Oil dependence and the Cuban example

When it (Carless Day) stole the headlines recently, I thought it was a way for people to get even with the oil companies which, by the way after an audit by the Energy Regulatory Commission, are said to be raking in profits like crazy or around 70 billion pesos in combined profits just last year alone. The move may prove to be just only a dent but for whatever its worth, it's clear that we consumers are getting back at them and that our message to the oil interests is that to at least "moderate their greed" in these hard times.

Dependency is what feeds the oil interest. This dependency has long been abused and exploited to such an extreme that they spend a lot in advertising to convince us the impractical side of driving. That arriving in style is more important than just getting there; that guzzling your cars with their high sounding additives make the driving experience a lot like Formula One. And we pay for giving in to such grandiloquent advertising. And every time we step on the gas in our cars, we step up their profits and stepping up, too, the carbon emissions in the atmosphere.

Yet, these oil companies never return anything for the tyranny of forced loyalty that motorists and passengers have to render every single day of their driving or commuting life nor does guilt exist in them for having a lot to do with the climate change everywhere. We have become an unwitting slave to serve and preserve their wealth to the fullest extent that we forget to preserve even our very own domain.

I have written sometime ago about Cuba, albeit, I cannot say if Cuba is the only country today that is immune to the spiraling gas prices. But one thing is clear…Cuba does not suffer as much as we do or like many developing nations now. For such a very small, poor and economically isolated country in the Caribbean, Cuba is perhaps the only country that lives up to the definition of what people power truly is in essence.

Cuba didn't campaign for a carless day when the Russians stopped buying their sugar for oil in the nineties. In the first place, there weren't so many cars there anyway. Cuba's dependence on oil from Russia was to keep their tractors going and to ferry passengers to work in public transports. And buying oil from a close and hostile neighbor (US) wasn't a good idea.

Overnight, Cuba was a disaster. Cars conk out in the middle of the street (even Fidel Castro's jeep was no exception), workers foot their way to factories, power outages and farm contraptions idling in the countrysides were a usual sight for almost a decade. But those unhappy moments never stopped Cuba from standing up to what it is today. Cubans learned to care about themselves and others. They traded their cars for bikes while some kept their cars to pick strangers. Government vehicles were mandated to carry passengers whether government or private employees.

Perhaps the most deciding event in Cuba's recent history was when it aggressively abandoned its policy on petroleum dependence for agriculture and energy. Cuba is now using organic fertilizer and natural pesticides to drive agriculture. Since the early 1990s, an urban agriculture movement has swept through Cuba, putting this capital city of 2.2 million on a path toward its present day sustainability. Thus, no Cuban child or an elderly is ever hungry in Cuba today no matter how poor a household is.  

Schools are powered by solar energy while factories churn using natural energies. Vehicles running around in Cuba have been rationalized for emergencies, government services, tourism and health care and ferrying commuters thus amending the Oil Deregulation Law does not make us any better nor scrapping the same would make gas prices any less affordable in the future. I would rather wish that we enact a comprehensive policy to reduce our petroleum dependence by half in the near term. Such decisive step would tell oil companies that we can live without them just like what Cuba did. 

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