The Cuban comedian Mario Sardiñas, known for his character Chequera from the show "Vivir del cuento," posted a video on Facebook where he takes an old musical theme to humorously portray the crisis that Cuba is experiencing.
On this occasion, the actor subverts the chorus of "40 y 20," a classic by the late Mexican singer José José, to denounce what thousands of people in the country are experiencing: 40 hours without electricity and 20 days without water.
In the clip, a neighbor asks Chequera why he is so happy, and he responds by singing to the tune of the famous song: "40 and 20, 40 and 20... we've been 40 hours without electricity and 20 days without water."
The punchline of the sketch encapsulates the public's exhaustion: "If we keep going without water and electricity, next week I'm declaring myself a weevil with cataracts."
The expression combines the "weevil"—an insect found in stored foods that can survive without liquid—with "cataracts," one of the most common causes of vision loss.
The song "40 y 20," released by José José in 1992, tells a love story between two people with a significant age difference. Chequera retains the melody but changes the meaning: the numbers no longer refer to ages but to hours without light and days without water, a reinterpretation that the Cuban audience immediately grasps.
The video surpassed 254,000 views, a figure that reflects the immediate resonance of the message among Cubans both on and off the Island.
The sketch arrives amid one of the most severe electricity and water crises that Cuba has experienced in recent years. The generation deficit has exceeded 2,000 MW in September, with some areas experiencing power outages lasting more than 32 continuous hours.
The water crisis is directly linked to the electricity supply: 87% of the water supply system depends on the electrical grid, meaning that without power, there is no pumping. Official data from May indicated that around 2.7 million Cubans lacked regular access to drinking water, while much of the remaining population received the service intermittently.
This is not the first video in which Chequera satirizes the crisis. This week, he reacted to the shortage of oil, liquefied gas, and water in another clip, and days earlier, he turned a food tray into an antenna to search for an Internet signal, a video that surpassed 334,000 views.
At the beginning of the month, he starred in a sketch about proverbs that no longer work in Cuba - including "water that you will not drink, let it flow" - which garnered over 64,000 views.
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