Between the first and second nationwide blackouts that Cuba suffered in July, I was in line behind two psychologists wearing white medical coats and openly discussing their patients.
“I don’t worry about the people who say they are stressed out,” one said to the other psychologist in the line to buy food that’s trucked in weekly from the countryside. “It’s the people who say they are fine. There is something really the matter with them.”
Cuba’s energy grid failed again on Tuesday, for a third time this month, plunging nearly 10 million Cubans into darkness and further uncertainty. Anxiety over the future is hitting an all time high here.
As the communist-run island’s economy unravels and the Trump administration piles on with ever punishing sanctions , the Cuban revolution would seem to be drawing its final breath.
But if there is anything I have learned in nearly 15 years of living in Havana it is how much Cubans can endure and how effective the government is at maintaining control.
Never easy, life for most Cubans has become excruciatingly hard. Power, water and fuel are increasingly precious luxuries which you are lucky to have any of these days and positively greedy to expect to have all three at the same time.
After the second nationwide blackout on Friday, my neighborhood in Havana went 36 hours without power. Finally, at 4 a.m. local time on Sunday, I was awakened by lights from the house next door which were lit up like Christmas-eve. I could see my neighbors in the sudden illumination rushing around in the middle of the night doing all the washing and cooking and charging they could with the precious few hours of electricity.
The next morning, once again in a blackout, I chatted with my neighbor Jorge, who is helping me and several people on our block turn our small patches of grass in front of our homes into vegetable gardens to comply with a quixotic government mandate for people to grow their own food,
He was overjoyed with our brief return to the 20th century.
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“We had four hours of uninterrupted power,” he said, “When was the last time that happened?”
The uncertainty is playing tricks with all our minds. No one knows when the power will go off and for how long. Sometimes the electricity comes back after an all-day blackout but then in a fleeting few minutes it clicks off again, and the whole neighborhood lets out a collective, audible groan . Everyone I know seems exhausted.
The government here maintains a WhatsApp channel to update residents on exactly how long they have been without power. It is no longer uncommon to see blackouts that stretch past 30 hours. If you get electricity for even a few minutes, the count resets to zero. Realizing they are being had, Cubans respond to their government on the chat with emojis of excrement or the US flag.
Some have taken to banging pots and pans late at night, but there are still no organized protests in a country where the government regards dissent as thinly veiled treason.
Increasingly Cubans realize they are living a climactic moment in their island’s roller coaster history, and there may be more jolts to come.
Each morning on Cuban state TV, a presenter who clearly has the worst job on the island, is tasked with forecasting the daily power deficit in the same way the local news in other countries reports the weather or traffic. With the hotter summer months now upon Cubans and more energy required to counter those scorching temperatures, that shortfall is worsening.
“The solutions for Cuba’s energy crisis now can longer come from within Cuba, they have to come from outside,” Jorge Piñon, a senior energy researcher with the University of Texas in Austin, told CNN.
Beyond the blockade the Trump administration has placed on oil shipments, Cuba’s energy sector is crippled by a lack of state investment in its antiquated power plants over several decades to which there’s no easy fix, according to Piñon.
“Cuba produces enough oil on its own,” Piñon said. “But at any moment, half of the thermoelectric plants are down for maintenance.”
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There is no sign that help is on the way. The US seizure of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro cost Cuba a key ally with the largest oil reserves in the world. Russia is increasingly embroiled in its war with Ukraine and not able to send more aid to an island that already owes their former Cold War patron billions of dollars. Mexico, so far, is heeding Trump administration threats to not dispatch any oil shipments out of fear of US economic sanctions.
The Trump administration says the pressure campaign is designed to hit high-ranking government officials, not regular Cubans.
But there is little sign those at the top are being forced to tighten their belts.
In a July interview with USA Today , Raul Guillermo Rodriguez Castro, the grandson and chief of security of former Cuban President Raul Castro, showed off a gold chain, luxury brands and access to a Jet Set life unimaginable to the majority of Cubans.
Castro, who has been identified by Cuba as the island’s interlocutor in ongoing talks with the Trump administration despite not holding a high-ranking position in government, lamented that most Cubans do not share the perks that come with his lineage.
Cubans I know were scandalized by the brazen remarks at a time when their already tenuous standard of living is plummeting
“It’s like they don’t how we live, how our salaries every day are closer to being worthless,” a Cuban friend named Homero told me recently over lunch. Conscious of how little Homero made in his state job, I invited him to the simplest restaurant I could think of.
But as we looked at our menus, Homero let out a loud sigh, and I realized how badly I had failed to put him at ease. Every plate of food on the menu, he told me, costs more than he now earned each month.
