“We sometimes pay the bill, but then they usually end up charging us for electricity we’ve not used, so then we go on strike,” says Ms Miranda, a scrum of three children lurking round her feet waiting for supper.

At the other end of the social spectrum, in Santo Domingo’s chic hotels, guests are also plunged into darkness at least twice a day, if only for a few minutes before diesel generators in the basement crank up.

Recurrent power failures are a fact of life in the Dominican Republic. Ms Miranda and millions like her suffer 2,000 hours on average per year without electricity – almost one-quarter of the year.

That’s about 1,300 times more than in the US, where blackouts occur on average for only 90 minutes per year, and 10 times worse than elsewhere in Latin America, where the power is cut for 200 hours per year.
The Dominican Republic’s abysmal power situation is a big irritation for the poor and shopkeepers, a significant financial challenge for businesses, and a huge headache for the authorities.

But it is a vicious circle. Generating companies have ample installed capacity but stop supplies to distributors when they default. The distributors cannot then pay because they cannot collect payment from consumers, and consumers refuse to pay because the supply is erratic, or they do not have money either.

Tito Sanjurjo, general manager at EGE Haina, which can generate up to 650MW, or about 20 per cent of the country’s 3,200MW of installed capacity, says his priorities are markedly different to those in other countries.

“Normally, if you’re a generator you want to see your customer use as much of your capacity as possible. The more they use the happier you are,” he explains. “Here our attitude is different. We actually have to ask them to cut back, because we want them only to take what they can pay for.”

Edenorte and Edesur, the country’s two largest distributors, which are state owned, have accumulated debts that render them technically bankrupt and unable regularly to pay the generators.

“Blackouts occur simply because the company doesn’t have the money to buy the power,” says Manuel Suárez, manager of Edenorte. The distributors’ debts, which total $400m, have worsened in spite of a continuous flow of government subsidies to the energy sector.

One of the causes, generating companies say, was that a “capitalisation”, or partial privatisation, programme under the first administration of President Leonel Fernández, in the late 1990s, was left incomplete.

“It led to overinvestment in the generating sector and underinvestment in distribution,” says Rolando González-Bunster, president of EGE Haina. “The situation then became aggravated by political meddling.”

Successive governments have found that keeping electricity subsidies in place is politically imperative. Yet it has had no lasting impact on improving the country’s dire power problems.

Vicente Bengoa, the finance minister, says the government poured 17.5bn pesos, or $530m, in subsidies into the electricity sector last year, about the same as the health ministry’s national budget.

Although the incidence of poverty in the Dominican Republic is on a par with other countries in the region, severe interruptions to the domestic power supply have fostered a culture of non-payment among consumers.

State-owned distributors collect, in some cases, no more than 40 per cent of the electricity they send to consumers, a ratio that is the lowest in Latin America.

Problems reached their nadir under former President Hipólito Mejía, who reversed reforms, froze tariffs and extended subsidies to heavy industry. The banking collapse and economic recession compounded the difficulties.

In 2003, Spain’s Unión Fenosa was forced to sell its 50 per cent stakes in Edenorte and Edesur to the government, while AES Dominicana sold its Ede-Este distributor to Trust Company of the West, an investment fund.

But with the economy once again growing and investor confidence returning, Mr Fernández is now turning to the power sector.

Mr Fernández has rolled back subsidies and the government is examining an option to introduce “floating” tariffs that would adjust automatically in line with world energy prices and the exchange rate, a recommendation made by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

“The first thing they did which improved the situation greatly was to set a tariff sufficiently high in dollar terms to reflect the real cost of generation,” says Mr González-Bunster.

Officials are also examining the possibility of importing cheap liquefied natural gas from Qatar. AES, the US power company, has constructed AES Andres, a modern LNG terminal and generation plant. About 84 per cent of generating capacity in the Dominican Republic is thermoelectric.

Another solution to the problem of non-payment and electricity theft, says Mr González-Bunster, would be to install pre-paid meters, a policy that has been highly successful in South Africa.

However, generators also say that the longer the power sector remains financially troubled, the more difficult it will be to fix because of structural changes that have taken root as users seek their own solutions.

Irregular supply has prompted businesses, factories and other high-end consumers – which would normally pay much higher electricity rates – to build their own generators and unplug from the national grid.

Such a phenomenon has been exacerbated by the expansion of the tourist industry. All-inclusive resorts on the coast have no hope of retaining visitors if the disco lights don’t work and food is cold.

Manuel Pérez Dubuc, president of AES Dominicana, which has invested $850m since 1997 and now has 20 per cent of the country’s generating capacity, says this shift has made matters worse for state distributors.

“The most important and biggest clients have built their own generating systems and their own distribution. They are isolated systems,” Mr Pérez says, insisting that the Dominican Republic needs to remember that, as well as operating as a business, a national electricity system has a social function.

“If you only have the poor as part of the system, your destiny is failure,” he says. “Like a pension fund, everyone should contribute.”