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The activist Yanalli González, from Sancti Spíritus, posted this Sunday a heart-wrenching testimony on Facebook describing the extreme conditions in which she lives due to prolonged blackouts, contaminated water, and the lack of temperature-sensitive medications.
"What a dawn I remember as something distant when on Sundays I would watch movies and cook something different; now everything is sad, everything has turned black and white," González wrote at the beginning of his post, which sums up in a few lines the despair of thousands of Cubans.
The activist reports power outages of up to 24 consecutive hours that prevent her from cooking, sleeping, and storing her medication. "During the only time there's power, you rush out of bed to cook, and then it's 24 hours without electricity," she recounted.
The result is devastating: the rice cooked the day before has gone bad. A pound of this staple food costs 250 Cuban pesos, an expense that is lost irretrievably when the power goes out.
The water coming out of his pipe is dark brown. "Look at the water that's coming out of my pipe, I don't know if it's possible to wash or cook with it," he wrote, accompanying the text with images that show the murky liquid in a bucket.
González was retired at 37 after 15 years of work, which places her in a position of special vulnerability.
Several of your medications require refrigeration: insulin, serums, and skin foams.
"My medications, many of them need to be kept cold, like Lina's insulin, which I don't know if it works or not, because without refrigeration my serums, the cold foam from the skin, loses its effectiveness," she warned.
"I wonder what I should do with all my ailments, how I survive so much pain," she added, describing a picture of insomnia, irritated skin, cold meals, and constant mental anguish.
His cry for help came in capital letters: "NO, THIS IS UNBEARABLE, I NEED TO SLEEP, I NEED MY MEDICINES."
González's testimony is not an isolated case.
This Sunday, the Unión Eléctrica reported a National Electric System availability of only 1,113 MW against a demand of 2,720 MW, projecting a deficit of 2,072 MW during peak hours. Additionally, 106 distributed generation plants remained out of service due to lack of fuel.
In May, Cuba set historical records for blackouts, with deficits that exceeded 2,200 MW and outages that simultaneously affected nearly 70% of the population. Sancti Spíritus has been one of the hardest-hit provinces.
President Miguel Díaz-Canel acknowledged that the situation was "particularly tense", without providing concrete solutions to a crisis rooted in structural causes: decades of neglect of the electrical infrastructure and an economy in collapse after 67 years of dictatorship.
González, the administrator of the solidarity project "Saving Lives," which organizes the delivery of food and medicine to vulnerable individuals in her province, also spoke out about the situation of the rest of the population: "We, the common people, are exhausted; there is no longer any joy on our faces, just weariness and dark circles under our eyes. Those mothers are heartbroken as they witness their children's sweat and mosquito bites, and on top of that, they face poor nutrition."
She closed her post with a phrase that another mother from Sancti Spiritus shared with her, which sums everything up: "It’s not politics, it’s pain."
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