According to Radio Rebelde [a government-run radio station]: “during the Cuban President’s intense tour of economic entities, social institutions, and the transforming neighborhoods of San Miguel del Padron, Regla and Havana’s Revolution Plaza, the most touching moment was the children’s reactions, upon seeing – as I heard them express – “Wow, the President outside the television…. The presence of the leader caused huge excitement, laughter, hugs and kisses.”

My thoughts:

• Even the children have noticed that [Cuban President] Diaz Canel never leaves the small screen.
• The excitement came because they haven’t seen him for some time, due to the blackouts.
• You can find a way to profit from even the most negative events.

Moreover, the blackouts are on the way to a solution, according to an extensive four-part interview with the Minister of Energy and Mines published by Granma.

• That newspaper, more than a mine, is an inexhaustible vein of faith in the future of a country that “doesn’t stop, despite the difficulties.” If we allow ourselves to be swept along by the reports they publish before each summer arrives, by now we would already be exporting energy to Jamaica and the nearby islands.
• Or perhaps just to the neighboring homes. In the same newspaper, in an article titled “Crossed wires” they ponder the clandestine electricity hook-ups. “The scene is this: two old and very long cables, joined together by nearly equidistant adhesive tape connecters, emerge slowly, with a nearly nervous lethargy, from a white-painted wooden window. A cable from here to there, or there to here, so you can connect a refrigerator, a fan, or watch the telenovela chapter, because even today, a Cuban without their soap opera is a bundle of sorrow.”
• The television station broadcasts the soap operas, [the government] spins the stories.
• “You begin to connect the dots of what you see, experience and hear with what others saw, experienced and heard, and you become convinced that the Cuban soul is a very unusual thing, but perennially hopeful.”
• The journalist has the daily hope that you forget what you lived and heard years ago, in order – strangely enough – to continue hearing the same.
• In the introduction to the Minister’s interview, in a moment of frankness, the journalist writes: “Having electricity isn’t a luxury.”
• An elegant way of affirming that, in Cuba, it is.
• He adds: “Lacking it means suffering for every family, not only for being unable to turn on the TV or charge your phone, but even more essential for being left without options for cooking or preserving the foods that need refrigeration. And the whole country suffers, unable to put a foot on the straight road to the urgent development it needs.”
• What the country urgently and concretely needs is asphalt. It’s impossible to go straight with so many potholes.
• Regarding the solar parks, Vicente de la O Levy, the Minister of Energy and Mines, says that two of the reasons why they’re to be distributed all through the country is that, “There can be a shadow right now across the first array of panels we inaugurated in el Cotorro, (Havana) while the one in Granma has bright sunlight.” I never would have thought of that.
• But Diaz Canel did. Three years ago – among “laughter, hugs and kisses,” I imagine – he called for the analyses carried out during those months of emergency to lead to strategies that give greater stability to the functioning of the electro-energy system “as the economy revives”. Reviving the economy is becoming more difficult day by day, not even the most sophisticated intensive therapy can achieve it.
• I recall a televised appearance of the president, very instructive for children. One of his high points was to declare: “There’s a surge at midday that has to do with the lunch hour when food is cooked, an important part of this using electrical cooking methods. The ideal thing would be for there not to be surges, and for usage to be stable, but that’s very hard to achieve because it has to do with the way life in society is structured.”
• He fell just short of proposing a change in the structure of society to put an end once and for all to that evil custom of eating lunch. If you note “it’s “hard to achieve,” it’s because at some point the idea popped into your head.
• What ideas wouldn’t occur to a mind capable of manifesting: “one thing that everyone can be sure of, is that none of the blackouts here have been deliberately provoked to annoy anyone.”?
• The peak moment in that program wasn’t that remark, but when he let go before the cameras with: “An investment in thermoelectric power is extremely costly for the country and takes time. You can’t set up a thermoelectric plant immediately, it takes four or five years.”
• His PhD in the Sciences didn’t take into consideration that, when you invest, you have to begin at some point. It would have been sad, for example, had the leader’s mother tried to convince his father that an investment in giving birth, nursing, education, and molding a president is extremely costly, and could take over sixty years.
• On the other hand, it might have been very prudent of her.

This article was translated into English from the original in Spanish.