Life in Cuba revolves around brief sparks of electricity

A 20-minute burst of electricity is a small miracle in Havana nowadays — a miracle that sometimes comes at 3 am. That’s when 72-year-old Leidis Rodriguez frantically cooked beans after the lights switched on this week following hours of uninterrupted blackouts. “The power has come back on, everyone go!” Rodriguez shouted. In the wake of sometimes days-long blackouts in Cuba - fuelled by the oil blockade imposed by the Trump administration in January - Cubans are planning their lives around the lights turning back on.

Those small bursts of relief last a few minutes or a few hours. They come at any time, day or night. Increasingly, electricity flicks on when Rodriguez and her 41-year-old daughter, Yaimara Matos, would normally be asleep.

When the power comes on, the family stops everything they’re doing. “You want to do everything at the same time - wash clothes, iron, cook, tidy the rooms, because it’s impossible in the dark, and even get a little relief from the heat,” Matos said. “What we used to do in 10 hours, we now have to do in two.” That’s the case for Cubans across the island, whose lives have been transformed by one of the worst crises the island has seen since the Cuban revolution. Daily life has turned into a tangle of compounding crises families have to unravel.

Public transportation and cultural events have come to a standstill. So has tourism, the country’s economic engine, especially as tourism companies have withdrawn, leaving 25,000 hospitality jobs vacant.

Flights to the island are regularly cancelled and workdays have been shortened to adjust to the new reality of a Cuba without power. Medicine shortages have worsened and food rots in fridges without power.

“If there’s no electricity, there’s no water because it doesn’t get pumped to the tank. When there’s water, there’s no electricity,” Rodriguez lamented.