A woman identified as Raquel García Castro, residing in Palma Soriano, a municipality in the province of Santiago de Cuba, starred in a heartbreaking video in which she tears up while denouncing the living conditions she suffers under the Cuban regime.
In the clip just over a minute long, shared by exiled social communicator Yosmany Mayeta Labrada, Raquel does not hide her political frustration or her personal despair.
"I don't want Díaz-Canel, I never wanted Raúl either, I have never been involved in politics, but I can't take it anymore," says the woman with a broken voice, rejecting the entire chain of leadership of the dictatorship in one stroke.
The Cuban woman describes a life on the edge: she cooks with charcoal because there’s no electricity, power outages spoil her food, and the heat forces her to sleep on a mattress in her yard.
"Cooking with coal, what desire am I going to take to have a coffee? What desire causes my food to go bad? Because these blackouts are driving me crazy," she laments.
The decline also affects her mental health: “I had to see a psychiatrist and I don’t have medication either; I feel like I'm going crazy,” she confesses.
Additionally, she shared a phrase that summarizes the exhaustion of thousands of Cubans: "I don't feel like showering, I don't feel like doing anything. I'm almost crazy, I'm crazy."
The electrical crisis is compounded by the collapse of other basic services. Raquel reports that the children in the neighborhood sell water jugs for between 50 and 60 pesos, that she herself has to buy water containers, and that she has been unable to cash her check because there is no cash available at the bank.
As if that weren't enough, according to the report, those who manage to get paid do so at 45% of the nominal value: "I feel like I can't take it anymore."
"I am speaking on behalf of the people of Cuba," said Raquel García Castro before breaking down in tears, a phrase that thousands of Cubans on social media have embraced as their own.
The testimony comes at one of the worst energy moments of the year for Cuba. Between July 6 and 14, the National Electric System collapsed three times, totaling five complete blackouts in 2026.
In Santiago de Cuba, the Antonio Maceo thermoelectric plant is undergoing maintenance, and Palma Soriano is reporting outages with an average duration of 24 hours.
The shortage of medications further worsens the situation: at the national level, there are 461 out of 651 essential drugs missing from the Basic List, which means that only about 30% is available in state pharmacies.
In Santiago de Cuba, there is only one psychiatric hospital, which is in poor condition, to serve the entire province.
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