By Raquel Martori

HAVANA – The global recession is beginning to have an impact on the daily lives of already hard-pressed Cubans, who view with concern the calls for austerity that come from Gen. Raul Castro’s government.

Maria Elena, an accountant who works in a state-run firm, told Efe on Monday that several weeks ago the government began taking measures to reduce electricity consumption, with greater controls and cutbacks in the allotments of fuel.

Restaurant employee Norberto Sanchez said he prefers “to wait to see what happens.”

“I’m ready for what may come. In the end, for years we’ve been getting ready to survive in times of crisis,” he added.

Many Cubans fear that the worst years of the “special period” are returning, a euphemism for the acute crisis the country suffered after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, which had generously subsidized the communist regime in Havana.

Susana, 51, a professional worker who retired due to ill health, said that that period was “very hard” for her, adding that now she does not have “the same energy to confront a similar situation.”

“I remember the bitter experience of the scarcity and the long blackouts,” she added.

The Cuban economy worsened over the past year with three hurricanes that caused losses of $10 billion, the rise in prices of imports, the fall in exports and the reduction in revenues from tourism and remittances.

The government announced “exceptional measures” to be implemented on June 1 to save fuel, with an eye toward avoiding a new program of blackouts.

Economy and Planning Minister Marino Murillo warned that the economic growth of 6 percent that the government had expected for 2009 “will not be achieved,” saying that now Havana is only expecting around 2.5 percent growth.

Murillo also said that “there will be restrictions on consumption” because of the crisis, although he said that “nobody is going to remain vulnerable.”

Opposition economist Oscar Espinosa Chepe says that the symptoms of economic deterioration have been noted for months, due to the roughly two decades of the “special period” and the three recent hurricanes.

He added that the world crisis was hitting a country “submerged in a decades-long crisis and punished by natural phenomena.”

Gisela Delgado, with the opposition group Agenda for the Transition, told Efe that “it’s clear that in Cuba there has been an economic crisis for some time.”

“Calling on people ... for awareness about electricity consumption is due to the fact that there’s no money to buy petroleum,” she added.

“A while ago, one could see the scarcity of products even in the hard-currency stores and in the agricultural markets the products have gotten more expensive,” she said, going on to predict that in the coming months there will be “great shortages for the public and there will be other measures that they will have to take so that chaos doesn’t result.”

Cuba uses two currencies: the ordinary peso, worth less than 4 cents, and the convertible peso, or CUC, which is equivalent to $1.08. While salaries are paid in ordinary pesos, hard-currency stores accept only the CUC. EFE