Cuba’s Unique Breaker Switches

By Lien Estrada

HAVANA TIMES – One of Cuba’s gravest challenges – in addition to food, transport, health, education, and others – is the electrical system. Long periods of blackouts are torture for workers, students, and the general population. It’s a problem that’s never totally resolved, like so many others. Between the moment someone yells: “the electricity’s off!” with the distress that triggers; and the screams of joy when it comes back, accompanied by applause from the children, and the relief and happiness of all those affected, there are responsibilities that must be shouldered among neighbors.

For example, many of the streetlights don’t automatically turn on at dusk and off at dawn as they should. Making sure they do is the responsibility of the neighborhood where the streetlights are located – when there’s electric current, of course.

Because of that, when the electricity has returned, it’s nothing unusual to see silhouettes emerging from the houses at midnight to turn on the streetlamps. Or to see someone go out very soon after dawn to turn them off, because then they’re no longer needed. If no one attended to them in this way, these bulbs would stay lit all day for nothing, because there’s no other mechanism to turn them off, except the blackout itself.

Many of these lampposts have breaker switches, ordinary ones adapted for this use, but at least they’re with an apparatus for the safety of those who are going to use them. In some neighborhoods, however, it’s not like that. In addition, we encounter wires that are bare at each end, one in front of the other, indicating to us that when join them, the bulb will light; and conversely, if we separate them, it will turn off. Obviously, this is a daily job. In some cases, there’s one person who’s always responsible, in others it rotates among the neighbors.

This neighborhood problem of the lack of breaker switches is reflected in the bare wires almost everywhere, with only a few adapters here and there to turn the streetlights on at night. It’s not a problem that’s restricted to the marginal neighborhoods, or the most vulnerable residents.

In Holguin, in places as central as Area Street between Antonio Cardet and Rastro, you can find a deodorant can hanging from an electric pole within reach of anyone’s hands. Most people know very well that, in this context, it’s no longer a simple deodorant can hanging there – it’s functioning as a breaker switch!

At first glance it seems strange, especially to those who are unaware of Cubans’ ingenuity at facing the many challenges that everyday reality lays before us. Like the fact that what was originally a deodorant can could end up fulfilling other functions, such as helping to transmit or block the flow of electricity when necessary, due to the lack of the original breaker switches, and our awareness of the dangers of having bare electric cables within anyone’s reach.

What would a foreigner think if they saw this? What would they understand? Would they see it as the final decay of a system nearing its end? In that last conclusion, they’d be mistaken – we’d respond that we’ve spent decades, over half a century, with such inventions. A system that doesn’t work? This is possibly true, but the problem is that it’s been this way for over 63 years.

What else would they understand, if they discovered that the thing hanging from the most dangerous electric cables in a city isn’t exactly what they’re seeing (a desodorant can), but something else: a breaker switch? Surely the tourist guide will explain with flourishes and in great detail what it is, and why there isn’t a breaker switch as there should be, offering reasons like: “the Yankee imperialists’ economic blockade.” Even though we Cubans are convinced that the reasons are definitively others, beyond the influence of the aforementioned factor.

At any rate, this deodorant can, now a breaker switch, represents a distinct historic period. An era in which a people have resisted much – a lot, too much, some would say – and in which they continue resisting, transforming what didn’t begin that way, to respond to a present that challenges us at every step.

Read more from the diary of Lien Estrada here on Havana Times.