A young Cuban filmed his own home to show the world what it means to survive in Cuba this year, and the result is a stark portrait of a crisis that seems to have no end.
Emanuel González Moral, a content creator on Facebook, posted a video that summarizes in just over a minute the daily collapse faced by millions of Cubans: without gas, without electricity, without running water, and with empty pots.
"I live in Cuba, and living here is like waking up every day in a horror movie. Forget what they tell you. Today I'm going to show you the face of a country that is falling apart," González Moral says at the beginning of the clip.
The images show how she cooks with charcoal because neither gas nor electricity are viable options.
"The reality forced us to go back 100 years," he states. The refrigerator, instead of preserving food, only serves to store water. Opening it, he says, "brings more heat than closing it."
Hygiene is not unaffected by the crisis either. Without running water, bathing relies on buckets filled in advance. "Cuban hygiene is based on buckets and patience," he sums up with a mix of irony and exhaustion.
The most revealing part of the video occurs while he is recording: the power goes out. "Get ready for three in the morning. This is an infinite loop," he says in front of the camera. In the end, he shows the bottom of a nearly empty pot: "Scraping the pot to see if something miraculously appears. It's tough that this is the routine for many Cubans."
"It's ironic, we have one of the most beautiful sunsets in the world, a sky that looks surreal, but it only serves to adorn the entrance of another dark night. I won't stay silent any longer because the silence is consuming us. We are alive by miracle," concluded González Moral in the video.
The clip is not an isolated case in González Moral's journey. Earlier this month, he published another one in which he described having electricity as living like a millionaire for a few hours: toasting bread, watching a movie on the laptop, or finding a frozen yogurt in the refrigerator had become luxuries.
"The odds of freezing something in Cuba nowadays is 1%," he admitted then. In August, he showcased what can be purchased with 15 dollars on the island: a small bag of ketchup, tuna, elbow pasta, rice, hair cream, condensed milk, malt, and flour.
The energy crisis depicted in the video has concrete figures. Cuba suffered its eighth total blackout of the year on September 18, and the recovery of the national electrical interconnection took more than 30 hours.
In Matanzas, there have been reports of up to 87 consecutive hours without power. The Electric Union warned at the end of August that the blackouts could worsen between September and December.
Each blackout also exacerbates the water crisis: around 87% of Cuban aqueducts rely on electric pumps. Without electricity, there is no water. And without gas—whose small cylinder reached prices between 10,000 and 50,000 Cuban pesos in the informal market—families are turning to charcoal, the price of which tripled between 2024 and 2026.
The nearly empty pot that González Moral shows at the end of the video reflects a reality that is also evident in the statistics. The minimum wage in Cuba, set at 3,210 pesos per month, amounts to only about 4.65 dollars on the informal market, while estimates from Cuban economists place the monthly expenditure needed to cover just an individual's food needs at over 70,000 pesos.
The survey "There is Hunger in Cuba 2025", conducted by Food Monitor Program and Cuido60, also revealed that 33.9% of the households surveyed had at least one member who went to bed hungry in the 30 days prior to the study.
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