The Light Against Sadness
HAVANA TIMES – I have a lightbulb that sometimes flickers, and I still can’t bring myself to throw it out. A new one would cost 500 pesos. So I look for a spot in the house where I can tolerate intermittent lighting. That light they take from us and give back—it’s still indispensable.
I remember a scene from a United States TV series where a pharmacist refused to sell antipsychotics without a prescription to a woman who urgently needed them to manage her depression. He insisted that all she needed was to install stronger lightbulbs at home, because winter gloom draws out melancholy.
We Caribbeans tend to romanticize the dim light of other climates because here, it’s only seen on rainy days. For years, I myself tried to soften the violent brightness that floods my balcony every morning by hanging fabric curtains. Then those became my cats’ toys, and after many scratches and tugs, I ended up taking them down.
But now I understand that my mood feeds off this sun. Just as it licks everything it touches—fading the photos on the walls until they’re unrecognizable—it also dissolves every particle of sadness.
Sadness, which alters our perception and the contrast by which we see colors. Medical research has confirmed it: those who suffer from depressive disorders literally see the world in shades of gray.
I experienced it once, and just remembering it still paralyzes me. I had just broken up with my first boyfriend after a tumultuous four-year relationship. I was riding a bus through Vedado and looking out at the city: everything seemed gray, desolate, and in that emptiness I felt myself wavering, something had stripped reality of all meaning. It wasn’t like looking from above in the panoramic way of out-of-body experiences—I felt detached and excluded from everything that can make life enjoyable.
That’s why I understand what it means to fall into a mental abyss, where circumstances become magnified and any rational perspective is lost. It’s a chosen isolation that can be very dangerous.
Now, with so many people sharing what they know (and even what they don’t) on social media, I’ve seen more than one doctor emphasize that sunlight is the best cure for depression. That’s why seasonal affective disorder is common in cold countries, and its symptoms include depression, hopelessness, and social withdrawal.
Of course, Cuba has no shortage of sun—but what do we do about the nighttime blackouts, when the silence feels twice as heavy and the mosquitoes start to torment us? The same sun that overheats rooftops and walls retreats to illuminate some other part of the world. And we are left in darkness, alone with our thoughts and a bitter feeling of disillusionment.
Every Cuban generation has already experienced this moral defeat, attributing it to geographic misfortune, karma, the wrath of the gods, personal ineptitude… Everyone asks themselves why they didn’t leave earlier, to any corner of the world, even if it’s more melancholy. To make this island disappear from sight and memory.
To rip up every root and hope it takes hold somewhere else. It has to work. We were born in a waystation. We grew up feeding on uprootedness.
After all, who would want to identify with discomfort—with precarious comfort constantly being sabotaged?
Sometimes, in the middle of a blackout, the silence is broken by impatient voices, children crying. Sometimes a curse or angry shout cuts through the air like a knife.
I don’t know how mothers manage to contain the impatience, the restlessness, the lack of entertainment options. How they convince their children that life isn’t like what they see in movies or cartoons.
One night, when the power outage lasted much longer than scheduled, along with the familiar banging of pots and pans, children’s voices were heard shouting: “Turn on the lights!”
You don’t need to have a child in the house to understand their desperation.
Just half a block away, there’s a building that always stays lit during our misery because it’s on a different “emergency cut” schedule. And you wonder: how long will this go on, and why is everything rationed here? You’re always part of a program, on a list.
Like those toys they sold us in the 1970s—if your shopping turn didn’t fall on the first or second day, you missed out on the wonders you had coveted with your face pressed against the glass display case.
Those same kids, who now dream of freely available toys that most parents can’t afford, now envy the lights across the way, the hum of appliances, echoes of a domestic life that flows without interruptions.
Something that feels like such a basic right at this point in human history.
But now it’s starting to feel like a blurry, perhaps even improbable, reality… How can these generations grow up emotionally stable, if the only thing they know as permanent is uncertainty?
I had a friend who emigrated to Chile and came back to visit many years later. He was shocked by the blackouts he had already forgotten, and he told me, quite animated: “In Chile, if there’s a power outage, the next day the electric company shows up with gifts so you don’t sue them!”
I think about that comment all the time, because here, we don’t feel like customers of this essential service—even when we pay for it every month, and even if it’s expensive for the average salary.
Here, there’s never anyone to complain to, and it’s easy to fall into a delirium or psychotic episode when the electricity is cut and restored with no mercy on your electronic devices. It seems like it’s just another natural storm you have to wait out.
No matter how long the blackout lasts, mothers manage to quiet their children, they fall asleep, or they simply surrender to fate. And meanwhile, the darkness gains weight and substance, enveloping everything in a swell of sadness and exhaustion.
Read more from the diary of Veronica Vega here on Havana Times.