Cuba in the Mirror: The Crisis in the Soul of Generations
HAVANA TIMES – Havana at noon smells of salt, gasoline, and exhaustion. In the shade of a Vedado portico, Mariela, a 34-year-old teacher, unfolds a shopping list that looks like a puzzle. “What I managed to get today won’t even last until tomorrow,” she says. Her hands tremble slightly as she folds the paper again. It’s not because of the heat; it’s the uncertainty that has become part of everyday life.
That uncertainty also wears the face of a child asking if there will be milk tomorrow; of a young person mapping out a life project based on what they might obtain outside of Cuba; of an elderly man who remembers with nostalgia the feeling of having enough, even if it was little. Rafael, a 72-year-old retiree, sums up the situation in one simple and forceful phrase: “Before, even if it wasn’t much, life was predictable. Now this whole thing devours your dignity.”
The impact is not only material: it’s an emotional erosion that runs through homes, schools, and public squares. Teachers interviewed in different municipalities speak of children with trouble concentrating, teenagers swinging between anger and apathy, and parents who repeat, in weary voices, “we have to hold on.” In many households, conversations about emotional wellbeing have been reduced to whispers. Out on the street, silence tell stories that people don’t dare to say aloud.
That absence of speech feeds what could be called a “social blindness”: a collective inability to see and acknowledge emotional suffering while urgent material needs take center stage. People tend to the lines, the medicines, the food supply—but rarely look beyond the surface. When psychological pain goes unnamed, it becomes normalized; when it’s normalized, it becomes chronic.
Different generations respond in different ways. For older people, the crisis brings losses of security, habits, and certainties, so they anchor their memories to a past that felt manageable. For the young, the crisis is a threshold: many extinguish their projects, and others escape—physically or through apathy. Between them lies an abyss measured not only in income or access, but in the capacity to imagine a shared future.
Anecdotes say it all. In a neighborhood of Centro Habana, a single mother admits she stopped taking her son to music classes because she can’t guarantee him a daily snack; she prefers that school time be “a guaranteed meal.” In a medical consultation, a nurse describes an increase in psychosomatic symptoms: insomnia, tachycardia, unexplained pains in patients who had never shown signs of anxiety before the crisis. Short stories, multiplied, make up the emotional map of the nation.
What is at stake goes beyond scarcity: it’s the emotional memory of an entire society, the trust between generations, the ability to dream and project oneself into the future. The crisis not only depletes resources; it also erodes hope, leaving invisible scars and silently, but deeply, shaping the way Cubans feel, live, and relate to one another. Faced with this, the country confronts not only material hardship, but an emptiness that threatens to define, in a lasting way, the emotional experience of entire generations.
Read more from the diary of Safie M. Gonzalez here on Havana Times.