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A Cuban mother identified as Lety Lety posted a heartbreaking account on Facebook about what it means to survive more than 30 consecutive hours without electricity in Cuba, and how her four-year-old daughter has already learned to ration the fan's charge so that her mother doesn’t have to fan herself all night.
In the days leading up to the account, the family had only received two hours of electricity, which was insufficient to charge the fan that had its battery completely drained.
That night, with rain and unbearable heat, Lety had to break open a cardboard box and spend hours fanning her daughter Erika, who was four years old, as the girl cried amid the heat and mosquitoes.
The next day, when the fan finally managed to charge, Erika turned it off by herself upon waking up. The girl's explanation left her mother speechless: "No, mommy, I just turned it off so the battery wouldn't run out, so you wouldn't have to fan me with your fan."
"My little girl is only four years old, but she, like every child in Cuba, sees her parents crying without tears, feeling depressed, agitated from not being able to endure anymore," the mother wrote in her post.
The testimony concludes with a direct inversion of the famous phrase by José Martí in La Edad de Oro: "Martí said that children are the hope of the world, but I see children growing up without hope."
Lety's account adds to a chorus of voices that document the human impact of the worst electrical crisis Cuba has faced in decades.
On May 29, another Cuban mother shared the viral message "I am mentally exhausted" after 26 hours without electricity, water, or internet, with her daughters unable to sleep due to the heat.
A study published in May revealed the devastating psychological impact of power outages: 55.4% of those affected experienced extremely severe depression, 66% reported severe anxiety, and 65.8% faced extreme stress.
The electrical crisis that has been affecting Cuba since 2024 has reached historic levels in 2026. As of June 1, the Electric Union reported a availability of only 1,160 MW against a demand of between 2,689 and 3,100 MW, with a projected deficit of 1,940 MW for the nighttime peak.
On the Island of Youth, the Union Eléctrica itself acknowledged on May 30 that the territory was only receiving six hours of electricity a day, meaning 18 hours of daily blackouts.
In Santiago de Cuba, an executive from the Electric Company admitted on June 1 that in many cases they could no longer guarantee even two hours of service.
On June 2, a failure at a substation in Havana caused the shutdown of significant facilities in the national electrical system, further exacerbating the situation.
The UN reported that the Cuban energy crisis has led to the postponement of more than 96,000 surgeries and has left 3,000 children with delays in their vaccination schedule.
"This crisis is forcing our children to grow up without a childhood, to mature suddenly without knowing what it means to be a child," wrote Lety Lety, summarizing in a single sentence what millions of Cuban families experience every night.
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