The Camagüey poet Alejandro Muñoz Aguilera published this week on Facebook a poem written in décimas titled "My Neighborhood and Its Dawn," dedicated to his community in Camagüey that had been experiencing 13 consecutive days without electricity.
The text did not arrive alone. On September 2, Muñoz Aguilera had published a detailed prose complaint about the first eight days of darkness in that same neighborhood, following the explosion of a transformer that left 32 homes without power. Technicians from the local electricity company acknowledged on their first visit that the equipment was faulty and that there were no spare parts: "We have to wait because there are no transformers, they are unavailable."
On the second visit, instead of bringing the necessary equipment, they reconnected the fuse circuit —the "caballito"— to the damaged transformer. The poet anticipated it, recorded it with his phone, and documented the second explosion.
In the poem published this week, that collective desperation transforms into images of a starkness difficult to ignore. The first stanza opens with a metaphor of death and sleeplessness: “The night is the single frame / that the dead see, / the dunes of the deserts / accumulate in my bed. / My subconscious demands / with the suture in its mouth / while the crying knocks / insistently at my door / to speak to me of the people / who are losing their minds.”
Another stanza transforms daily survival into literary matter: "Incinerating my titles / I heat the soup. I bite / the cord, swallow, get lost / in the light that capitulates." The closing of the poem is the darkest: "Our children will mutate / into little creatures without eyes / and our elderly, crippled, / may not see another dawn. / Our walls will be / a beast that wounds us. / And a Cuban will say: asere, / asere, there’s no doubt / that when God sneezes / another neighborhood dies."
In his prose complaint, the poet had already pointed out that in the affected neighborhood live more than 20 children and numerous elderly people with serious illnesses. "And here we are, without 'caballito', without transformer, without electricity and without hope, in a neighborhood where more than TWENTY (20) children live, […] children who do not sleep, children whom I personally hear crying every night, swimming in sweat and besieged by mosquitoes," he wrote. He added: "the indifference, neglect, and carelessness with which we are treated down here hurts."
The case fits into a documented pattern in Camagüey over the past few months. The writer María Antonia Borroto Trujillo, a Doctor in Communication Sciences and a member of the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba, reported 48 consecutive hours without electricity and the inability to file a formal complaint. Residents of La Virginia, in Najasa, reported power outages lasting a week or more with such unstable electricity—going on and off more than twenty times in the scheduled three hours—that it damaged appliances.
The national dimension of the crisis is equally alarming. The Minister of Energy and Mines, Vicente de la O Levy, admitted before the National Assembly in July that there are communities experiencing up to 105 consecutive days without electricity, attributing the situation to obsolete transformers that cannot be replaced. In August, the generation deficit exceeded 2,400 MW and so far in 2026, the National Electric System has experienced seven total collapses.
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