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Iraida Calzadilla, a retired journalist who dedicated decades to the official newspaper Granma of the Communist Party and continues to work as a university professor, published a passionate article on Facebook in which she criticizes the Electric Union (UNE) and, implicitly, the very government she has served throughout her professional life.
The text, titled "UNE: ANOTHER PSYCHOLOGICAL VIOLENCE IS ADDED," was published days after the mass blackout on July 6, when the complete collapse of the National Electric System left 9.6 million people without electricity, marking the third national blackout of the year.
Calzadilla describes the uncertainty regarding the schedule of the "alumbrón," the inability to preserve food, and the new distress of not knowing to which circuit each home belongs as forms of systematic abuse: "We live in anticipation. Trapped at home until the so-called light arrives. Everything else is on hold. There are no plans. There is no present, and we cannot foresee a future. What chaos and what a mess."
The journalist demands accountability straightforwardly: "UNE, have a little dignity and provide an explanation to a people that truly deserve it."
The portrait of daily life in Cuba is devastating: "The life of a Cuban is terrible: no electricity, astronomical prices for any purchase or service, difficulties in transferring money, lack of water, shortage of medical services and medicines, a crisis in education, a loss of human values and civility... in a chilling list."
To illustrate the depth of the crisis, Calzadilla evokes the "inedible and disgusting" food items from the rationing during the Special Period of the 90s—meat paste, duck paste, banana peel hash—and concludes that Cuba has not been a laboratory of survival, but rather "of mere subsistence."
Then it points directly to the inequality that sustains the system: “Now it is more evident that hardship has always affected the majority, not everyone. The same people who also do not experience it now,” implicitly referring to leaders who demand sacrifices without suffering them.
Her complaint comes after the statements made by Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro, grandson of Raúl Castro and known as "El Cangrejo," who, in an interview with the American media USA Today, said that it pains him greatly that people cannot live as he does, while appearing in Hermès sneakers, a Hugo Boss t-shirt, and a Rolex Submariner watch.
The closing statement by the veteran journalist is a direct challenge to the official narrative: "I want to see who dares to ask me for more creative resilience while basic and even non-basic needs are well met."
The "creative resistance" has been for years the central concept with which the ruler Miguel Díaz-Canel urges Cubans to survive the economic crisis with ingenuity.
In March, he cited the use of coal and firewood for cooking as an example. It wasn't until June 18, during the Extraordinary Plenary of the PCC Central Committee, that he himself admitted that "resistance alone is not enough" and acknowledged that there are "obstacles that do not come from outside or from blockades".
Calzadilla's voice carries a particular symbolic weight because it does not come from dissent or independent journalism, but from the heart of the system that she defended and helped sustain for decades.
It is not the first time that the journalist has documented in the first person the deterioration of her living conditions. In June 2025, she was photographed waiting on the threshold of a bank to collect a pension that, as she herself reported, was not even given to her in full.
In December 2022, she reported that she spent 20 days waiting in line at a currency exchange to buy 100 dollars and was unable to do so because the government changed the system without prior notice.
His colleague Roberto Pérez Betancourt, also a state journalist and National Journalism Award winner, summarized in September 2025 the situation of retirees in the system with a phrase that resonates just like Calzadilla's: "I never imagined my old age like this."
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