Chinese refrigerators invade Cuba

Chinese refrigerators invade Cuba
Cuba launches massive push to replace households' old fridges with more
energy-efficient ones.
COX NEWS SERVICE
Sunday, September 03, 2006

HAVANA — 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 — the invasion of the Chinese
refrigerators.

THE PALM BEACH POST

A new refrigerator takes its place in a Cuban home. Although some are
excited about getting new appliances shipped from China, there are
complaints that the refrigerators aren't as big as the old ones.

Eighteen-wheelers stacked with hundreds of Chinese-made Haier fridges
stopping door-to-door in the countryside and on city streets have been
as common a sight as Cuban military transports. An estimated 300,000
households, in a country of 11 million people, are replacing their aging
appliances — all in the name of an effort to lower Cuba'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 who asked to remain
anonymous. "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 that includes oil, wind, solar energy and even a botched
attempt at building a nuclear plant, this year was dubbed the Year of
the Energy Revolution. But despite sweetheart deals with Hugo Chavez'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
much 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.

Folks have taken to pilfering electricity. A popular way is to stick a
square, 3-inch piece of X-ray film into a meter. The film stops the
meter from running but not the electricity from flowing.

"My neighbor from the left side told me how to do it, and I passed it on
to guys on the right and across the street," one man in the coastal town
of Cienfuegos said, proudly demonstrating the technique. "The entire
street does three or four hours a day. One problem is that it works only
with the Soviet meters. The old American ones, because they have three
dials, won't stop running."

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, 1 million color
televisions were purchased under the same plan and, soon, so will
air-conditioners and electric stoves, rice cookers and fans.

For now, the 5-foot-tall Haiers have made their appearances in some
homes where, mostly because of endemic poverty, there might have not
been new appliances in half a century.

"I'm 42, and this is the first time I see a brand new fridge," said a
woman waiting for the truck to pull up to her home in San Francisco de
Paola, 30 minutes southeast of Havana. From the doorsteps of her
two-room wooden shack, she asked that her name not be used. Inside, in a
home nearly empty of furniture and dark even at high noon, her baby-blue
General Electric dinosaur had been readied for pickup by workers on the
same truck dropping off the new fridges.

"It's so exciting, I'm sorry. I need to go. Here it comes."

For the past month, the old refrigerators — some American-made, some
Soviet — have dotted the landscape.

Whether lined up like soldiers on concrete coffee-drying pads in the
Sierra Maestra or stacked in a multi-colored heap near the monument to
independence hero Calixto Garcia in Cardenas, they're waiting to be
cannibalized and sold as scrap metal overseas — providing another
revenue stream for the government.

Residents said the government isn't buying the old appliances from them
and merely provides their removal.

Complaints about the new equipment, meanwhile, include the fact the
fridges are more than a foot smaller than the older ones and look
flimsier, even with a three-year warranty.

With a U.S. subsidiary in South Carolina, Haier is mostly known on Wall
Street for its failed attempt to buy American staple Maytag a year ago.

"I liked my old fridge," said a homemaker in Cienfuegos. "This one is
too small. And it won't last 30 years like the old one. We have so
little food that whatever we have needs to be preserved well."

http://www.statesman.com/news/content/news/stories/world/09/03/3cubafridge.html