Yade Ledon, a Cuban resident in Lakeland, Florida, posted a video on Instagram in which she expresses her evident pain upon learning of her grandmother's death five hours after it occurred, due to the internet access issues faced by Cubans.
"Today my 99-year-old grandmother passed away at three in the morning in Cuba. And I found out at eight. Because there was no connection in Cuba," Yade says with a trembling voice.
The testimony summarizes a reality that millions of Cubans abroad face daily: the disconnection caused by the energy and telecommunications crisis that the regime has allowed to grow for decades without resolution.
"For millions of Cubans, this is the pain we constantly endure: the fear of being far away, of losing someone and not being able to arrive in time, the fear of saying goodbye over a phone call. Because emigrating is not just about leaving a country; it’s also about living with a divided heart every day," they say.
At the end of the testimony, the Cuban addresses a direct message to President Donald Trump, in which she speaks to him as a granddaughter, as an immigrant, and as a Cuban.
"Help us ensure that our families can live with dignity. Help us to make Cuba smile again one day, because behind every Cuban who emigrated, there is a story that still hurts," he concluded.
Daily in Cuba, the Electric Union reports a deficit of thousands of MW, resulting in power outages of about 20 hours a day in most provinces.
When blackouts collapse the electrical grid, they also take down the telecommunications infrastructure of ETECSA, the state monopoly, leaving almost half the country without mobile phone service or Internet.
The connectivity crisis is neither new nor accidental. Less than 8% of Cuban households have access to the Internet, making Cuba the second worst country for connectivity in Latin America, just above Haiti.
In March, a total blackout caused a 65% drop in internet traffic in Cuba, detected by Cloudflare Radar, and the restoration took 29 hours.
The paradox of the regime is hard to overlook: while millions of Cubans cannot make a basic call to find out if a family member is still alive, Díaz-Canel visited the University of Havana just days earlier to promote the development of a "sovereign" artificial intelligence in Cuba.
The case of Yade Ledon is not the first to go viral. In March, another video showed a young Cuban in Spain saying goodbye to his sick grandmother via videoconference, due to the inability to communicate in any other way.
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