A Cuban from the municipality of Arroyo Naranjo in Havana became the face of the desperation experienced on the island by appearing in a viral video shared by exiled journalist Daniel Benítez, cooking with charcoal on an improvised stove, without water and without stable electricity.
"Cuba, look at how we are treated, cooking when you don't even know what to come up with to get the coal going. We can't take this anymore, there's no water, no electricity, this is horrible," the woman denounces in the 49-second recording, which garnered more than 37,000 views on Facebook.
The Cuban describes how the electricity was cut off and restored repeatedly throughout the day: "They turned it off, they turned it on, they turned it off, they turned it on, they turned it off. This is absolute madness, my friend."
His final call encapsulates the exhaustion of a population on the brink: "They're wiping out children, the elderly, everyone. They have us killing ourselves with stress. We can't go on like this anymore, please, do something."
What the video shows is not an isolated case.
Residents of the Los Pinos neighborhood, also in Arroyo Naranjo, reported on June 20 that they had experienced 26 consecutive hours without electricity. Another resident claimed on the same day to have accumulated 42 hours without power and more than three weeks without water.
The energy collapse has figures that explain it: as of the close of this Wednesday, the deficit in electricity generation in Cuba reaches between 2,035 and 2,075 MW against a nighttime demand of 3,250 MW.
On May 14, a historic maximum deficit of 2,174 MW was recorded, leaving more than 54% of the island without electricity simultaneously.
In the absence of gas and electricity, millions of Cubans have had to improvise methods to cook with charcoal or firewood, according to data from the Food Monitor Program, which estimates that 35% of the population has turned to these fuels.
The issue is that charcoal, which cost between 900 and 1,400 pesos per sack at the end of 2024, soared to between 3,200 and 5,000 pesos in June 2026, while the average state salary was around 6,930 pesos per month.
"I have one similar to that charcoal stove. Soon we won't be able to use it because coal is over 3,000 per sack," warned Yaisé Centeno in the comments of the video.
Yumary Zamora added, "We are crazy. We don't know what we're going to cook, and they haven't paid the retirees either."
Other Cubans who reacted to the video pointed out that the situation is not limited to Arroyo Naranjo.
"If it were only in Arroyo Naranjo, but it’s happening all over Cuba. It’s true, we don’t know what else to come up with," wrote Norges Dinza.
Maggy Morales was more straightforward: "There are many neighborhoods all over Cuba like this, without electricity, without water, and without money."
The gas crisis worsens the situation: the liquefied gas cylinder reached 50,000 pesos on June 16, with around 834,000 customers without supply.
Eighty-seven percent of Cuban aqueducts rely on electricity to pump water, making every power outage a crisis of multiple supplies.
The forced ingenuity of Cubans has led to solutions as extreme as adapting a pressure cooker to work on a charcoal stove or building stoves from dry almond leaves, while a mechanic from Mayabeque adapted a car to run on charcoal through the gasification of biomass.
Roxana Mugica summed up the outrage of many with a phrase that captures the regime's contradiction: "You have nothing, but for the funeral of the other murderer, there was light, water, and transportation. Down with the dictators."
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