The Mistreatment We Cubans Live With
HAVANA TIMES – From the moment I wake up, the first thing I do is check the blackout schedule.
There’s no gas to cook, so everything must be timed precisely to avoid meals being left half-finished. I even make extra coffee to store in a jar and rush to prepare everything that needs to go in the blender.
As time passes, I feel a growing anxiety that sometimes prevents me from organizing my thoughts and actions.
Let’s not forget that the water pump also runs on electricity, and when you live in an apartment building, you must coordinate very carefully so that water, power, and the presence of most neighbors coincide. Only then can the pump be turned on, and you can, for example, wash all the piled-up clothes.
Sometimes they cut the power outside the announced schedule and restore it after ten, twenty, thirty minutes… Other times it comes and goes so often you lose count—and lose all hope that it will stay on. The only constant is anxiety, as you rush to unplug appliances to prevent damage, and outside you hear people cursing. Some neighbors sit on their balconies “waiting,” as they say, “for this nonsense with the electricity to end.”
You never know what causes these bewildering events. Maybe we should be used to how intermittent everything is. To not being considered or respected. But the truth is, we’re not.
By instinct, we try to build ourselves an oasis, even if in fragments, even if it bleeds us dry—like those street vendors who walk kilometers every day under the relentless sun trying to sell their goods (brooms, mops, buckets, and all sorts of plastic utensils); or, in my case, I try to build it with help from family living outside of Cuba, always holding onto the hope that some degree of comfort might someday become stable.
Blackouts are a national trauma. Since the 1990s “Special Period” crisis, which was never officially declared over. Like a virus, it seems to have adapted to the treatments meant to cure it and has come back even stronger.
A friend in Holguín tells me she can’t take it anymore, that the blackouts give her headaches all day. Now that she finally has a computer and a work commitment to publish a book, inspiration and electricity are never aligned.
Sometimes I feel I can’t take it anymore either, and now that I have a bicycle, if it’s daytime, I try to escape during those hours when everything is on pause.
But the street is inhospitable and heavy. If you’re tempted to buy anything, the prices are staggering and people look so withered… Even if they don’t give up—because Cubans are warriors of adversity—you can see in their eyes the weight of exhaustion.
Meanwhile, the places tethered to me through memory exude a sense of abandonment that cuts deep. Going downhill is a marvel, especially on the slope in Alamar, as they call the long stretch of two streets that run parallel to the Cojímar River. Here, the vegetation is lush and beautiful. You can glide down without pedaling, and as gravity carries you, you feel like you’re falling into God’s hands, and that nothing evil could ever happen to you.
Like that idea of happiness we absorb in childhood. It doesn’t come through explicit words. It’s a sense of certainty that grows along with your bones, your muscles, and the awareness of inhabiting a body in this world. It’s something almost tangible, like a mother’s embrace: a sense of belonging.
Life welcomes us in the same land where we first open our eyes. Those of us born in Cuba after 1959 are familiar with the concept of crisis. We’ve been through so much that precariousness, shortages, and uncertainty are already part of our mental framework. Like injuries in a physical body.
In my first autobiographical novel published in France in 2010, I included a passage where I describe traveling one day here with my partner Yasser in a bus with no windows. The newly imported yellow buses had had their air conditioning systems removed.
As I felt sweat running down my face and the fatigue building up to the brink of collapse, a man burst out, saying: “Cubans go through some serious shit…”
Hardship, effort, shoving, like when you board that same overcrowded bus or fight for your place in line to buy some food. Always struggling, defending your spot in a crowd. In an endless war.
But wars are not the natural state. Nor are crises.
Even with a wounded body, one overcomes. Wounds close and the system prepares to move on, to heal and to thrive. We wait and we feel that we deserve a different experience: one of wholeness. Cubans, too, deserve that long-sought happiness, driven by an inner strength that refuses to give up, even in the face of an increasingly bleak landscape.