A Cuban entrepreneur published a video on social media that brutally summarizes the frustration of millions of Cubans with the official discourse: cooking with charcoal alongside her mother, Yilian Illas Villafaña directed a pointed critique at those who call for "creative resistance" without ever having experienced the crisis faced by the Cuban people.
“Resist creatively,” say those who don’t see my mother and me trying to ignite the charcoal or struggling with the oil stove to move our venture forward, to be able to put a meal on the table,” Villafaña says in the video.
The target of criticism is the language that President Miguel Díaz-Canel has made a ideological banner to justify the crisis. On January 2, 2026, commemorating the anniversary of the Revolution, Díaz-Canel invoked "67 years of creative resistance", and in February he called on the population to face severe cuts with "creative resistance, effort, and talent."
Villafaña dismantles that narrative with the everyday reality she experiences alongside her mother: power outages lasting over 24 hours, days without water, months without gas, and nights without food.
"Resist creatively, say those who do not know what a blackout of more than 24 hours is, those who do not know what it means to go days without water or months without gas, those who do not have dark circles under their eyes," she states in the video.
The entrepreneur does not stop there. She also targets those who have never witnessed the human dimension of the crisis: “Those who have not seen millions of Cubans go to sleep with nothing in their stomachs say the same. The list is long, but resist, resist, resist, and resist, say those who have never had to resist anything.”
The video arrives at the worst energy moment in Cuba in decades, with blackouts that have exceeded 40 consecutive hours.
The electrical crisis is compounded by a shortage of medications: more than 70% of essential drugs were out of stock in state pharmacies in April, and 100,000 patients, including 12,000 children, were waiting for surgeries due to power outages and lack of supplies.
The popular rejection of the "resistance" discourse is not limited to social media. Clanging pots and pans erupted in several neighborhoods of Havana —Regla, Vedado, Guanabacoa— as a direct response to the blackouts, and other Cuban citizens have raised their voices in similar videos that are widely circulating. An elderly woman asked days ago how she is supposed to survive this crisis.
Filed under: