A Cuban mother identified on TikTok as @gelylaflaki posted a nearly two-minute video last Wednesday in which she expresses her frustration over the blackouts that her family endures, with outages lasting 18 hours or more per day amidst extreme heat.
"I'm tired of the abuse because those people don't suffer from the heat," says the woman at the most powerful moment of the video, referring to the regime officials who impose the cuts without experiencing them.
"They are cutting off our electricity for 18 hours or more," he reports, describing sequences of blackouts that extend from 10 PM until 3 PM the next day, or from 1 PM until 8 AM the following day.
At the time of recording, I had been without electricity since four in the morning, and it was already nearly four in the afternoon, estimating that it wouldn't come back until ten at night.
The woman shares that she has a portable power station—a EcoFlow—and a rechargeable fan, but the power outages are so prolonged that she doesn't have enough time to charge them: "There's so little time when they do supply power that I can't charge it."
The electrical crisis is compounded by a gas shortage. "I buy a small gas cylinder and it costs me 30,000 Cuban pesos because I can't cook with electricity," she explains, also responding to those who criticize her on social media: "Then they say to me, get a job, lazy person, no, my life is not like that. If I start working for someone here, I won't be able to buy the gas cylinder."
In the video, she also mentions that one of her daughters was sick with vomiting at the time of the recording, and that the accumulation of pressures has her on edge: "I have the little girl sick with vomiting, so all of this is driving me crazy."
This testimony comes at the worst time of the Cuban electricity crisis in recent years. On the same day, May 13, Cuba recorded a record deficit of 2,153 MW. The following day, the Antonio Guiteras thermoelectric plant collapsed for the ninth time in 2026, leaving the eastern provinces operating as isolated microsystems.
The Minister of Energy and Mines, Vicente de la O Levy, publicly acknowledged that Cuba was “completely lacking in fuel, in diesel, only associated gas”, describing the situation as “severe, critical, and extremely tense.”
Matanzas is one of the most affected provinces, experiencing power outages of up to twenty hours a day in some municipalities. The town of Cantel, in Cárdenas, had been without electricity for more than seven days as of May 11 following the explosion of a transformer, with no response from the authorities.
It is not the first time that @gelylaflaki documents the impact of blackouts on her family. In February 2026, she shared her reasons for emigrating or staying, ending with a sentence that captures the mood of many Cubans: “I still hold the foolish hope that this will get better someday.”
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