The Cuban capital is living through its worst moments: trash on every corner, empty markets, sky-high prices, streets deserted because of the fuel crisis.
14ymedio, Yoani Sanchez, Havana, 20 February 2026 — When a cyclone is approaching, the streets of Havana take on another velocity. The pace accelerates, vendors offer their merchandise with more urgency, and the small businesses rush to close before the winds start blowing. This Friday there is no hurricane expected, but the city I’m walking through feels like it is waiting for a monster greater than anything on the Saffir-Simpson scale. The fear isn’t from possible gusts, but from the total paralysis of a country run out of fuel.
At the Tulipán Street market, several stalls are already shut down because of the energy crisis. “Tomorrow I won’t come, we are in critical state,” a vendor shouts into his cellphone, his stand overflowing with goods imported just a few days ago. People prefer food that doesn’t need refrigeration in fear that the blackouts, which have already multiplied in the last few hours, will keep getting worse until the whole city goes dark.
I put two packages of peanuts in the shell into my bag. They don’t need to stay cold, they’re pretty nutritious and, in case the gas service doesn’t work, it won’t be a great sacrifice to eat them raw. I leave the eggs even though I need them. They’re only selling them by the carton, 30 for 3,200 pesos, and I’m afraid they’ll spoil if the power outages drag on. I add some onions and a bunch of cilantro. The little I’ve bought costs me over 4,000 pesos, more than an average monthly pension.
A young guy jokes that soon we’ll have to come to the market with a wheelbarrow because the Cuban peso keeps losing value while prices keep climbing. I imagine myself pushing bills in one of those improvised carts that I used when I was a girl to help carry water to my house in Centro Habana. Life has this way of bringing us back to a point we thought we’d left behind, and doing so in a way that makes us feel nostalgia for the days when we were carrying water instead of useless paper to nearly empty markets.
Every area I pass through gives the impression that a hand, from the sky, has dumped an enormous trash bin. The trash that accumulates on the street corners, forming mountains of cardboard, bags, and plastic, is added to the debris scattered everywhere. I can’t find a single square meter without some filth, break, or pothole. I feel a bit shattered myself. My calves ache from climbing up and down 14 flights of stairs because there is no electricity to power the elevator. I hurt my elbow lifting bags of soil to plant some herbs on my terrace, facing the “zero option,” and I sleep little at night because of the constant power outages, generating buzzing, clicking, and shouts that echo through the neighborhood.
Now, on the outskirts of the market, the rush is palpable. “Grab your last garlic here before I leave,” shouts a shirtless man, accompanied by a teenage girl. It is barely nine in the morning, so his threat to leave has nothing to do with the market’s opening hours. “I’m not coming back, take advantage now,” he emphasizes, in case anyone didn’t get that this is the last day he has transportation to make it to Estancia street, full of potholes and where, traditionally, if inspectors don’t raid it, the stalls sprawl out, selling everything from Chinese ointments to disposable razors to liquefied gas cylinders.
But today the movie is playing even faster. It is like those scenes shot in early movies filmed at fewer frames per second that when played back in our time give the idea of wind-up puppets frantically jerking from one side to the other. Now my neighbors and I seem to be “out of revolutions,” never better said. The scene could not be more starkly contrasting. Above, a picture-postcard blue sky invites calm, while below, we move nervously amidst squalor and despair.
A motorcycle zooms right by me because I’m walking in the street. The sidewalks are devastated and dangerous for your ankles. But the driver doesn’t yell an insult or ask sarcastically if I maybe have a license plate. A strange understanding of others, a willingness to empathize with each other in the face of the collapse we’re experiencing, seems to have spread around the market. In my dirty neighborhood, at least these days, “the noble and the villain, the great man and the worm dance and shake hands,” or more accurately: we all suffer together and try not to step on each other.
An old lady sidles up to me while I’m buying some tiny carnations with more leaves than petals. “Give me something to eat,” she says in a low voice. Her facial skin is so tight to the bone you can make out every tendon, every muscle underneath. You don’t even know anymore what counts as a decent handout. If I give her 50 pesos, will she feel insulted because it won’t even buy an egg? A hundred still too little for this old woman to eat something? Even being generous in these chaotic money times is difficult. You don’t know if you’re helping or humiliating someone with these worthless colored scraps that make up our national currency.
Also, there is a gray dust covering everything. It falls on our heads. It’s from the trash piles they’ve set on fire. If I look out from the balcony, I see them smoking here and there, dotting Havana’s landscape. The city smells like a medieval village where flames try to do what modern sanitation services are supposed to handle. A neighbor tells me her asthma attacks have multiplied, her eyes water all the time, and she locks herself in her room under the sheet hoping, the stench and smoke don’t reach her.
I hurry past the nearest mountain of trash closest to our building. Dominating the scene, on the sign over the Ministry of Transportation, it reads “hasta la victoria siempre.” A young guy is digging through the garbage. I wait for him to finish so I can take a photo. If poverty used to be more starkly visible among the elderly, now there’s a whole sector of Cuban children and teenagers whose faces bear the marks of hunger. They have that extreme thinness and yellowish complexion of someone who only eats small portions of poor-quality food every now and then.
I head home and pass a mipyme*-run shop. We’re in a blackout. The old garage converted into a little bodega looks like a dark cave. A customer complains he can’t pay electronically because there’s no power or data connection. The employee shrugs and says: “We’re lucky we’re even open, because who knows if we can be tomorrow.” An atmosphere of goodbye hangs over everything. No one knows for sure if the neighborhood store will open next week, if the guy with the electric tricycle hauling goods will have charged his battery, if the chronic patient in the nearby house will make it without transport to the emergency room. We’re all saying goodbye to each other, too, in fast-forward.
I get to the bottom of my concrete block. I joke with a neighbor who points out it is the third time today he’s seen me climbing the stairs. “I’m training for a marathon,” I tell him. Yes, I’m prepping for a long-distance run, though for the stretch ahead we need more inner strength than steady knees. Finally I make it upstairs. I look out. Smoke from another trash fire has emerged on the horizon. I think it’s coming from over there, from the neighborhood where I used to haul water as a girl.
*Micro, Small, Medium Enterprises [MSME in English; mipyme in Spanish]
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