Related videos:
A girl watches as the blades of the fan come to a stop during a power outage and asks, "Why?" Meanwhile, the adult accompanying her doesn't know how to respond.
That scene, published this Sunday in the Sunday chronicle of the newspaper Girón from Matanzas, signed by journalist Guillermo Carmona Rodríguez, devastatingly summarizes what millions of Cuban families experience daily.
"Why?" the girl asks, following the blades of the fan with her gaze as they slowly stop turning.
"Why?" he repeats, grabbing the equipment with his tiny hands and shaking it to give it a life it won't have until a day or two later.
The narrator imagines fantastic tales to avoid telling the truth: a gluttonous little fish that covers the electrical wires, a kingdom of mermaids that is given the scarce water, a fearful unicorn that symbolizes the collapsed economy, and some boastful buses that explain the lack of transportation.
For the water shortage, the story goes that "a bad man steals the water from his pond to bottle it and sell it for 200 pesos per bottle."
For the economic crisis, "the price of rice and chicken has skyrocketed, and from up there, it greets us with a flourish."
But in the end, Carmona admits that he cannot do it: "I don't want to give the real answer. It's too long and convoluted, like a tangle of forgotten Christmas lights in a drawer. Perhaps their colors will fade with too much truth."
The distance between the adult and the girl is not just one of age, but of accumulated experience in the face of disaster: "At times, I find myself feeling gray and withered; yet I am an adult who has died and been resurrected many times. She is piecing together her first life."
The text is published in the newspaper Girón, the official organ of the Communist Party in Matanzas, which makes its tone even more remarkable.
This is not the first time that Carmona has depicted the crisis in this manner from a state medium: last Sunday he published “The Little Rest of the Just”, about a night without electricity and extreme heat, and in 2022 he had already authored “Blackouts, man, blackouts.”
The report arrives at the worst moment of the Cuban electricity crisis in decades. In June 2026, the Electric Union reported deficits of up to 2,040 MW during peak hours, affecting 68% of the national electrical system.
The researcher Jorge Piñón estimated that about 60% of the 19 units of the eight thermoelectric plants in the country were out of service.
The impact on children is documented and severe. According to UNICEF, 9% of children under five suffer from severe nutritional deprivation, and 48.5% of students aged six to eleven do not receive food or snacks at school.
The UN warned in May 2026 that over 11,000 children were awaiting surgeries delayed due to power outages.
That context is the same that led a Cuban mother to report on June 11 that her daughter was crying from hunger while trying to light wet wood to cook without electricity.
The Ministry of Education has moved the end of the school year to the period from June 15 to June 30 in response to the energy emergency, a measure that implicitly acknowledges that the State cannot guarantee minimum conditions in classrooms.
Carmona ends his chronicle without stories or consolation: "I can't bring myself to. I don't have the heart to deceive her that way. She asks again 'Why?', and inserts a finger through the fan's grille to spin the blades. Since I don't know what to say, I remain silent."
Filed under: