A state car with a loudspeaker slowly travels through the El Vélez neighborhood. Warn the neighbors that if they do not have electricity it is because of the blockade that the United States maintains against Cuba. Nobody believes them. They’ve heard the same thing before. They turn their backs. It is four in the afternoon on Saturday in the province of Pinar del Río, in the west of the island, and the people have haggard, tired and haggard faces, like a decimated troop, like a troubled choir, like the characters of the setfrom the end of the world movie. Few have gone to work.
No children are in school, but neither are they running around the streets. Some adults balance on the armchairs in the porches of their homes. There is a sun that burns and a silence that crushes. Luckily there is some air, which relieves the desperate and sticky heat of the tropics. Since Friday, the country has been left completely in darkness due to the collapse of its main thermoelectric plant, but people, unlike other blackouts, are strange, much more solemn, and they will be if the light even arrives, if the light bulbs in their homes They come on suddenly if the fan starts up. They agree that this is not just another blackout.
In the El Vélez neighborhood, where everything seems very sad, people have taken their charcoal stoves out to the patio or street. The nearby pediatric hospital is almost collapsed, with children sleeping on makeshift beds along the hallways. There is hardly any water and they say that the hospital floor is only intended for the onco-hematology, intensive care and progressive care rooms. About three cases of children between two and three years old have arrived urgently, who drank oil from the knob that their parents use to cook when there is no light, or to light the homemade lamps that make their way in the depths of a blackout.
A Cuban from Spain writes on his Facebook profile that he has not heard from his mother for almost two days. Someone responds that they don’t know about theirs either, who are 88 and 93 years old.
On Thursday night, people were heard in Havana’s Vedado protesting with cauldrons in the middle of the darkness. The blackout is probably the moment that most emboldens Cubans. Being able to hide in the anonymity that the lack of light brings, so that the political police cannot later put a face and name to the protest, Cubans in recent times have taken advantage of the blackout to take to the streets. There are few things that bother them as much as the lack of light. It seems like they are used to it, but the truth is that no one adapts to the drops of sweat running down their foreheads, the wave of mosquitoes like beasts, the little food rotting in the refrigerator, the crumpled children’s uniforms, the fan of cardboard to breathe air into the baby who won’t fall asleep and won’t stop screaming.
On Revolico, a Cuban classified ads site, the sale of power plants for prices between $500 and $2,000 has exploded like never before, which Donaidis, no matter how much he wanted to, cannot buy. In their neighborhood in Alquízar, at least two neighbors have plants that their relatives in the United States have sent through the Cubamax or Cuballama parcel services, or some of the many shipping agencies to Cuba that flourish in South Florida. On blackout days, Cuba is divided between those who have a power plant and those who do not, between those who sleep with rechargeable fans or those who barely sleep, between those whose flashlight lasts or those who light an alcohol lighter. The blackout becomes a question of class and survival. But what happens with a massive one, with a blackout that accumulates as many hours as the one that began on October 18, is that, at some point, it equals all Cubans. There is a time when the battery of the fan, the light of the rechargeable lamp or the oil with which the power plants run will run out and everyone will occupy the status of doom, tiredness and stubbornness.
Donaidis, who has been without electricity for almost 30 hours, lost the milk his seven-month-old baby drinks. He says he has rage; More than heat, more than desire for a glass of cold water, he feels rage. He says that in the town the Government forced several people to stand guard at the Party headquarters and other institutions that could be meeting points for a protest.
The power reached Eliannis’ house, in San Miguel del Padrón, in Havana, but not his neighbor’s, which is just two blocks away. The neighbor connected an extension from his house to his and so he could eat and sleep. In Matanzas some families are emptying their refrigerators to prevent food from rotting, making gigantic soups, cooking for the neighborhood. At the Presidente Hotel in Havana they are allowing neighbors to recharge their cell phones so they can respond to desperate messages from their relatives who want to know if, in the midst of all the disaster, they are okay.
Nobody knows what is going to happen. The authorities also announce the reestablishment of a thermoelectric plant, the arrival of electricity in a municipality or hospital, which reports the breakage of other circuits. The light arrives, when it arrives, in dribs and drabs. The leaders have asked for trust and patience, but Cubans barely have either one or the other.
At times it does not seem that what is happening in Cuba is a blackout, another blackout of electricity. There is a feeling that this is a different blackout, darker, more desolate. Not like the one from a week ago or the one from two years ago, but the great blackout that has resulted from the accumulation of all the previous ones. The evidence of a collapsed country, a country that cries out to be turned on once and for all. Among all, one phrase has become popular among some Cubans in the last long hours in the dark: the night will not be eternal.
Subscribe here to the newsletterTHE COUNTRY America and receive all the key information on current events in the region.