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Guillermo Carmona Rodríguez, editor of the state newspaper Girón from Matanzas, published a literary chronicle this Sunday that unusually depicts the exhaustion of living through the Cuban crisis from within, in a text circulating under the title “The Little Rest of the Just”.
The piece, part of the weekly section "Sunday Chronicle" of the provincial newspaper linked to the Communist Party of Cuba, begins with an image that says it all: "The day has hit me hard. It kicked my ribs. It tightened my shoulders. It shattered my brain."
The sentence that encapsulates the text is even more striking: "I am not a man, but a war refugee with a face soiled with coal instead of gunpowder. I am not a man, but a pilgrim with feet battered from walking the churches of the holy flesh at 800 pesos per pound. I am not a man, but a weary creature who needs to sleep to become once again as close as possible to being a person."
Carmona describes a night without electricity in which he and his partner share a rechargeable fan with only one of four light bulbs lit, as the power last came on two days earlier and the device was not fully charged.
The only light in the room comes from the neighbor's house, which has its own power generator.
The heat, the odors from the nearby dump—which the journalist ironically describes as "Gucci landfill aromas"—and the inability to sleep create a portrait that hardly aligns with the official discourse of the regime.
The chronicle ends with a fire: someone took advantage of the darkness to set the neighborhood dump ablaze, and the flames spread to nearby homes, with the neighbors themselves extinguishing it using buckets of water. "I won't sleep tonight," Carmona concludes.
The text is not an isolated fact. In February 2025, the journalist reported in Girón the bureaucratic obstacles and the lack of fuel that almost prevented the funeral transfer of his grandmother in Matanzas.
In June 2025, he published "Luxury Article," where he described unreachable privileges such as the basic things like sleeping well, bathing with running water, or having hot meals, with phrases like “Everything is lukewarm: the soup, the coffee, the spirits”.
In August 2025, alongside journalist Humberto Fuentes Rodríguez, he signed a report on inhumane conditions at the social protection center in Jagüey Grande, Matanzas.
The context surrounding the chronicle of this Sunday is one of multiple crises. On Saturday, the National Electric Union reported a supply of only 1,090 MW against a demand of 2,557 MW, with a forecasted impact of 1,990 MW in the evening.
This is compounded by a waste crisis that has spread across the country: landfill fires have become a recurring phenomenon, with residents in Havana deliberately burning garbage to attract fire trucks and obtain water.
That a journalist from the state apparatus describes Cuban reality with such starkness — "How sad to remember what it's like to sleep an entire night with electricity," writes Carmona — is itself an indicator of the level of deterioration that the island has experienced after 67 years of communist dictatorship.
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