A Cuban decided not to lament his broken refrigerator or the endless blackouts: he laid it down in the yard, filled it with water, and got inside as if it were a jacuzzi. Content creator Yendry García captured the moment and shared it last Monday on her TikTok account @locuras_con_yendry, where the clip quickly became a phenomenon on social media.
The 25-second video shows the protagonist immersed in the appliance repurposed as an improvised bathtub, right in his backyard, with a smile that suggests he has found the perfect solution to two problems at once: the sweltering heat and the useless device.
"Sir, don't struggle with life here in Cuba, don't struggle with the blackouts. If your refrigerator breaks down like mine did, think of it as a jacuzzi. Well, you won't have a heart attack just because of these blackouts. Look, I enjoy it here, look, look, it’s nice," García says in the clip, with the description "Don't go crazy" as a punchline.
The ingenuity is not free: Cuba is experiencing its worst electrical crisis in recent history in June 2026. The National Electroenergetic System records generation deficits exceeding 2,000 MW daily, with a availability of only 950 to 1,015 MW against a demand of between 2,570 and 3,050 MW.
In Havana, power cuts range between 20 and 22 hours daily. In provinces like Matanzas, residents have reported more than 72 consecutive hours without electricity, with barely two hours of supply during that time. In Santiago de Cuba, the electric company itself admitted that it cannot guarantee even two hours of power daily to its users.
The Antonio Guiteras thermoelectric plant, one of the most important in the country, recorded its eleventh disconnection of the year by mid-June, with its fifth disconnection occurring in just five weeks. Additionally, 106 distributed generation plants remained out of service due to a lack of fuel, which represents 1,203 MW of unavailable power.
In that context, with temperatures exceeding 35 degrees Celsius and refrigerators becoming prized possessions, losing one is a significant blow for any Cuban family. This is why the emergence of the improvised jacuzzi has resonated so strongly.
The video of the refrigerator-bathtub joins a trend of Cuban inventions in the face of crisis that is continuously circulating through social media: a rice cooker transformed into an electric stove, a Cuban woman cooking spaghetti with firewood on the balcony, homemade fans made from cardboard and sticks, or a stove fueled with leaves from the almendrón tree.
Humor in Cuba remains one of the few things that blackouts cannot extinguish.
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