In Cuba, a blackout no longer solely determines when a light bulb turns on. It can also decide when to cook, do laundry, charge a phone, take a shower, relax, and even when a couple can have a moment of intimacy.
That is the everyday reality that the Cuban writer Yasser Sosa Tamayo has turned into a sort of "manual" for living on the island.
The activist also shared this Thursday on his reflection: "There are countries where electricity lights up the house. Here, sometimes, it decides when you can experience it," he wrote.
Sosa listed some of those routines affected by the availability of electricity: washing, cooking, charging the phone, or showering, but he took the reflection even further into the realm of intimacy.
"Because the Cuban, even when tired and with empty pockets, still has the desire to live. And also to make love," he noted.
The problem, he added, is trying to do it with temperatures above 30 °C, in a small room, without a fan, with a child sleeping nearby and with water that must be reserved for the following day.
“So even desire makes calculations”, she summarized.
For the writer, power outages affect much more than just appliances. A phone call, a visit, a movie, a conversation, a cold beer, or a night of intimacy can all be postponed simply because there is no electricity.
"It may seem like a small thing. But a life is made precisely of those things," he noted.
Her reflection highlights precisely those small sacrifices that often go unrecorded in statistics: sleepless nights, rushed showers, uncelebrated birthdays, interrupted conversations, postponed plans, and affectionate moments that must wait.
"That doesn't show up in any statistics. But the body knows," he stated.
According to Sosa, the constant adjustment to scarcity forces Cubans to accommodate "dreams, hunger, wallets, desires, plans," until reaching a conclusion that summarizes the essence of his text: "we are learning to live with less life".
The writer clarified that he was not talking about luxury, but about basic actions such as eating without having to calculate every expense, sleeping without enduring the heat, or spending time with a partner without constantly worrying about when the electricity will be restored.
"To have a Tuesday that is just Tuesday," he wrote.
His reflection concludes with a question: "How much life can one postpone before 'later' becomes a form of slowly dying?"
The proposal aligns with recent testimonies about how the crisis has increasingly reduced daily life to a series of calculations and survival strategies.
This Thursday, a Cuban estimated that the monthly expenses for a small family in Havana exceed 200,000 pesos, including food, hygiene, medications, transport, and utilities, while even excluding several products from the total.
And although it may seem unrelated to what Sosa describes, the constant worry about meeting basic needs also ends up affecting couple life, adding tension, exhaustion, and emotional strain to daily coexistence.
Moreover, this is not the first time that Sosa uses everyday scenes to depict the impact of the crisis.
In July, he stated that the true "blackout" in Cuba was having stopped questioning whether the current conditions could be considered life, and he challenged the normalization of increasingly greater deprivations.
A month later, he returned to the topic and pointed out that blackouts not only deprive people of electricity but also of hours of life, as they force individuals to spend a significant part of their day gathering water, cooking, preserving food, or simply waiting for the power to return.
The impact of power outages is not limited to personal testimonies: a study published in Social Science & Medicine, based on an online survey conducted with 415 Cuban adults between July and November 2025, found a correlation between prolonged blackouts, disruption of daily life, and very severe levels of stress, anxiety, and depression within the studied sample.
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