Not even a police baton are able to prevent people from speaking loudly and badly against the government.
14ymedio, José Lassa, Havana, 15 March 2025 — The lack of enthusiasm of the three policemen who watched the Guanabacoa fair this Saturday, settled on their motorcycles, does not deceive anyone: they too have had a difficult night. For anyone’s nerves and body, an early morning of total blackout is devastating. Even so, you have to go out to look for food, and no matter how slim the pickings are, you have to take advantage of it.
The motorcycles come and go around the stalls, and the officers – two young men in blue and an older one in the army’s olive-green uniform – continue to watch over the transactions. But be careful. With a night like this Friday, not even a police baton is able to prevent many insults from being hurled loudly against the Government.
The blackout also has an amplifying effect on the general annoyance. If every weekend prices go up and pocketbooks lose power, after a night without sleep everyone wakes up in a bad mood. Customers are tense, and sellers are uncomfortable; those who listen are upset, but no one can think of what to do or what pill to resort to.
A concern runs through the crowd: with the total blackout, the last reserves of liquefied gas in homes will have to be used. When what they have saved is used up, they will have to go back to using charcoal. The bread, increasingly compact and hard, is sold for 200 pesos in Guanabacoa, and only the rich – if that word makes any sense in Cuba – can afford to buy a bag from a street vendor.
The tension is more abundant than oxygen among the food stalls. The noonday sun is punishing; last night it was the mosquitoes and the blackout. One of the policemen wakes up and walks around the food fair. Fleeing from the sun as if he were a vampire, he soon returns to the comfort of his motorcycle.
Several kilometers away, in Luyanó, people also wake up hungry. The most desperate ride their bicycles up and down the street, hunting a seller. The bakery door is closed. Bad sign. A messenger explains that the bakeries in La Víbora – another Havana neighborhood – closed yesterday and they asked him to collect about 600 bags of bread.
“It was the only thing that could be done before the arrival of the blackout, and I have already sold everything,” he says, before continuing with his wheelbarrow on Arango Street.
The electronic equipment at the sugar mills had their own blackout.
Dodging the power cut and saving the equipment has become a macabre sport in Cuban homes, and there is not always luck. “You have to have everything disconnected when the current comes back on so that things don’t explode,” a housewife from Cienfuegos tells this newspaper. “In my house an air conditioner and a microwave oven have already bit the dust.”
When hunger presses, everyone looks for what they can, and no one has to remind the dumpster divers. About to dive into the trash, an old man pushes the bags away from the top to see if it’s worth exploring further. Like those lined up in Guanabacoa or pedaling under the Luyanó sun, his clothes are threadbare and his face full of wrinkles. They are emblematic of a country where the goal is to survive. Living will be for another day.
Translated by Regina Anavy
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