Professor Ricardo Vilahomat described in an interview how a typical day in Cuba is shaped by blackouts, extreme shortages, and insufficient salaries, attributing the blame more to the political system than to external factors.
In a recent interview given to the program La Entrevista, by journalist Orlando Petinatti, he explained that the day starts when the electricity arrives, not when dawn breaks.
"The time you wake up depends on when the light comes on," she stated, describing windows of just one hour (from 4:00 a.m. to 5:00 a.m.) during which basic tasks like cooking, washing, or pumping water must be concentrated.
That ephemeral margin sets the tone for the rest of the day. Without electricity, without water, and without enough food, the routine turns into a series of accumulating shortages, with children going to school without breakfast, workers lacking transportation to get to their jobs, and salaries that, far from compensating for the effort, are insufficient to sustain a week of basic nutrition.
Vilahomat does not resort to euphemisms: it describes the income as "terrible."
The figures reinforce the collapse being described. A teacher in Cuba receives between 4,000 and 9,400 pesos per month, equivalent to between eight and 20 dollars, compared to a cost of living that exceeds 40,000 pesos.
The professor Adhy Toledo had already highlighted that disproportion by demonstrating that her salary barely covered the cost of a package of coffee, four eggs, a pound of beans, and a kilogram of rice, a concrete piece of evidence of the complete loss of purchasing power.
But the testimony goes beyond the economic and delves into the human aspect. Vilahomat recounted how he has to fan his son with a cardboard in the midst of the heat and mosquitoes due to the lack of electricity.
"My arm cannot get tired because the one who is there is my son," he said, describing a scene that encapsulates the physical and emotional strain imposed by daily survival.
Desperation, as he explained, is not episodic but cumulative and constant, to a point that—he asserts—it becomes impossible to fully translate into words.
From that experience, the professor dismantles the official explanation that attributes the crisis to the U.S. embargo. He recalled that during the years of Soviet subsidy, when the country received resources without real pressures for repayment, a functional economy was not established; instead, funds were allocated to exporting the political model and financing conflicts in other regions.
"Cuba without a blockade, what would it be? What we were in the ’80s," he stated, alluding to a system of structural scarcity even under conditions of increased external financing.
His conclusion points directly to the heart of the problem, which is not just an economic crisis, but a political model that prioritizes control over any form of openness. "They don't want to lose a millimeter of control over the people," he stated.
To reinforce that idea, he quoted Raúl Castro himself, who after the rapprochement with the Obama administration admitted that "we should have done more," a statement that, in the current context, exposes the lack of real reforms and the persistence of the same structural limitations.
The testimony contrasts with that of a pre-university teacher in Morón who defended before her students last March that "I wish everyone, especially in the world, had the conditions that we have today," denying that Cuba is a dictatorship.
Furthermore, reprisals continue against those who dare to contradict that narrative. Professor Roberto Viña Martínez was expelled from ISA in January and Professor Abel Tablada was removed from CUJAE in March, both for publishing critiques on social media.
The Cuban Observatory of Human Rights reported in April that 89% of Cuban families live in extreme poverty and 97% have lost access to basic food, while blackouts in Cuba show no signs of abating with outages lasting up to 24 continuous hours in various provinces.
Filed under: