A Cuban residing in Italy surprised her followers on TikTok by posting a video in which she humorously and ironically shows that she has been without electricity or water for nearly two hours on European soil, comparing the situation to the chronic blackouts that Cuba suffers.
The user known as LA ISA (@isalarosa) posted the clip on Thursday, with the description: "No electricity, no water, and no idea why?? But in Italy." In the 35-second video, the woman films several pages of her dark surroundings and delivers an ironic warning to those who doubt that the lights can go out in Europe as well.
“Without electricity but in Italy, just so you know, so that later they don’t say that here in these countries the power doesn’t go out,” says the Cuban in front of the camera.
The author does not hide the irony of the situation and takes it to the extreme: "We've been here without power for almost two hours, it seems like we're over there but we're right here, ha ha ha ha, it's not easy, sir."
The video concludes with a phrase that summarizes the resignation learned in Cuba: "No electricity but in Italy, and let it not be said, well, you know, let's see when it comes."
Humor works precisely because the comparison is disproportionate. While a local and specific power cut in Italy is a rarity, in Cuba, blackouts have become the most brutal norm of everyday life in 2026.
The Cuban National Electroenergy System has collapsed at least seven times in 18 months. On March 16, 2026, a national blackout lasting up to 29 hours and 29 minutes was recorded, and in April, the planned deficit during peak night hours reached 1,850 MW. Cuba has gone for months without receiving regular supplies of diesel, fuel oil, gasoline, and liquefied petroleum gas.
This crisis has generated a wave of viral videos. In March, an Italian spent 25 hours without power in Cuba and his clip reached nearly 780,000 views. In April, another Italian tourist declared he was "dying to leave" after 30 hours without electricity on the island.
The video from LA ISA reverses that narrative: now it is a Cuban abroad who experiences, for the first time in a long time, what it is like to be left in the dark, even if only for a few hours in a country where power outages are exceptional events.
Italy has a generally stable electrical grid. Its last major national blackout occurred on September 28, 2003, when a failure in a high-voltage line in Switzerland left about 57 million people without power for hours. What LA ISA experienced was likely a short-lived local technical outage, incomparable to the energy crisis that Cuba endures daily.
The phenomenon of Cuban émigrés comparing sporadic blackouts in Europe to the crisis on the island has become a recurring humorous subgenre on social media, where irony and dark humor are the usual tools of the diaspora to process a reality that, while distant, is not forgotten.
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