A young Cuban woman identified as Daniella Pérez (@daniella_perez99) published a vlog on TikTok last Saturday in which she humorously and exhaustively recounts how she survived 30 consecutive hours without electricity in Cuba, a testament that encapsulates the daily life of millions of Cubans enduring the worst electrical crisis in decades.
"Thirty hours without power, and for those who don't know, I live in Cuba, and yes, my love, this is hell. No, mom, it's not drama, it's accumulated exhaustion, it's abusive; well, this really has no name," Daniella says at the beginning of the video.
When the electricity returned, Daniella took advantage of every minute: she cleaned the floor with a mop, set up some newly purchased induction cooktops, and organized her room.
"I had been longing for a mango smoothie for days, but the power outage wouldn't allow me," she confesses in the video, describing one of the simplest deprivations that blackouts impose daily.
The young woman acknowledges having her own generator, but clarifies that it doesn't solve everything: "The generator's battery isn't eternal, and if I use it for some things, I can't use it for others."
With only two hours of available light, the priority was clear: “These two hours of light must be taken advantage of,” he says, before describing how he changed the sheets because “with these blackouts and this heat, one tends to get a bit of a smell.”
The video was published on one of the most critical days of the year for the National Electric System (SEN). On May 16, the maximum impact reached 2,041 MW at 9:10 PM, and it was estimated that 51% of the country was left without electricity simultaneously.
Two days earlier, on May 14, the Antonio Guiteras Thermoelectric Plant —the largest individual generator in the country— went offline due to a boiler malfunction, marking its ninth failure in 2026, leading to a partial collapse of the National Electric System.
On that same day, the Electric Union projected only 976 MW available against a demand of 3,150 MW, resulting in a deficit of 2,204 MW that led to daily blackouts of 20 to 22 hours in Havana and complete outages in the eastern part of the country, impacting nearly two million people in Santiago de Cuba, Granma, and Guantánamo.
The Minister of Energy and Mines, Vicente de la O Levy, publicly acknowledged that Cuba had "absolutely no fuel, no diesel, only associated gas" for electric generation, and admitted the public's discontent regarding the prolonged outages.
The crisis is neither new nor temporary. Since early 2026, Cuba has been facing historical deficits, with four consecutive months of not receiving fuel for generation between January and April, as acknowledged by the authorities themselves.
Social discontent is growing in parallel: the Cuban Conflict Observatory recorded 1,133 protests in April 2026, a 29.5% increase compared to the same month the previous year.
The ending of Daniella's video says it all: "You make the bed because the room looks nicer when it's tidy, but that doesn't mean you're always up for it."
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