A Cuban arrived on the island amid the darkness of the blackout and documented everything in a video that captures in images what millions feel: the overwhelming joy of a reunion that no power outage can extinguish.
The user @wendysbilbao, identified as Wen, posted a nearly three-minute clip on TikTok with the hashtag #malditadistancia and a description that says it all: "Cuba is missed." The video garnered over 2,400 views and 310 likes within its first few hours.
The moment couldn't have been more Cuban: Wen arrived just a day after the third nationwide blackout of 2026, the collapse of the National Electroenergetic System that occurred on Sunday starting at 12:15 PM, when the shutdown of a unit at the Nuevitas thermoelectric plant in Camagüey triggered a cascading disconnection that left the island's 9.6 million inhabitants without electricity.
But the darkness did not steal a single second of happiness from the reunion.
The video of Wen arrives at a time when surprise reunions in Cuba have become a viral trend on TikTok, with a particularity that can only happen on the island: they almost always occur in the dark. Just on Tuesday, another clip showed a mother "lying on the floor" upon seeing her son arrive as a surprise, in a video that also went viral that day.
The pattern has been repeating since the beginning of the year. On January 8, the TikToker William López surprised his grandmother during a blackout in one of the first videos of this trend in 2026. On June 1, @ailetsantos recorded her arrival after 25 hours without power and wrote: "Sorry for the quality, but there was no electricity. Still, getting home and hugging you all means everything to me." On July 4, a Cuban mother's surprise at seeing her son made her fall to the sidewalk, in a video that exceeded 223,000 views.
The paradox is as Cuban as son: the most severe electrical crisis in the country's recent history—with a deficit exceeding 2,100 MW, outages lasting up to 87 consecutive hours in Matanzas, and an average of 15 to 24 hours daily without power in Havana—unintentionally becomes the backdrop for the brightest embraces.
The day after the collapse on Sunday, the Electric Company of Havana had only restored power to 46% of the capital, about 131 circuits that millions of families rely on.
But for Wen, none of that mattered too much. The hashtag sums it up better than any report: #damndistance. Because when the hug comes, even the longest blackout in the world cannot extinguish it.
Filed under: