Master confectioner José Brooks Masó, a skillful emergency baker, looks "melted". Tiredness and sleep for several hours at dawn cost him the bills at the emblematic El Progreso bakery-candy shop, where he works at the head of a septet of workers in the production of seven thousand loaves, 80 grams each, for the basic basket.
Erelis Rojas Vázquez, administrator of this center ideally destined for special productions of bread and sweets, and his other workers, could be just as "burned out" by the circumstance, since they have had to reconvert and guarantee another nine thousand loaves of bread in a continuous shift. regulated for the population.
El Progreso is in the center of the city of Guantánamo, and had to assume what other bakeries of Popular Councils where the lack of electricity service is frequent.
Miguel Ángel Vichí Llanfly is another of those “chicharrados” to turn on the daily light of bread. A teacher at the also central and well-known El Cisne Blanco bakery, points out: "We have two shifts, of 5,880 loaves each, for the population of the Center-South and the Ho Chi Minh district, which we take over from other bakeries, apart from other productions for public health centers”.
The Center has priority in relation to other circuits in the availability of electrical energy. And the country's energy contingency forces the Food Business Unit (UEB) of the municipality of Guantánamo to assume a strategy that makes better use of its installed capacities, to guarantee, despite the various difficulties, the production of "our bread from each day".
In fact, the UEB attached to the provincial company of the Food Industry has to provide daily more than 16 thousand loaves of 80 grams for the consumers of the supply books of the city and surrounding neighborhoods, among other priorities.
Exposing it, Rubiel Fernando Sánchez Romero, director of the UEB Alimentaria Guantánamo, explains that, of its 26 bakeries, only 11 have generator sets, they are distributed in all the Popular Councils.
According to sources from the provincial entity, in the entire Guantanamo territory only 62 establishments, among the 96 existing ones, have generators, also limited by fuel and eventual breakages.
“When power outages last for more than five hours -explains Sánchez Romero- they interrupt the process at some stage and damage the material with which the first bread is made. Hence the applied strategy of transferring raw materials and workshops to bakeries with more electricity service coverage, including those with energy autonomy, although these teams must be given periodic rest and combine their generation with the moments of network service”, warns.
The delivery of the operators stands out, as they must alternate work shifts in the units and hours in which this has been concentrated, with which they are avoiding damages and the production process is stabilized, in order to be able to deliver the product to the population, although alter schedules.
By “fighting” the difficulties due to the energy contingency in this way, bakers also avoid losses of raw material or having to reprocess it due to interruptions, events that usually have a direct impact on the quality of the bread in different ways.
Since the beginning of the month, the municipal government checks the situation daily in the early hours of the morning, verification transferred to alternate days in the event of a relative improvement in the situation. Together with other organizational procedures, people like the ones mentioned above manage with their hands in the bakeries to keep the daily light of bread burning in Guantánamo.
Written by Victor Hugo Puron Fonseca
Taken from the Newspaper Venceremos