A video lasting just 13 seconds, posted on Saturday by the page of Facebook Holguín MiciudadHoy, showed dozens of people crowded at one of the service stations on Avenida de los Libertadores in the city of Holguín, waiting to buy gasoline, a scene that sparked outrage on social media.
The image is accompanied by the text "A few years ago, we thought this was the worst... What a struggle Cubans face," a phrase that captures the accumulated exhaustion of a province where lines for fuel have been ongoing since February, when drivers were already spending whole nights at the service stations.
The dozens of comments generated by the clip reflect a mix of resignation and indignation. "Every day, we think we’ve hit rock bottom and that we will start to rise to the surface. But it's incredible, unpredictable; every day, rock bottom seems to move further away. It’s like utopia," wrote a user.
Another summed up the sentiment with a striking phrase: "In communism, things can always get worse."
There were those who pointed out that the scarcity has even surpassed the possibility of waiting in line. "There’s no longer even a memory of gasoline," one internet user noted. Another was more straightforward: "Now there are no lines and no fuel."
The video emerges at the worst moment of the Cuban energy crisis. On Friday, the Electric Union acknowledged that there is no imported fuel in the country to sustain distributed generation or the power plants in Havana, with over 1,200 MW halted for that reason.
The neighboring province of Guantánamo has gone several days without receiving state fuel, to the extent that its authorities proposed buying diesel and gasoline from small and medium-sized enterprises to maintain essential services.
Cuba produces only 40,000 barrels of oil daily when it needs 110,000, and the interruption of shipments from Venezuela, which provided between 32,000 and 35,000 barrels, has worsened the deficit since January, following the capture of former president Nicolás Maduro.
Lines at Cuban gas stations exceeded 15 hours of waiting during the most critical moments of April, as the government limited official sales to gasoline in dollars with a cap of 20 liters per vehicle.
By June, the informal price of fuel had reached 6,000 pesos per liter, up to eight times higher than in January, while the government set the official dollarized price at 2.60 dollars per liter in May.
Meanwhile, illegal fuel sales proliferated in the eastern province with minimal oversight; by August, authorities had only imposed four fines of 60 pesos, an amount that the official press itself deemed laughable.
Cuba purchased $156.8 million worth of fuel from the United States between January and July, of which $61.1 million were in the seventh month. However, this supply goes to the private sector and does not alleviate the shortages in state channels nor for the average citizen.
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