Livania Núñez Ricaño, mother of three daughters residing in the Porvenir neighborhood of Boyeros, Havana, posted a video on Facebook this Tuesday in which she urgently denounces the situation she faces after leaving the hospital with two of her girls, who were admitted for malnutrition and a virus.
The testimony was recorded two days after receiving medical clearance on July 19, and it starkly reflects the simultaneous collapse of basic services experienced by thousands of Cuban families: without electricity, without water, and without the means to preserve food.
"I have already checked in, I left the hospital with the girls, I don't even know how many times I'm going to have to check in again because the water needs to be boiled but it doesn't give you any time, no cold water, the mosquitoes are unbelievably big, it's constantly cooking with firewood," the visibly exhausted woman recounted.
According to his account, the electrical circuit M1603, to which his neighborhood belongs, receives only two hours of power each day. The night before the video was recorded, the electricity came on at 10 PM and went out at midnight, he mentioned.
He reported that without refrigeration, the only chicken he managed to buy to feed his daughters went bad. “Both of my daughters have been discharged, but they can’t eat because the little chicken I could buy is already spoiled and now infested with maggots, because there's nothing that can be done, and they can’t eat firewood,” he said.
Cooking with wood has left every meal coated in soot. "Pure soot, pure soot, because it's just too much, and my girls don't want to eat because the food tastes like soot, like wood," she said, holding out her blackened hands to the camera.
Livania also pointed out the inequality she perceives in the distribution of electricity: "The courts do have generators, panels, everything, right? And here we are struggling with the children, with the elders, they don't care about anything, nothing matters to them."
His final message was a cry of collective frustration: "I can't take it anymore. And like me, all Cubans feel this way; the thing is, no one wants to speak up because here you can't even talk anymore, because if you tell the truth, then it's considered bad."
The video was supported by the Movimiento Democracia, the Movimiento Opositores por una Nueva República, ARC, and Cuba Decide, organizations that called on the international community and human rights organizations to address these testimonies.
The Porvenir neighborhood is among those affected by the severe blackouts on July 12, when nearly all circuits in Havana lost service. In the capital, outages average between 15 and 24 hours daily, with peaks of up to 35 hours in some municipalities.
The case of Livania is not isolated. In June, Ileana Legón Pereira, a mother in Ciego de Ávila, reported that daily power outages lasting more than 22 hours prevented her from using medical equipment for her seriously ill children.
The food crisis underlying the testimony has alarming figures: according to the Food Monitor Program, 96.91% of the Cuban population lacked adequate access to food in April 2026, and 33.9% of households had at least one member who went to bed hungry. Deaths due to malnutrition increased by 74% between 2022 and 2023, according to data from the National Statistics Office.
"How long is this going to last, if you're not going to put it on for even three hours, four hours, or anything? How long, how long?" Livania concluded her complaint with a question that encapsulates the exhaustion of an entire community.
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