A jar of lukewarm water. That's all that remained in the refrigerator of a Cuban identified on TikTok as @la.cubanita621, who posted a video on Sunday that starkly captures the reality faced by thousands of families on the island: power outages lasting between 30 and 40 consecutive hours that ruin food purchased at high prices.
"There are so many hours... all the food, the little we had, which isn't given to us for free and is quite expensive, we had to throw it away," the woman says as she shows the empty interior of the appliance. "This is what we have left. Look, a bottle of water that isn't even cold."
The Cuban explains that the electricity they receive—barely one or two hours a day—is not enough to freeze anything. "This is a lack of respect; they cut off our power for 30, 40 hours; the only thing they leave us with is one or two hours, which is not enough to freeze anything at all," she says, her voice breaking.
The video was published on the same day that the national electrical deficit reached 2,120 MW, with only 980 MW available across the country. Three days earlier, on June 25th, that deficit had reached 2,208 MW, the worst historical record for Cuba, leaving 66-70% of the population without electricity simultaneously.
In June 2026, Havana is experiencing daily power outages ranging from twenty to 24 hours. In Matanzas, some areas have gone without electricity for a staggering 85 consecutive hours. Granma and Santiago de Cuba have surpassed 48 continuous hours. The Antonio Guiteras power plant, the largest in the country, recorded its 15th breakdown of the year just on June 15th.
The impact on food is devastating. According to the Food Monitor Program, 96% of Cubans have lost their purchasing power for food, and in May 2026, 33.9% of households had at least one member who went to bed hungry. Cuba imports approximately 80% of what it consumes, and domestic production has decreased by 67% in the last five years.
The video by @la.cubanita621 is not an isolated case. An 80-year-old woman showed in May her empty refrigerator, thawed due to power outages, and a mother documented four days without electricity cooking thawed meat. Displaying an empty refrigerator on social media has become a form of civic protest against a crisis that the regime does not publicly acknowledge.
Discontent has overflowed onto screens. On the same Sunday, Cubans in Old Havana shouted "Freedom!" after more than 40 hours without electricity. The Cuban Conflict Observatory recorded 1,311 protests just in May 2026, a 29.5% increase compared to the same month of the previous year, marking the highest monthly record in history. The regime has responded with police deployments and arrests.
The Cuban woman in the video concluded her complaint with a question that encapsulates the exhaustion of many: "How long will this go on? One stays silent, but in the end, being silent means I continue crying in the same misery." And then, with bitterness, she named what she showed: "This is a true cold of revolution, of resistance, of creativity."
Filed under: