carbon economy without high-tech innovations. Based on ethnographic encounters in Pinar del Río and Havana, the author describes how urban households adapted to energy shortages, building resilience, while relations with the socialist state apparatus were altered: “Most Cubans were forced into energy poverty and were compelled to find solutions to the livelihood challenges facing them in the enforced low-carbon environment” (p. 71). Notwithstanding the electricity shortages, he notes, “the SEN was an infrastructure that assured the equitable distribution of energy as a non-commodity,” which explains how electricity was rationed through scheduled blackouts to each neighborhood (p. 75).Chapter 4, on “socialist redistribution and autonomous infrastructure,” discusses government, academic, and industry responses to the energy crisis, including the 1993 Program for the Development of National Energy Sources, which mobilized grassroots strategies, in parallel to the state, to build resilience in localized spheres. Cederlöf argues that these responses can be interpreted in terms of eco-socialist or degrowth paradigms of attempted energy transition. Moving on to the 2000s, chapter 5 discusses pivotal developments post-2000: first, the impact of increasingly frequent and intense hurricanes tearing into Cuba's energy infrastructure; second, the Energy Revolution, a government program to decentralize energy generation, thus reducing Cuba's energy vulnerability, and promote energy saving and conservation; and third, the alliance with Hugo Chávez's Venezuela and the Bolivarian Revolution, which alleviated Cuba's oil shortages through the famous “oil for doctors” program.Cederlöf concludes with a discussion about what Cuba's low-carbon contradiction can offer to our understanding of energy transitions globally. His book also ends with reference to the renewed energy crisis into which Cuba has been plunged since 2019, with a return to blackouts and energy rationing. This externally imposed crisis, the intended result of US sanctions under President Donald Trump, reveals the persistence of the structural problems that the Energy Revolution addressed but did not resolve.