Iván García, 22 August 2024 — At half past two in the morning, the blackout. Luciano opened the last drawer of the wardrobe, took a piece of cardboard and went to the room where his 8-year-old son was sleeping. His wife was already cooling him with a fan. The mosquitoes buzzed like aeroplanes in his ears. An hour later, the boy burst into tears because of the heat. She brought him water and started to tell him children’s stories in an attempt to calm him down.
Luciano, his mother, his wife and his son live in a dilapidated building in the municipality of Sandino, some 220 kilometres west of Havana. They live a hard life, like most Cubans. They have no relatives abroad to send them dollars. Luciano’s family comes from a village in the mountainous Escambray region of the former Las Villas province.
“My parents owned a small farm where, in addition to growing coffee, they kept pigs, sheep and chickens. The authorities accused my father of helping guerrilla groups fighting against the government and sentenced him to twelve years in prison. They confiscated everything from him and forcibly transferred my mother, alone, to a captive village in the municipality of Sandino. My father was released from prison after serving half of his sentence, he died twenty years ago,” says Luciano, who was born in Pinar del Río.
“I remember my mother working as a tobacco picker and collector. She is 86 now and suffers from osteoarthritis and urinary incontinence. I earn my living as a day labourer growing rice and crops. In the good months my salary is 8,000 to 10,000 pesos, but that money isn’t enough to feed four people. That’s why I go fishing in the lagoon, where there are plenty of trout, some I take home, the others I sell”, says Luciano and explains that the problem is not only food, but also the shortage of drinking water, which only comes every forty days.
“Every two days I have to carry dozens of buckets of water from a turbine two kilometres away to the third floor of the building where we live. Several neighbours go in a cart and make two or three trips. A miserable life. In their free time, the men pass the time with cockfighting or a group of friends drinking a couple of bottles of rum and relieving their frustrations. In these villages there is no future. The younger people go off to the city or they emigrate. We are left, the oldest assholes, who never try to do anything to change our destiny.”
His flat is in urgent need of a lick of paint. There are dark patches on some parts of the ceiling due to damp caused by leaks from broken pipes. The termites have shattered the Miami-style windows. The most valuable object is an old Haier refrigerator, that the dictator Fidel Castro bought for a knock-down price in China when he implemented the so-called ’energy revolution’ in 2006, which was supposed to save the country’s electricity. Eighteen years later, the fridge is hardly working. The gaskets of the equipment have come loose and Luciano’s solution was to screw a crude metal clip on the door that allows the fridge to be opened and shut.
The furniture in the flat is ancient. The television set, with a 21-inch screen, has cathode ray tubes. In the kitchen hang two slotted spoons, two cast-iron pans, and a rice cooker that has lost its enamel. The three beds in the two rooms need to be replaced, as do the mattresses. “When the old woman urinates, as we don’t have disposable pads, we have to carry the mattress up to the roof of the building to dry it out in the sun. And when the water crisis hits, we relieve ourselves in nylon bags, which we then dump in the fields.
Luciano believes that in 2014 they were still eating well, by Cuban nutritional standards. “We had bread with tortillas and coffee with milk for breakfast and what was left over from dinner for lunch. We ate pork frequently, fish, chicken and sometimes beef, which I bought under the counter and a pound cost 25 or 30 pesos. Nowadays, a pound of beef is not less than 1,200 pesos. We couldn’t go to a hotel in Varadero, but we had breakfast, lunch and dinner seven days a week. Now we can only eat once a day.
According to a study carried out last July by the Cuban Observatory for Human Rights, extreme poverty on the island is close to 90 percent of the population. According to surveys by the Food Monitor Program, Cuban families currently spend almost all of their income on food, whether they have a low or a good income, whether they receive dollars or not. Nutrient deficits, lack of food hygiene, and the stress associated with food insecurity are “is having adverse consequences for the health of Cubans,” the organisation says.
Likewise, the “phenomenon of hidden hunger”, used by the FAO to describe prolonged undernourishment, is “very common in Cuban society”, which consumes more carbohydrates and sugars while going without fresh fruit and vegetables, as well as meat and dairy products, which has led to high rates of diabetes, high blood pressure and gastritis, among other ailments, said Food Monitor.
But it is not only food that is missing in Cuba. Basic services such as electricity, liquefied gas and public transport hardly work. Blackouts outside Havana often last eight to ten hours a day, or more. The shortage of medicines is more than 65 percent. Rubbish piles up for days in the streets, especially in the capital, which is dirtier and more abandoned than cities in other provinces. Due to breaks in the aqueduct, 50 per cent of the drinking water that is distributed does not reach homes or is lost through leaks. Hospitals are a mess. Patients must bring disposable syringes and cotton wool, among other supplies. And if you want good care, you need to give money or gifts to the doctors and nurses.
“The water supply cycles in the neighbourhoods of Holguín exceed 55 days,” says Yoss from Holguín. From Santiago de Cuba, Rudy says that in several areas of that city they have been without drinking water for more than 60 days. “The houses are full of containers. Those who have dollars build huge cisterns. For lack of water, despite the tremendous heat, there are people who bathe every two days. It’s as if they were in a war.
Many Cubans see no way out of the country’s structural crisis. For Luciano, from Pinar del Río, there are three options: “Emigrate, continue to put up with it or take to the streets to protest. Either we put on our trousers, like the Venezuelans, or this government starves us to death”.
Translated by GH
