The Cuban architect Ileana Pérez Drago harshly denounced that in Cuba, the deceased cannot be buried with dignity, describing cases in which families in exile who send food to their relatives on the island are forced to put their loved ones in Cubamax cardboard boxes — the same boxes used for food packages arriving from Miami — because there are no coffins available.
"Cuba's first priority has to be to dispose of its garbage and bury its dead in coffins; we can't even do that, we can't even bury people with dignity," Pérez Drago stated in an interview where he discussed the country's situation in light of a potential transition.
The architect, an expert in colonial restoration who worked for the Office of the Historian of Havana under Eusebio Leal and has resided in Madrid and Miami, described a reality that goes beyond the scarcity of coffins: "The dead stay in the house for more than a day, and there isn't even ice to put on them because there is no electricity."
The complaint points directly to the chronic energy crisis that the island is experiencing, with power outages of up to 20 hours a day that hinder the refrigeration of corpses during wakes in homes.
Pérez Drago did not hold back in evaluating the regime's responsibility: "What there isn't is shame because this dictatorship no longer has any limits."
The architect's testimony is not an isolated case. In Holguín, families have improvised coffins from cardboard due to the shortage of caskets, and in municipalities like Caibarién, there has been a craft production of coffins initiated as a desperate response to the lack of supplies.
In Ciego de Ávila, only eight out of the 19 hearses are operational, and in December 2025, the transfer of a coffin in a cage truck was documented due to a lack of funeral vehicles. The glass of the coffins is reused among several bodies, and in Holguín, delays in the removal of corpses have led to neighborhood protests.
The situation reflects the dependency of millions of Cubans on remittances and packages sent from exile, primarily from Miami, through companies like Cubamax, whose cardboard boxes have become an involuntary symbol of degradation: the same boxes that bring food to the living are used to carry the dead to the cemetery.
Pérez Drago also referred to the political dimension of the Cuban collapse, noting that "the people will not surrender to hunger; they will die," and warning that the young leaders imprisoned after the protests on July 11, 2021, could be released in July, "possibly with a plane ticket to leave," as the only escape the regime offers them.
The expression that circulates among Cubans bitterly summarizes what Pérez Drago described: "Neither alive nor dead do we have dignity."
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