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Ileana Legón Pereira, a mother living in Ciego de Ávila, posted a heartbreaking message on Facebook last Wednesday, in which she seeks help for her two children with serious illnesses, whose situation has become unsustainable due to the power outages exceeding 22 hours a day in that province.
His son Christopher Max Espinosa Legón, eight years old, suffers from cerebral palsy with multiple brain malformations, moderate hydrocephalus with an Evans index of 68%, a cyst in a brain ventricle awaiting surgery, Lennox-Gastaut syndrome, and severe autism with self-aggressive behaviors. The child neither walks nor communicates.
Her daughter Gabriela Alejandra Piñeiro Legón, 13 years old, suffers from severe multisystemic Systemic Lupus Erythematosus and Rheumatoid Arthritis. She has undergone surgery twice on both hips —the first in 2023 for bilateral Coxa Valga Antersa, and the second at the end of 2024 to remove material due to rejection and a bacterial infection that threatened to disintegrate the bone of her left hip— and she needs a third corrective surgery.
The lack of electricity has turned Christopher's care into a daily emergency. The child relies solely on blended food, which cannot be prepared or preserved without power. "My little one has lost an enormous amount of weight; when we compare photos from winter to now, it’s noticeable," Ileana wrote.
Without access to animations or music—stimuli that keep him calm—the child experiences severe crises. “He is irritable all the time, becomes very aggressive, hurts himself, bites himself, tries to pull off his ears until they bleed, and has pulled out hair from the front half of his head on several occasions. He is being medicated by a Child Psychiatrist, but even so, he is not improving,” reported the mother.
This is further compounded by the difficulty of obtaining the five or six disposable diapers the child needs each day, an item that is hard to come by in Cuba.
Ileana herself is suffering from severely deteriorated health: she has epilepsy, intracranial hypertension, cortical atrophy of the frontal lobe, and Arnold's occipital neuralgia. On December 23, 2025, she experienced a complete left bundle branch block of the heart, interpreted as a heart attack, with ongoing complications still under study.
"As a mother, it is very difficult for me to make a public appeal like this and expose my children in this way, as they are the most precious thing I have in my life. But I have reached a point of such desperation that I don't know what to do," she wrote.
His specific request is to obtain a home generator. "If you can't help, please share my post to give it more visibility and leave it in the hands of Almighty God, hoping it touches hearts," he said.
Ciego de Ávila was declared in a condition of “maximum blackout” since March 16, 2026, with outages that at times exceeded 30 consecutive hours. In March, residents of the Vista Alegre neighborhood staged a casserole protest after more than 29 hours without electricity or water.
The electrical collapse occurs within the context of an unprecedented health crisis: Cuba has a surgical waiting list of over 96,000 patients, including more than 11,000 children, while approximately five million people with chronic illnesses are facing interruptions in their treatments due to a lack of medications.
"You cannot imagine the state of desperation that leads me to expose my children in this way on social media," concluded Ileana, whose case reflects the plight of thousands of Cuban families caught between illness and government neglect.
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