A satirical text published on Facebook by Angelo Del Castillo has become one of the most accurate portrayals of the collapse of public services in Cuba, as it pokes fun at the official statements from the main state enterprises on the Island, which casually announce the absence of the services for which they were created.
The viral post by Del Castillo points directly to Aguas de La Habana, ETECSA, the Unión Eléctrica, and the ministries of Transport, Agriculture, Housing, and Health, all showing the same pattern: communicating the lack of what they are supposed to guarantee.
Aguas de La Habana: 'We inform you of service disruptions with the water supply.' Excuse me? But you are AGUAS DE LA HABANA! That's all you do. You don't do anything else," writes Del Castillo.
The irony continues with the telecommunications company: «ETECSA: 'We are experiencing interruptions in communications.' Man, you are the communications company. If you can't communicate, what are you? A sign language academy?»
About the Electric Union, the author compares its communications to an absurd situation: "It's like a pilot saying: 'We inform you that we have no planes, but the desire to fly is there.'"
The conclusion of the text points to the only state organization that, according to Del Castillo, performs its function without fail: "In the end, the only state agency that operates with admirable efficiency is the one that collects. That one never has breakdowns."
The satire does not exaggerate. Each sector mentioned is experiencing a documented and structural crisis. Aguas de La Habana operates with only 50% of its pumping capacity, with more than 5,000 active leaks causing between 40% and 70% of the water to be lost before it reaches homes. Only 48% of the Cuban population has regular access to drinking water.
In October 2025, more than 156,000 people were affected by the water crisis in Havana, and the government's response was to send seven water trucks to Regla following a protest by women.
By April 2026, an NGO was already documenting a black market for private water tankers selling water loads for between 18,000 and 26,000 Cuban pesos.
In the electricity sector, Unión Eléctrica recorded an energy deficit exceeding 1,500 MW in May 2025, with blackouts lasting up to 38 hours a day in some areas.
Cuba went without imported crude from Venezuela and Mexico between December 2025 and April 2026, which exacerbated the cascading collapse: without electricity, ETECSA's network fails, and the water pumps stop working.
Public transportation, for its part, plummeted by 93% between January and September 2025, with only 219 out of 558 national buses operational in December of that year.
This citizen exhaustion occurs at a time when the regime of Díaz-Canel announced in June 2026 the largest package of economic reforms in decades: 176 transformations across 23 sectors approved by the Communist Party on June 17 and ratified by the National Assembly two days later, aimed at granting some autonomy to state-owned enterprises to export, import, and set their own wages.
However, the popular response to these reforms oscillates between hope and deep skepticism, and the satirical humor on social media remains, as reflected in Del Castillo's text, the most accurate gauge of a population that has been waiting for decades for something, anything, to work.
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