In the Santo Domingo neighborhood of El Manguito, only 30 out of 2000 residents used to pay for their electricity. However, the new pre-payment system has changed the attitude of the people who live between Winston Churchill and Abraham Lincoln avenues. Six hundred families already have the new pay-as-you-go meters and they can receive electricity 24 hours a day. Before this, the barrio only received between four and six hours of electricity a day since nobody paid for it, as reported in Hoy.
In response, the CDEEE and EdeSur decided to launch a social experiment with the pay-as-you-go meters and it is proving a success. In the local corner stores, electricity can be purchased.
Flavio Guillen, 29, said that he was one of the first to install the prepaid service: “Before we never paid, but we never had any electricity. Now we buy the electricity we need and do not depend on other people to read a meter.” He spends about US$13 a month on the service. El Manguito was selected by the CDEEE for the experiment because it lost 99% of all the electricity that was sent to the barrio. Now the streets are busy with teams installing the new meters and fixing up the electric power lines in the area.