A Cuban identified as Adriela Feito Hernandez published a video on Facebook that captures in 38 seconds the everyday tragedy of thousands of families on the island: she walks through empty streets carrying a chicken and other food items spoiled by power outages, desperately searching for a place to store them before it's too late.
The video of Adriela on Facebook accumulated nearly 55,000 views and over 2,600 reactions, touching an open wound that millions of Cubans recognize as their own.
"This is my family's effort, and they're not even here. Because while this is being lost, there are people out there killing themselves working. So that there is food in this house," Adriela says with a trembling voice as she records the scene.
What hurts the most, in his own words, is not just the material loss: "No one talks to you about that. No one tells you about the helplessness of opening a refrigerator and seeing everything slip away. And the worst part is not being able to do anything."
"Today it happened to me. And I had to run around like crazy to see where I could keep it. To see who could do me a favor," she recounts as the camera shows the empty streets around her.
That image of the empty streets is no coincidence. "Look at the streets, empty, without people. A sadness that cannot be explained, it is visible," says Adriela, capturing another symptom of the downfall: the massive emigration that has emptied entire neighborhoods across Cuba.
Adriela's testimony is not an isolated case. Cuba is experiencing in June 2026 one of its worst electrical crises, with blackouts exceeding 20 hours daily in many areas of the country.
Electric Union reported last Friday a availability of only 1,030 MW against a demand of 2,590 MW, with 106 distributed generation plants out of service due to a lack of fuel.
Those prolonged power outages break the cold chain in households and condemn to waste what little families manage to obtain.
The 2025 Food Security Survey from the Food Monitor Program, conducted in all 16 Cuban provinces, revealed that 47.59% of respondents lost refrigerated food due to power outages, and 80.39% experienced a decrease in their cooking capacity.
In provinces such as Granma, Matanzas, Pinar del Río, and Sancti Spíritus, more than 80% of households reported losses of refrigerated food. One in three households had at least one member who went to bed hungry in the past month.
Adriela's drama also encapsulates the dual tragedy of the Cuban diaspora: those who are outside make sacrifices to send money, while those who are inside cannot even keep what they purchase with that money.
By 2026, 96.91% of the Cuban population lacked adequate food, according to recent data.
This is not the first time that this kind of testimony has shaken social media.
A Cuban woman shared in May the pain of throwing away spoiled beans under identical circumstances, and the heartbreaking message from a Cuban father to the government, published on June 6, denounced that "children do not have a glass of milk to take to their stomachs" and that the future in Cuba is "completely dark."
Adrilea ended her video with a phrase that says it all: "Here I bring my son's food, from my home, and honestly, this doesn’t even have a name anymore."
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