Cuba Is a Country in a State of Hibernation

By Veronica Vega

HAVANA TIMES – Lately, it’s common for the end of the day to coincide with a blackout. As natural light fades and invisibility grows, the sadness hanging in the air becomes oppressive. In each building there are only a few windows still visibly lit—those of neighbors who’ve managed to get rechargeable lamps, electric generators, or other devices to compensate for the state’s electricity shortages.

The rest of the windows and balconies remain dark, and their occupants grow accustomed to finding their way through the gloom—to enduring a darkness that, it seems, has arrived with the intention of staying.

As if it were a ghost town, everything suddenly looks dead.

I cross a street, and right on the corner there’s a private kiosk selling basic foods and sweets.

It’s the only one that stays open after nightfall, blackout or not. People flock to it like an oasis in the middle of the desert. When they haven’t yet turned on their most powerful lamp, the customers themselves help keep the sales going by lighting the place with their mobile phones. It’s a strange situation, like the solidarity that emerges during catastrophes.

Nothing there is cheap—just like in all the other kiosks and private businesses. But it’s a relief to have a place where you can buy a packet of spaghetti if you suddenly realize you’ve run out of rice and all the stores are already closed.

A few meters away, a cart loaded with produce is parked. The vendors are in the dark, but if a potential customer approaches, a light appears immediately, even if it comes from a match.

Watching all this, I always have the feeling that we are in a state of war, a war in which no bombs were dropped, or in which they exploded while we were unconscious.

The destroyed houses are there. The broken streets. The withered people, some affected by the arbovirus of the moment: chikungunya. They look tired, even disoriented, without that quickness that comes from a free-flowing life—dreams, plans, possibilities.

There is a dense silence, and despite the silhouettes moving around—far fewer than you’d expect for this normally busy hour—one could believe the world has ended, that we are in a dystopian reality and the only survivors.

And when that thought sinks deeply enough and you begin to feel a suffocating anguish, suddenly the miracle happens: the electricity returns. Some people shout with excitement, and everything quickly begins to liven up.

More people come out of their homes; children’s voices can be heard, and a normality that seemed shattered begins to wake and stretch.

Nobody talks about the blackouts, as if they didn’t want to invoke the curse. Everyone makes the most of the time in which they can have a minimally functional domestic life.

And suddenly I understand that Cubans have found mechanisms of resistance and—just as in wars or cataclysms—they take refuge in their homes, enduring by reducing their expectations to the minimum, their needs to the minimum, saving their strength for when the moment comes to go out and reclaim their dreams.

When the time is right, when it’s possible, when their aspirations won’t be crushed in an instant.

They wait, with their ambition intact, because they sense that wars and catastrophes cannot last forever.

Read more from the diary of Veronica Vega here.