A 21-year-old Cuban woman identified as Thaly Holguín (@soy_thalyholguin) moved many on TikTok with a video in which she describes her reality as a university student from a rural area.
The video, published last Thursday, portrays a situation that affects many young people on the island: the inability to study and live with dignity amid the worst energy and transportation crisis that Cuba has faced in decades.
Thaly is in her fourth year of Dental Medicine—the dentistry program—and explains that, although her family can grow some food and cook with a wood stove in the countryside, the combination of studies and rural life has become unsustainable: “I live in the countryside, and while we can grow a few things and we have our wood stove, we can manage food, but coming home from school and having to cook with wood is tough, and it's really difficult.”
This difficulty led her family to decide that she should move to the city, close to her college. However, the relief was only partial: "Even though I live alone, I still struggle," she admits in the video.
The most emotional part of the testimony revolves around transportation. Thaly had not been able to visit her family in the countryside for about two months due to the fuel crisis: "Here in Cuba, there is basically no transportation; the only thing that is operating are electric tricycles because there is no fuel of any kind for transportation, that is, for cars or trucks."
His situation is not an isolated case. The state passenger transport fell by 93% nationwide by early May, and the government has spaced out the passes for internal students to every 21 days to prioritize transportation for teachers and night shift personnel.
Institutions such as the Sports Initiation School (EIDE) ordered their students to return home "on their own", without providing any kind of official transportation.
In Matanzas, over 90,000 students did not arrive at 504 schools due to a lack of fuel, and at the university level, nearly 177,000 students had their assessments altered by the crisis.
The reliance on wood-burning stoves described by Thaly is not exclusive to rural areas. The shortage of domestic gas and power outages of up to 20 hours daily have even led urban residents to install stoves on the balconies of buildings. In Holguín —the province of the young woman— a 49-year-old woman was cooking in the rain on an improvised outdoor stove to feed her sick granddaughter.
Miguel Díaz-Canel himself acknowledged on March 14 that not "a drop of fuel" had arrived in the country since January. Cuba produces only 40,000 barrels of oil daily against a consumption of more than 110,000, a structural deficit that the regime has been unable to resolve.
Thaly closed her video with a quote that summarizes the contradiction between precariousness and familial affection: “There’s nothing like my mom’s cooking, which is why I go to the countryside every so often just to see my family.”
Filed under: