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 experienced 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," says González Moral at the beginning of the clip.
The images show how the family 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 keep water. Opening it, he says, "brings more heat than closing it."
Hygiene is also affected by the crisis. Without running water, bathing relies on buckets filled in advance. "Cuban hygiene is based on buckets and patience," he summarizes with a mix of irony and exhaustion.
The most revealing moment 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 hard 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 unreal, but it only serves to adorn the entrance of another dark night. I won’t stay silent any longer because the silence is swallowing us. We are still alive by a miracle," concluded González Moral in the video.
The clip is not an isolated case in González Moral's career. 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 frozen yogurt in the refrigerator had become luxuries.
"The chances of freezing something in Cuba nowadays is 1%," he admitted then. In August, he showed what can be bought with 15 dollars on the island: a small bag with ketchup, tuna, elbow macaroni, rice, hair cream, condensed milk, malt, and flour.
The energy crisis depicted in the video has specific figures. Cuba experienced its eighth total blackout of the year on September 18, and the recovery of the national electrical interconnection took 32 hours, according to Infobae.
In Matanzas, up to 87 consecutive hours without electricity have been recorded. The Electric Union warned at the end of August that the outages could worsen between September and December.
Each blackout also brings along the water crisis: around 87% of Cuba's aqueducts rely on electric pumps. Without electricity, there is no water. And without gas—whose small canister reached prices between 10,000 and 50,000 Cuban pesos in the informal market—families resort to coal, the price of which tripled between 2024 and 2026.
The minimum wage in Cuba is only 4.65 dollars per month, while covering the basic food basket requires about 70,000 pesos just for food.
The survey "In Cuba There is Hunger 2025" documented that 33.9% of households had at least one member who went to bed hungry in the previous 30 days.
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