In Cuba, blackouts like the one that happened this Friday are nothing new. In fact, they have been a feature of life for decades — even if U.S. President Donald Trump’s ban on oil sales to Havana has deepened the crisis. With its limited domestic oil production and reliance on foreign exports, Cuba has long searched for alternative forms of energy to help it keep the lights on. Perhaps its most ambitious attempt was when, in the early 1980s, Fidel Castro embarked on plans to build a nuclear power plant in Juraguá, Cienfuegos province, to be built and financed with the help of the Soviet Union. It was hoped that the plant, envisioned as the first of three, would provide 15 per cent of the island’s electricity needs and usher in a new era of energy security for the communist nation. But that dream was never to be. A dream in ruins U.S. opposition, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, and the collapse of the Soviet Union all helped to doom the project, whose long-abandoned concrete shell stands today as a ruin that people can walk around freely. A short stroll down the road is Nuclear City, the town built to house the thousands of workers the project would have needed and which today is — like the plant — a shadow of its former self. There, Luis Vargas, an electrician who was part of the project, tells CNN he feels “a deep sorrow inside” when viewing the structure in its current state. “It’s a shame that it was left the way it is, because unfortunately millions were invested there and it could not be completed,” he says. Soviet collapse During the Cold War, Havana bet everything on remaining within the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence and on its assistance with ambitious projects such as the Juraguá nuclear power plant. Perhaps inevitably, the project soon ran into opposition from the United States which — despite having operated its own Turkey Point nuclear power plant in Homestead, near Miami, since 1972 — objected on safety grounds due to Juraguá’s proximity to the US. Those U.S. objections only grew when the worst nuclear disaster in history happened in 1986 at Chernobyl, Ukraine — then part of the USSR — and persisted despite the Nuclear Regulatory Commission telling Congress that year that, despite its reservations about the project, Juraguá was more similar in design to Western nuclear power plants than it was to the one in Chernobyl. But it was the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 that really spelled the end for the plant, which was decommissioned three years later before ever having become operational. Francisco Pérez, who like Vargas once worked at the plant, recalled the day Castro came to tell them the news. “He told us the truth; he told us what the situation was and what the problem was there, and that the plant had to be shut down.” While throughout the 1990s there were multiple attempts by Russia and Cuba to revive the project, Washington’s ongoing objections — coupled with the financial difficulties both countries were experiencing — meant none of these came to fruition. “We have long had doubts about the quality of the plant’s construction and about Cuba’s ability to operate it safely. I would only add that we have conveyed these views to all the governments involved, including Russia’s,” then-U.S. State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns told a press conference in 1995. Five years later, Castro reportedly told Russia he was no longer interested in completing the plant. Left behind While Cuba’s nuclear power dream now lies in the ruins of Juraguá, the decades since Castro announced the project have seen this form of energy flourish across the Americas. Today, according to the IAEA, the United States has 94 operating nuclear power reactors that produce 18-20 per cent of its annual electricity needs; Canada has 17 reactors that produce 13 per cent; Argentina has 3 that produce seven per cent; and Mexico has two that generate four to five per cent. The two reactors operated by Brazil at its Angra plant have the capacity to generate around 2,000 megawatts — just shy of the deficit Cuba’s Electric Union reported on Sept. 16. The unfortunate reality for Cuba is that while its nuclear dream collapsed, it still faces the same problem it has for decades: a growing demand for electricity and a lack of capacity to produce it. On the façade of the giant concrete structure that was once intended to solve that problem, a sign written in Russian and Spanish remains visible despite the passing years. “Let the atom be a worker, not a soldier!” it says. In Juraguá, it was neither.
