Cuba Is Not a Country, It’s a Madhouse
HAVANA TIMES – This lapidary phrase was uttered by a friend, completely shaken by the recent disruption of blackouts.
“My wife and I have been on the verge of separating. She feels like she’s going mad, and me! How much longer? How far will this go? What is all this about? I’m beginning to believe those conspiracy theorists who talk about social experiments on groups, exposing them to extreme situations and studying their reactions… Look, I don’t know what to believe anymore.”
He looked defeated. And I thought: of course, it’s easier to fight against a dragon, like in those ancient legends that glorified a warrior’s courage. But how do you fight against an invisible enemy, even when all you’re trying to do is be a decent person, protect your family?
They call it UNE, the entity in charge of cutting and restoring electricity in Cuba. Some months ago, one could rely on the weekly schedule published on social media. Every blackout is bothersome and ruins plans, but at least if you know the dose of forced absence of electricity, you can organize yourself. And move forward even in fits and starts, even if it’s not the life you dreamed of.
But what do you do if you don’t even have gas to cook, and the blackout comes unexpectedly, leaving food half-cooked? Ah, rice—once its cooking is interrupted, there’s no way to fix it afterward. And with how expensive the most prized cereal has become—the irreplaceable base of Cuban food… 260 pesos per pound at the very least, if you want rice that grows and doesn’t turn into a sticky lump.
Anyone who wants to understand the reality of ordinary Cubans need only look at the anxiety of people in the marketplaces, trying to stretch their money to put food on the table.
But now, on top of years of shortages and ever-rising prices, we have these chaotic, disordered blackouts.
They call them “emergency blackouts,” and they can strike anywhere, at any time.
“It’s a war of nerves,” a woman tells a kiosk vendor. “I’ve had to start taking clonazepam again, only because my daughter managed to get it ‘on the side’ (illegally), and at a crazy price.”
The afternoon begins to fade, and with the diminishing daylight, the interiors of homes sink into gloom.
Then an oppressive melancholy falls over the city.
The clouds of mosquitoes and gnats arrive.
And this deafening silence beats at the heart and memory, as if dragging along, in a rush, all the crises of the past.
“I can’t take it anymore,” a neighbor tells me as I bump into him coming out of the market. “Something has to happen because this is unbearable…”
I tell him yes, to have faith, that in my experience, when you feel this extreme fatigue, this “I can’t take it anymore,” it means change is coming—even if it’s just a personal one, and not collective.
I myself have resolved to retreat into the deep alleys of imagination, into whatever helps endure these new forms of adversity—like making a list of everything I can do without electricity, before daylight vanishes. Because, after four hours or more in darkness, the rechargeable lamp dims so much that it’s useless for reading, sewing, or other crafts.
At least I can write on my phone if I turn off data, so the battery lasts longer. Anyway, lately the blackouts cover several blocks (whole user communities), and the internet connection disappears completely.
When I was a child in the 1970s, during blackouts we used kerosene lamps to light our way. We called them “la chismosa” (the gossip), and I remember we’d gather around it. Jokes were told, family anecdotes shared, and I would usually sing. My mother always asked me for a Jose Augusto song, a sad one about lost love… There was no guitar or instrument to accompany the voice, and the tiny audience wasn’t demanding.
And so, in this involuntary retrospective, I realize that blackouts are as familiar in my life as overcrowded buses, or those endless waits at bus stops if you missed the last bus before midnight and had to wait hours until the early morning. That forced vigil when all your body longed for was to collapse into the safety of a bed, while you clung to hope in any flicker of light in the distance.
Blackouts, like lines and this sensation of endless waiting, are here to stay. Every generation born after 1959 knows them all too well, and the bitter experience has exhausted the resource of venting through jokes or memes.
I return from the market thinking about the little natural light left, and how no one knows how long today’s blackout will last—and on top of that will come the “on and off” until power is stably restored, at least until it’s cut again in the middle of the night.
I remember a Chilean friend who once described the horror he felt walking through the city at soap opera time, hearing the same voices repeated in every home, like a sinister hypnosis. “Everyone tuned in to the melodrama of the moment, consuming the same aesthetic standards, the same banal message, in a kind of induced self-forgetfulness. Without social or existential questioning. The pill of mediocrity,” he said.
And now, thinking about the silence that will repeat itself at that hour, house after house, I wonder if this forced abstinence from television might not be worse. Who knows what each person will choose to escape, to achieve some small dose of self-forgetfulness.