IN OTHER WORDS

In other words -

To my thin northern blood the Cuban heat is oppressive and the sun feels viciously bright. No one seems immune. Even the local people, who are obviously more accustomed to the weather than a visitor from Labrador, look like they're suffering under the fierce onslaught. However, Fernando - a friendly guy who speaks a bit of English - promised that the weather would change. He was quickly proved right.

A cool wind from the north soon pushed thick clouds over Havana to block out the dazzling blue sky. By sundown the humidity coalesced and a heavy rain started falling on the Caribbean city, growing harder by the minute and, thankfully, taking the edge off the heat. Soon lightning flashed across the sky again and again, bolts splitting and arching from cloud to cloud, sending heavy rolls of thunder over the streets and buildings, making pedestrians run for cover where ever they could find it. Then, after more than two hours, everything went black.

If it wasn't for the big turkey vultures, the albatrosses, the small white cranes, the little scurrying lizards, the heat and the blazing sun and the stifling humidity (as mentioned before), the wild and cultivated palm trees, the hedges made of cactus plants, the huge sugar cane plantations, the mango trees, the horse-riding shepherds, the horse-drawn taxis, the ox-drawn carts, the Chinese busses and trains, the thatched and tiled roofs, the Spanish that is spoken almost exclusively, and the police, military and security guards who watch from open doorways over everything in sight, Cuba would be just like Labrador: The roads are bad, the sandy beaches are good, the cars seem to lastt forever (albeit for different reasons), and the power goes out on a fairly regular basis, usually at the precise moment when you want it to stay on. And you never know how long it will be gone.

Actually, there's a lot about Cuba's electricity supply that resembles Labrador's. Despite having access to abundant solar and wind sources (not to mention the ocean waves), if only the technology was employed to use them for generation, Cuba relies almost entirely on diesel fuel to supply its power needs. There are windmills throughout the countryside - some of them brand new - but they're all of the design that used to be commonplace all over southern Ontario and elsewhere a hundred years ago and they're only used for the same purpose as the Canadian ones were: To pump water out of wells. If there are any wind-powered electrical turbines on the island they're well hidden. As well, solar collectors - so efficient and cheap and perfect for the south - seem to be completely unknown.

That's not to say the situation hasn't improved for the Cubans in recent years. With China's help (China being Cuba's best friend these days) the government replaced most of its older generators with smaller, more efficient ones. That means there are actually fewer power outages than there used to be, although obviously they haven't been eliminated altogether.

The new generators reveal another way Labrador and Cuba are alike. The Cuban government uses them to bolster its claims of being 'green' (unlike, it uses schoolchildren and musicians to say, dirty unsocialist governments), the same way the Newfoundland government tries to convince people of the falsehood that huge hydroelectric dams (like the ones proposed for Muskrat Falls and the Gull Island rapids) are good for the environment. In both cases the people in control seem content to carry on in a direction that will lead more and more to adverse climate change becoming increasingly inevitable and irreversible. They simply don't seem to take the danger seriously. It's an old story and a discouraging one: Left or right, when it comes to cutting greenhouse gas emissions politicians talk big, but they do small.