Green dilemma
Cuba’s energy revolution has had political consequences. Review: The Low-Carbon Contradiction, Gustav Cederlöf, by Gavin O'Toole
The Low-Carbon Contradiction: Energy Transition, Geopolitics, and the Infrastructural State in Cuba, Gustav Cederlöf, 2023, University of California Press
Britain has set an epochal—perhaps even grim—precedent as debate rages across Europe about the high price countries are paying to make the energy transition to net zero.
By closing its last remaining coal-fired blast furnaces at the Port Talbot steelworks, and shutting its last coal-fired power station within the last few weeks—the first G7 country to exit coal completely—the UK has finally drawn a line under its Industrial Revolution.
That revolution was fired by coal and steel which, together, underpinned the entire nexus of infrastructure—railways, mines, steelworks—that would give the country its capitalist head start as well as shaping its human geography in every respect.
Coal and steel spawned an empire built on the hard reality of bolts and bullets, but also fashioned the evolution of politics itself by shaping the geographic dynamic between capital and labour that would ultimately give physical form to the modern British state. There’s a reason why there’s no heavy industry in London.
We are yet to recognise the contours of the transition to net zero on British politics—indeed, with typical hypomnesia, far too little research has been undertaken on the sociopolitical implications of the green revolution.
But as Gustav Cederlöf sagely notes, there are countries elsewhere that we can turn to in order to comprehend more fully how the switch to a different form of energy use could reshape the state and political relations—not least, Cuba.
Cederlöf has made the brilliant observation missed elsewhere that Cuba offers clues to what could happen when a country is forced to abandon fossil fuel energy and make a dramatic switch to other sources.
This may be particularly attractive to the champions of decarbonisation in Britain—after all, it is another island that has experienced another kind of revolution, making it easier to imagine self-contained, home-grown strategic energy choices that offer the tantalising prospects of energy independence and security.
Electrification was at the heart of Cuba’s great revolution, with Fidel Castro associating independence from the grip of the US empire with the state’s ability to power up every corner of the island. His initial instincts were nationalist, and it was the industries minister, Ernesto Che Guevara, who fully understood the ideological implications of this, arguing that electrification was essential for Cuba’s transition to communism.
Every aspect of the radical transformation of society that then unfolded was dependent upon how energy was generated and distributed—infrastructure was the key to revolutionary state-building.
As Cederlöf writes: “In the revolutionary narrative, the infrastructure did historical work: it enabled the modernisation of Cuba, reduced social difference, and, on these grounds, induced communism. The Revolution, one might say, had infrastructural form.”
Electricity was generated by the state utility using fuel oil which, following a first trade deal in 1960, was imported from the Soviet Union in exchange for sugar, characterised as an expression of socialist fraternity and fair trade.
Then everything changed: after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba’s imports of crude oil decreased precipitously, as did its access to derivatives such as diesel, kerosene and LPG.
The impact was profound: Cubans were quite simply forced to adapt to a new low-carbon reality, the “special period”, which they weathered with great sacrifice and dignity until Venezuela came to the rescue with oil as part of an anti-imperialist alliance.
However, disaster struck again in the form of Hurricane Charley, which wreaked havoc in western Cuba and all-but destroyed the electricity network.
It was time for an “Energy Revolution”, announced Castro with characteristic determination, setting out the ambition of territorially decentralising the electricity infrastructure while decarbonising the economy by over a third.
As Cederlöf notes, however: “In reaching this goal, the Energy Revolution also did something more: it fundamentally changed the political nature of the socialist state.”
As a result of its post-Soviet experiences, Cuba has achieved something remarkable, yet again demonstrating the visionary power of revolution. Not only has it provided levels of human development on a par with, and often higher than, capitalist societies, it has done so with a tiny per capita carbon footprint.
In effect, the country reached peak oil in the 1990s, after which it developed a low-carbon economy on the basis of economic and social reform, rather than high-tech innovation—and in that sense it offers a model, admittedly with its own post-colonial quirks, for radical low-carbon transition.
