Energy Revolution

: Oil Dependence and the Political Ecology of Energy Use in Socialist Cuba

Abstract

Oil-based electrification had long been the backbone of the Cuban revolutionary programme when the Soviet Union collapsed. In the early 1990s, Cuba lost 86 percent of its crude oil supplies, leading to 15 years of enforced low-carbon energy use. The Cuban government then launched a nationwide ‘Energy Revolution’, overhauling the national energy systems while again decreasing the intensity of Cuban oil consumption. This thesis examines how energy use and the construction and maintenance of energy infrastructure were constituted in revolutionary Cuba, as seen in the government, scientific-industrial, and urban-household spheres. It examines how energy-system transformations reconfigured social relations and, particularly, relations between Cuban citizens and the socialist state.

Drawing on archival sources, interviews, and observations in Pinar del Río and Havana, the thesis demonstrates how the Cuban Revolution linked notions of development and energy use to specific physical infrastructure. While this infrastructure enabled the new socialist state as a vehicle of redistribution, its physical properties depended on a regime of primary energy supply, linking Cuba to the Soviet Union. The thesis also shows how Cubans reinterpreted official discourse of ‘resistance’, ‘inventiveness’, and ‘thrift’ during the 1990s ‘special period’, negotiating everyday experiences of energy use. Analysing strategies to reconfigure energy systems in the special period, the thesis challenges conventional definitions of energy efficiency and diversification. Reinterpreting these terms, it demonstrates how energy systems, assembled top-down and bottom-up, called the political nature of the socialist state into question. Technological interventions during the Energy Revolution, finally, reinforced state control over everyday energy-use, radically transforming state-citizen relations.

Theoretically, the thesis intervenes in the political-ecology literature, bringing energy more fully into the political-ecology tradition. It conceptualises energy as a materiality that moves through societies in uneven ways, shaping the circumstances for human action. Through energy infrastructure, the Cuban Revolution is reread as a political-ecological process.

Date of Award	1 Dec 2017
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	King's College London
Supervisor	Raymond Bryant (Supervisor) & Alex Loftus (Supervisor)