By Antonio Martinez

HAVANA – Cuba will have a very hot summer both in climate and politics, along with uncertainty and shortages, judging by what the island’s government, the state-run press, the internal dissidents, alternative bloggers, foreign diplomats and businessmen in Havana are saying.

“We expect an uncertain summer, where electrical outages will be announced, price rises and during which a migration stampede is being predicted,” said the most well-known blogger on the island, Yoani Sanchez.

“Nobody should be over-confident. During July and August the temperature will continue rising and with it consumption,” utility executive Ricardo Gonzalez told Communist Party daily Granma after announcing that restrictions in the state sector had avoided, for now, any generalized power blackouts.

He referred to the energy restrictions decreed by the government whereby businesses and state-run entities – who have been accused of wasting power by the same regime that manages them – must adhere to plans to conserve resources due to the lack of state liquidity.

The government reduced from 6 percent to 2.5 percent its forecast for economic growth in 2009.

Not a day goes by without the official media predicting years of shortages blamed on the global financial crisis and the U.S. trade embargo, avoiding any discussion of the fact that the island has been living with chronic shortages since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

“Savings” is the most-repeated slogan in the only communist regime in the Americas, which has been headed for the past 16 months by Gen. Raul Castro after he replaced ailing older brother Fidel, who had governed the island for more than 49 years.

Almost a year ago, after sparking expectations of reforms and confessing that in Cuba there are too many prohibitions, Raul, 78, asked his countrymen not to get accustomed to receiving only good news and painted a gloomy world panorama that also impacted the island.

He made those remarks in the eastern city of Santiago on the 55th anniversary of the start of the revolution that brought Fidel Castro to power in 1959.

Many now see Raul’s July 2008 speech as marking the end of the reformist attempts that leaders of some countries were using as an excuse to give another chance to a government that promised changes that still have not come to pass, according to what the majority of the diplomats, businessmen and analysts consulted in the Cuban capital said.

Observers recognize the existence of some Cuban social rights like universal access to health care and education – but services in both those sectors have deteriorated due to the lack of money – and also certain successes the regime has had in international relations, but nothing is improving in the area of civil rights and individual freedoms.

The normalization of relations with the European Union and Latin America is cited as one of Havana’s greatest recent achievements, and the regime has seen a new U.S. president, Barack Obama, take some tentative steps to ease certain restrictions imposed on Cuba, perhaps even the embargo as a whole, since 1962.

Some observers say that Raul Castro’s reforms were sunk by the global financial crisis and three hurricanes that caused losses of some $10 billion in 2008.

Others note that although 82-year-old Fidel turned over the presidency to his brother, he still is not allowing the dogma he has touted for years to be overwhelmed by the so-called pragmatism of the island’s new president.

“Even the government is acknowledging the impacts of the world crisis on a society that has not overcome the ravages caused by the loss of subsidies from the Soviet bloc,” says economic Oscar Espinosa, one of the 75 opposition figures imprisoned during the “Black Spring” of 2003, who was since paroled on medical grounds.

“In Cuba, the summers are always hot and I’m not talking about the thermometer,” a veteran diplomat told Efe, but he went on to say: “I’m not telling you that this year anything’s going to happen.”

On the streets of Havana, the discontent is palpable regarding the restrictions on energy consumption, the curtailment of bus routes and schedules and reductions in the products subsidized in the rationing books, including beans and salt.

Economy and Planning Minister Marino Murillo said in euphemistic Cuban language that the crisis “has complicated the obtaining of ... (low) prices and credit sources,” but “nobody is going to be unprotected.”

“Less rice, less of everything,” translated a Cuban man-on-the-street. EFE