Leonardo Padura published an opinion piece this Saturday in the Spanish newspaper El País titled "In Search of Lost Time" in which he portrays the Cuban crisis as a "war for survival" and describes his fellow countrymen as beings "immersed in a ditch of time," asking themselves, "How long?" with no one—not even the future—providing an answer.
The Havanese writer constructs the text using time as a guiding thread: he examines it from the perspectives of physics and literature before landing on its most brutal dimension, the existential one that millions of Cubans endure daily. "How much longer is this going to last?" he writes, noting that this question "may even be the most precise and, right now, commonly raised" among his compatriots.
The portrait it paints is stark: Cubans who have electricity for only "a couple of hours a day or even none for several days," with refrigerators reduced to mere storage; summer nights when it is nearly impossible to sleep without a fan; running water that comes "once in a while, with weeks and even months of drought"; food cooked with charcoal due to the lack of fuel; an inability to travel even for medical attention; and an internet connection that "almost never" exists.
"All of that, and more, happening simultaneously, and without bombings or invasions, like those in Gaza or Ukraine," emphasizes the writer.
Padura describes the collective response to a situation that most cannot change—“because there are no mechanisms to do so”—as a way of somatizing the overwhelming stress: “with anger but with resignation, with rum and reggaeton if possible, without counting the hours because the notion of time has become another refrigerator that has lost its meaning.”
The article traces the origin of the debacle to the 1990s: “when the country stopped being virtual, supported by the lavish and self-serving Soviet coffers, and became the most real country in which they have lived since then: a country with a devastated economy that, due to sustained political incapacities over time, has failed to achieve any recovery.”
As an additional catalyst for the current deterioration, Padura points to the pressure policy from Washington, which he believes has led to restrictions that prevent the arrival of fuel and other resources to the island. In response, the regime approved in June 2026 a package of 176 economic opening measures —which includes the authorization of private banking and private pharmacies— that the writer considers to be overdue, and whose implementation would represent, he says, "a 180-degree turn in the country's socioeconomic structure."
This skepticism is not new. In July, Padura had already pointed out in another article that the State, although it concedes economic ground, intends to preserve "the most important and efficient of its industries, that of control". And at the end of May, he noted in La Vanguardia that in Cuba "band-aids have been applied where deep surgeries should have been performed", and this includes the entire social, political, and economic fabric.
The text is published days after Padura received the Liber 2026 Award for the most outstanding Ibero-American author, granted by the Federation of Guilds of Publishers of Spain, making him the first Cuban writer to receive it.
The energy crisis described has figures to support it: generation deficits exceeding 2,000 MW and outages of more than 22 hours a day in some provinces. The ONEI reported in July 2026 that Cuba ended the previous year with a negative migratory balance of 245,264 people, while the effective population of the island fell to 9,434,593 inhabitants.
Padura, who has reaffirmed his decision to remain in Cuba, concludes the article by describing millions of people as "victims of various political decisions coming from different fronts," lacking the ability to change their circumstances and with the only possible escape— for those who can take it— being to emigrate: "Caught in a pit of time from which they ask 'how long will this last?', and no one, no one answers them. Not even the future."
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