A Cuban identified on TikTok as @yemayasitaasessu posted a video this Friday in which she desperately denounces the power outages that her community is experiencing, recounting more than 20 consecutive hours without electricity and describing a situation that, in her own words, "is not life."
In her testimony, the woman recounts that from midnight on Thursday until eight o'clock on Friday evening, they had no electricity, and that when it was finally restored, it lasted less than 15 minutes before cutting out again.
“Sir, this can’t go on any longer, we can’t take it anymore,” she says at the beginning of the video, visibly exhausted.
The Cuban describes how prolonged blackouts make it impossible to preserve food: "You go outside, everything is incredibly expensive, unaffordable, and then you buy a pack of chicken for 6,000 pesos and you have to eat it quickly or it goes bad."
It also mentions the unbearable heat, the mosquitoes, and the streets littered with garbage as part of a reality that accumulates without a solution: "The lamps can’t take it anymore, the fans can’t take it anymore, this can't be endured any longer."
In the video description, the woman wrote: "Enough already, we can’t take this anymore, they are killing us while we are alive. What Cubans are experiencing is not life; we are human beings, not animals."
The testimony arrives amid a historic electricity crisis. The Electric Union (UNE) reported on Thursday a maximum impact of 2,081 MW and projected a deficit of 2,075 MW for the nighttime peak, with only 950 MW available against a demand of 2,570 MW.
Of that deficit, 1,203 MW was directly attributed to a lack of fuel, with 106 distributed generation plants offline for the same reason.
The situation in Santiago de Cuba is especially critical: since June 16, the provincial electric company reorganized the outages into nine blocks, leaving each area with only one or two hours of electricity per day.
On Thursday, massive protests with pots and pans erupted in Santiago de Cuba in neighborhoods such as Reparto Sueño, Micro 2, Santa Bárbara, Antonio Maceo, and Altamira, while residents of the Havana neighborhood "El Hueco" reported over 36 consecutive hours without electricity.
This Friday, residents of Santos Suárez, in the Diez de Octubre municipality of Havana, set fire to trash in the streets as a sign of protest against power outages, while the regime responded with police deployments, militarization of the streets, and internet blackouts.
The extreme cases documented in June include 72 hours without electricity in Los Mangos, Matanzas, and 85 consecutive hours in another circuit of that province, in addition to areas in Diez de Octubre that on June 16 had only 20 minutes of electrical service throughout the day.
A study published on May 25 indicated that prolonged blackouts in Cuba are linked to depression, anxiety, and severe stress, making them a public health issue.
The Cuban closed her video with a question that encapsulates the exhaustion of millions: "But how far are they going to push someone?"
Filed under: