Three days without electricity and his children at the brink of desperation: That is the reality that led Eduardo Ragnar Lothbrok Muñoz Mora, a resident of Campo Florido in East Havana, to post a video on Facebook where he highlights the crisis in Cuba and admits to seeing only one way out.
"I have been without power and cut off from communication here for three days, going crazy, trying to keep the kids calm, coming up with ways for them to sleep, stay entertained, and eat," recounts the man, originally from Manzanillo, Granma province.
The immediate trigger was the collapse of the National Electroenergetic System (SEN) that occurred on August 2 at 10:43 PM, but Muñoz Mora wasn't even aware of it at the time. When the national grid went down, his neighborhood had already been without power for 20 hours. "We didn't even know that the SEN had failed because we had already been in a blackout for almost 20 hours when it happened," he explains. "We found out the next day when we were nearing thirty-plus hours without power."
When they tried to restore the service in the area, the situation worsened. "Some transformers blew out. They restored it about three hours ago. And in those three hours, of course, it has gone out ten times." At the time the video was recorded, the power outage had returned.
What weighs most heavily in her testimony is not the heat or the darkness, but the exhaustion of watching her children suffer without being able to do anything.
"I believe it's time for me to leave this country; let someone else fix it, I can't do this to my children," she wrote while sharing the video, a phrase that captures the frustration driving thousands of Cuban families towards emigration.
"This is madness, gentleman. I don't know how one can be so oblivious knowing that people hate them," he concludes in the video.
A country punished with darkness
The outages on August 2 and 3 were, respectively, the sixth and seventh national blackouts of the year. The reconnection process was slow and partial. On Monday, Havana had barely recovered 14% of its customers, with priority given to 19 hospitals.
The testimony of the father in Campo Florido adds to a chain of stories that are being shared on social media, where several content creators in Cuba have expressed how painful the decision to leave the country has been, as they cannot endure the energy crisis.
An influencer and Cuban mother expressed after leaving Cuba: “I feel that my son deserves to grow up in a place where dreaming is not a luxury, where working is sufficient, and where living is not just surviving.”
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