Cubana estimates that it has lived 44,300 hours without electricity since 1985: the equivalent of more than five years in blackout

A Cuban born in Havana in 1985 used artificial intelligence to calculate how many hours of her life she has spent without electricity, and the result condensed decades of energy crisis into a single number: 44,300 hours, equivalent to more than five complete years in the dark.

Yulieta Hernández Díaz shared the exercise on her Facebook profile, where she explained that she asked ChatGPT to estimate that figure based on her date of birth —September 11, 1985— and the historical evolution of power outages in Cuba.

"The result was striking: of the approximately 357,500 hours I have lived, I have spent around 44,300 hours without electricity," the author wrote.

The calculation took into account four major phases of the Cuban energy crisis: the Special Period of the 1990s, when outages averaged up to 12 hours per day following the collapse of Soviet oil subsidies; the years of relative electrical stability; the so-called "solidarity blackout" that began in 2019; and the sustained worsening from 2022 to the present.

Hernández was clear about the limits of the exercise: "It is an estimate, not an exact figure, but it is based on historical data and the known evolution of blackouts in Cuba."

However, the symbolic impact of the number transcends mathematical precision.

"Beyond the fact that the exact number may vary, it forces us to think about how much time in our lives we have lost waiting for the power to come back," he noted.

The publication arrives at one of the worst moments of the Cuban energy crisis. In May 2026, the country broke its historical record for electrical deficit with 2,174 MW, leaving 70% of the island in the dark simultaneously.

In March 2026, Cuba experienced its longest general blackout: 29 hours and 29 minutes of total disconnection from the national electrical system. This Thursday, there were 7,373 reports of blackouts throughout the country, of which 1,676 were in Havana.

The Cuban capital is currently experiencing between 20 and 24 hours of daily electricity outages, while areas of Matanzas have accumulated up to 85 consecutive hours without power so far in June.

The situation worsened further when Venezuela halted its oil shipments to the island in January 2026.

The collapse of the system has structural roots that no government has managed to resolve in over three decades.

Experts estimate that restoring Cuba's electrical infrastructure would require between 8,000 and 10,000 million dollars and between three and five years of sustained work.

Hernández Díaz's publication is not just a mathematical exercise; it is a biographical testimony of what it means to have been born and raised in Cuba since 1985, with darkness as a constant companion in life.