Cuba has also been closely scrutinised at a more theoretical level by advocates of “degrowth”, the notion that it is impossible to achieve sustainability through the traditional emphasis on a permanent growth in GDP.
This idea is often seen as a critique of capitalism but could also apply tangentially to the existing understanding of Cuban socialism, dedicated to improving the lives of citizens by generating economic growth.
The distinction between degrowth and “eco-socialism” is fundamentally important: the growth imperative guiding any economy (socialist or capitalist) undergoing decarbonisation will create a situation in which the share of renewables and the consumption of fossil fuels will increase simultaneously due to rising electricity output.
That means—as the UK is now discovering—investments in renewables only contribute to a real low-carbon transition if fossil fuels are taken out of use at the same rate, and such a prospect goes against the modernist growth-oriented paradigm.
As Cederlöf notes, this contradiction between degrowth-inspired and eco-socialist trajectories has been visible at the heart of Cuba’s energy transition: revolutionary Cuba was shaped by a political project founded upon fossil-fuelled economic growth, yet in recent decades it has been shaped by political efforts to create a low-carbon economy essentially resting on non-growth-based social values.
In both cases, it is impossible to ignore the role played by infrastructure as a means for the state to impose social order. This is particularly so in an energy transition, which makes the state more visible, reconfigures the arrangement of resources with socio-political consequences, and re-imagines the political subject that inhabits the energy landscape.
Cederlöf argues that while electrification was an inherent aspect of the original socialist project in Cuba, this began to change as the socialist bloc disintegrated and household practices were transformed during the special period.
Cubans began to interact with energy infrastructure in differentiated, uneven ways and this enhanced processes of stratification that were beginning to appear, challenging the revolutionary master narrative.
The 1993 Programa Energético policy adopted to guide economic activity created spaces for the population to set up infrastructural arrangements parallel to the state, with the proliferation of smaller localised infrastructures and spheres of exchange generating political conflict and the commodification of fuels.
Cederlöf suggests that the revolutionary political imaginary around energy use in Cuban politics that centred on a postcolonial, class-based subject changed as the special period generated unequal experiences shaped along lines of gender, race, and class.
This shook the master narrative of socialist progress, fractured the socialist state, and required Cubans to negotiate the inequalities they experienced within a new understanding of revolutionary change.
The subsequent Energy Revolution of the early 2000s led to far-reaching efforts to reduce the energy intensity of the economy centred on households, extending an ethic of thrift as the basis of what it meant to be a “true revolutionary citizen”—thereby re-centralising power and reinforcing the hegemony of the state.
Cederlöf writes: “While large-scale infrastructural solutions continue to dominate in Cuba, degrowth-inspired practices are also integral to island life. Conflicting political priorities of autonomy and centralisation, self-sufficiency and redistribution are held in suspension in the decarbonisation of the economy.”
Endless disruptions since the Energy Revolution—from the death of Hugo Chávez to new US sanctions and chaos in international energy markets—has confronted Cuba with permanent challenges, manifested at times in acute fuel shortages and blackouts.
From an ideological point of view, the author argues, while offering incentives for degrowth strategies, and indeed compelling Cubans to live through a degrowth experience, the country’s experience has not been narrated in that way by a jealous state—the eco-socialist perspective has prevailed, with implications for the nature of the transition.
He writes: “A revised ecological concept of Cuban state socialism has instead developed that remains firmly rooted in a political project in which growth is considered a sine qua non for historical progress.”
As a result, the energy transition does not strive for autarky or self-sufficiency but a form of energy sovereignty based upon the ability to maintain a particular political economic arrangement of resource flows—infrastructural power. It is, fundamentally, a political project.
Thus as with Britain, even as Cuba invests in renewables the PCC predicts that the consumption of fossil fuels will increase until 2030, blurring the nature of the transition, complicating its objectives—and questioning its radical intent.
As Cederlöf concludes: “While oil scarcity is the mirror image of oil dependence, a low-carbon economy is defined in relation to an economy locked into fossil fuel use. To envision a radical energy future, the challenge is not to negate what already exists, but to break out of the binary.”