Cubans getting energy-efficient Chinese refrigerators

Posted on Tue, Aug. 29, 2006

CUBA
Cubans getting energy-efficient Chinese refrigerators
Although oil and energy shortages continue, the Cuban government is
distributing Chinese refrigerators as a way to save electricity.
Cox News

HAVANA - Energy-saving fridges arrive

With President Fidel Castro ailing, his still-healthy propaganda
apparatus has been trying to convince the country that the United States
is about to invade Cuba.

But while the elderly women assigned to watch the horizon from beach
lookouts have reported no sign of Marines, there's been a foreign
invasion of the island nation all right.

Call it: The Invasion of the Chinese Refrigerators.

Eighteen-wheelers stacked with hundreds of Chinese-made Haier fridges
stopping door-to-door in the remote countryside and on city streets have
been as common a sight here as Cuban military transports. An estimated
300,000 households, in a country of 11 million people, are replacing
aging appliances -- all in the name of an effort to lower the county's
total energy use.

And this being Cuba, not only are the replacements mandatory -- but many
people have had to take out loans from government banks to pay for the
new appliances.

''Don't think that because we're in a socialist regime that the fridges
are free,'' said a religious leader in a coastal city. He asked to
remain anonymous as Cuban dissidents and others were warned not to kick
up dust during Castro's illness.

``Actually, they're quite expensive. I'm paying the equivalent of $286.
My wife and I make about $25 a month. So, like most people, we're
financing it over a 10-year period at 10 percent interest.''

In a country known for its rolling blackouts and aging patchwork of
power systems this year was dubbed Year of the Energy Revolution. But
despite sweetheart deals with Hugo Chávez's government in Venezuela and
Chinese interests, oil especially has been hard to come by. It isn't
rare to pull into a station in a major city and find no gas, even at $4
a gallon.

Nowhere, however, have energy price increases hurt the average Cuban as
in the price of electricity.

Eighteen months ago, the average household paid 10 to 15 pesos a month.
That has jumped to 50 to 60 pesos -- as much as one-fifth of the average
monthly salary.

Proving once again faithful to the country's unofficial motto, resolver,
or ''be resourceful,'' folks have taken to pilfering electricity. A
popular way is to stick a square, three-inch piece of X-ray film into a
meter. The film stops the meter but not the electricity.

Preferring legal ways to conserve, the government in March bought
300,000 of the energy-efficient fridges from China under a deal to
assemble them in a Cuban plant. Late last year, one million color
televisions were bought under the same plan and, soon, so will
air-conditioners and electric stoves, rice cookers and fans.

For now, the five-foot-tall Haiers have made their appearances in some
homes where, mostly because of endemic poverty, there may have not been
new appliances in half a century.

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/15385366.htm