Bárbara Consuegra Reyes, a Cuban working on the island, posted this week a reel on Facebook that starkly summarizes the experience of millions of Cubans: sitting, waiting for the charcoal to finish cooking her food, with her hands blackened by soot, before getting dressed and heading to work.
"Well, nothing, my darlings, the charcoal does its job, here I am sitting, waiting for it to cook, look at these hands," she says at the beginning of the video, showing her fingers stained black as evidence of a routine that the Cuban regime has normalized in light of its inability to ensure electricity or domestic gas.
Bárbara's testimony is not just a regular complaint: it is a demand for dignity. “We want to die with dignity; we want to spend the years we have left as we should, happily, with all the comforts and conditions, as a human being should,” she states in the video.
It describes a reality that repeats every day in Cuban households: "It's hours and hours of blackouts, heat, mosquitoes, desperation, desperation, that it can’t go on any longer."
However, Bárbara doesn’t give up. "We must keep going, because we all have children, we have siblings, we have families that we have to keep trying to support," she says, before clarifying that after finishing the coal, she has to get dressed and go to work.
That dual burden —surviving the crisis at home and fulfilling work obligations— defines the lives of those who remain in Cuba amid the most severe energy crisis in decades.
In June 2026, the Electric Union reports generation deficits ranging from 1,500 to over 2,000 MW, with an availability of only 960 to 1,090 MW against a demand of 2,600 to 3,000 MW. Blackouts reach 20 to 22 hours daily in Havana and up to 45 to 48 consecutive hours in some provinces.
On June 4, a breakdown left 3.4 million people without electricity in the eastern part of the country, and reports from June 5 indicated that the outages could affect 65% of the Cuban population.
The electricity shortage has pushed thousands of families to cook with charcoal and firewood, marking a regression of decades. The regime itself publicly normalized this practice in March 2026 as an "alternative," while an association in Camagüey exported more than 150 tons of charcoal to Europe in the first quarter of the year.
The impact goes beyond heat and soot. The that the Cuban energy crisis has a "systemic and growing" effect on health, water, food, and telecommunications, with over 96,000 surgeries postponed, 32,000 pregnant women at risk, and 3,000 children with vaccination delays.
A study published in Social Science & Medicine found "extremely severe" levels of depression, anxiety, and stress in a sample of 415 Cuban adults, directly associated with the prolonged blackouts and their psychological impact.
Testimonials like Bárbara's have multiplied on social media in 2026: a Cuban mother showed seven days without electricity cooking with wood and coal; another described the anguish of not knowing how many more nights remain. They all share the same thread: they're not asking for luxuries, they're asking to live as human beings.
"Here, look at me, giving myself little breaks until the coal does its job, because I'm also working, yes, yes, I'm working, and right now I need to get dressed and head to work," concluded Bárbara, with a blend of humor and exhaustion that better captures than any statistic what it means to survive in Cuba today.
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