Energy Cafe: Saving energy, saving the Revolution: Energy efficiency and revolutionary ethics in the Cuban transition

Dr Gustav Cederlöf

School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg, Sweden

In the pursuit of socialism, Cuba become one of Latin America’s most oil-dependent economies. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the country lost 86 percent of its crude oil supplies. In the face of this shock, Cuba started to develop a low-carbon economy based on economic and social reform rather than high-tech innovation. In this talk, Gustav Cederlöf introduces his new book, The Low-Carbon Contradiction (UC Press, 2023), to argue that energy efficiency – simultaneously a thermodynamic, economic, and cultural phenomenon – plays a key role for our understanding of Cuba’s period of low-carbon transition, a period that some have called “a real-life experience of degrowth”.