To say that Cuba has had a trying week would be an understatement. After a grid failure last Friday caused four days of nationwide blackouts, and a Category One hurricane smashed into the eastern province of Guantanamo on Monday, killing seven, the lights are back on most of the time and things have steadied on the island.
Nilza Valdés Núñez, sixty-one, from Guanabacoa, East Havana, feels a bit of a relief. I spoke to her on Monday, the day after her eighty-one-year-old mother cooked all the defrosting meat in their freezer that her brother in Florida had bought for them.
“The lack of electricity, of gas, and all the other problems we have here,” said, pausing with tears in her eyes but fury in her voice, “make you feel so bad.”
At a time when over a million Cuban homes are already going without running water, the power cuts compounded the problem by disabling pumps. People carried water to their houses in buckets from nearby cisterns and wells.
Before the blackouts, the street price of a bag of ten bread rolls in her neighborhood was about 50 cents (150 pesos). In their aftermath, it shot up to nearly a dollar (280 pesos).
Once all but vanquished, hunger has returned in Cuba in recent years, as state guaranteed food rations have been cut. With scarce food spoiled and prices rising this last week, some who rely on state salaries or pensions and don’t have relatives to help them out from abroad are now feeling the pinch as much as people were in the Special Period following the Soviet Union’s collapse.
At the same time, the country’s resilience is striking. Massive outages like this would terrify people in other countries, but many I met took them calmly and even with nonchalance.
Playing on her phone in old Havana, next to a…
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Auteur: Ed Augustin
