Postcard from a dark Cuba

A government car with a loudspeaker drives slowly through the El Vélez neighborhood. Warn neighbors that if they do not have electricity it is due to the blockade imposed by the United States against Cuba. Nobody believes in them. He has heard the same thing before. They turn away. It’s four o’clock in the afternoon on a Saturday in Pinar del Río province, in the west of the island, and the people’s faces are haggard, tired and haggard, like a decapitated army, like a troubled choir, like characters. set From the end of the world movie. Some people have gone to work.

None of the kids are in school, but neither are they running around on the streets. Some adults balance on chairs in the verandahs of their homes. There is a sun that burns and a silence that crushes. Luckily there is some breeze, which provides relief from the frustrating and sticky heat of the tropics. Since Friday, the country has been left in complete darkness due to the collapse of its main thermoelectric plant, but people, unlike other blackouts, are strange, much more severe, and they will be there even when the lights come on, if the light bulbs. They will get jealous and suddenly they come when the fan is on in their house. They agree that this is not just another blackout.

In the El Vélez neighborhood, where everything seems so sad, people have taken their coal stoves to the patio or to the street. The nearby pediatric hospital has almost collapsed, children sleep on makeshift beds along the corridors. There is hardly any water and they say the hospital floor is only for onco-haematology, intensive care and progressive care rooms. About three cases have immediately been reported of children between two and three years of age who drank oil from the knob which their parents used to cook food when there was no light, or to light a homemade lamp. Who make their way in the depths of darkness.

A Cuban man from Spain writes on his Facebook profile that he has not heard anything from his mother for almost two days. Someone answers that their whereabouts are also unknown, those who are 88 and 93 years old.

On Thursday night, people were heard protesting with frying pans in the darkness in Vedado, Havana. The blackout is probably the moment that excites Cubans the most. Being able to hide in anonymity due to the lack of light, so that the political police cannot later give a face and name to the protests, Cubans have taken advantage of the blackouts in recent days to take to the streets. There are few things that bother them as much as lack of light. It seems as if they have got used to it, but the truth is that no one gets used to the drops of sweat running from their forehead, the wave of mosquitoes like animals, the small food rotting in the refrigerator, the torn uniforms of children, the fan. Adopts. Cardboard to wind up the baby, who won’t sleep and won’t stop screaming.

On the Cuban classified advertising site Rivolico, there has been an explosion of sales like never before for power plants at prices between $500 and $2,000, which Donadis can’t buy, no matter how much he wants to. In their neighborhood in Alquizar, at least two neighbors have plants that their relatives in the United States have sent to Cuba via CubaMax or Cubalama parcel services, or some of the many shipping agencies that thrive in South Florida. -Flowers. On days of blackout, Cuba is divided between those who have a power plant and those who do not, between those who sleep with a rechargeable fan or those who barely sleep, between those who have a moving flashlight. Or those who light alcohol lighters. The blackout becomes a question of class and survival. But what happens with a massive blackout, which accumulates for an equal number of hours as the blackout that began on October 18, is that, at some point, it equals all Cubans. There will come a time when the battery of the fan, the light of a rechargeable lamp or the oil that runs the power plants will be exhausted and everyone will be in a state of ruin, fatigue and obstinacy.

Donadis, who was without electricity for about 30 hours, lost her seven-month-old baby who stopped breastfeeding. He says he is angry; More than the heat, the desire for a glass of cold water makes him angry. He says that in the city the government forced many people to stand guard at the party headquarters and other institutions that could have been meeting places for protests.

Power reached Elianis’ home in San Miguel del Padrón in Havana, but not his neighbor’s home just two blocks away. The neighbor added an extension to his house so he could eat and sleep. Some families in Matanzas are emptying their refrigerators, making giant soups, cooking for the neighborhood to keep food from rotting. At Havana’s Presidente Hotel they are allowing neighbors to recharge their cell phones so they can respond to desperate messages from relatives who want to know if, amid all the disaster, they are OK.

Nobody knows what is going to happen. Officials also announce the restoration of a thermoelectric plant, the arrival of electricity in a municipality or hospital, reporting breakdowns of other circuits. Light comes, when it comes, drop by drop. Leaders have called for trust and patience, but Cubans barely have one or the other.

Sometimes it doesn’t seem like what’s happening in Cuba is a blackout, it’s just another blackout of electricity. It feels like this is a different darkness, darker, more desolate. Not like the one a week ago or the one two years ago, but the great blackout that resulted from the accumulation of all the previous ones. Evidence of a broken country, a country that screams to be turned around once and for all. Amidst all this, those last long hours in the dark, a phrase has become popular among some Cubans: The night will not be eternal.

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