Yudiezka Delaz Quintana, a mother of eight children aged between three and 16 residing in Santiago de Cuba, recorded a testimony that is shocking in its rawness and which the opposition organization UNPACU spread through activist José Daniel Ferrer: her children go to bed without eating, four of them are malnourished, and she has gone two days without food to give them the little she manages to obtain.
"My name is Yudiezka Delaz Quintana, I am the mother of 8 children, and I am here to expose the harsh reality that thousands of Cuban mothers are facing. We have to see our children cry from hunger because we have no way to feed them," says the woman at the beginning of the video.
Yudiezka works as a cleaning assistant, but her salary—2,800 pesos a month, less than five dollars at the informal exchange rate—barely covers her minimum food needs.
"The miserable salary we earn is not even enough for us to afford poor nutrition. Not to mention medical care, as we have no access to medications, neither in pharmacies nor in hospitals," she reports.
The situation of their school-aged children is no better: those attending the Abel Santamaría boarding school were once served three slices of cucumber for lunch, and several have stopped going to classes because they leave home without breakfast or a snack.
"My children are at the Abel Santamaría boarding school, and a few days ago they were given just three slices of cucumber; they are not being provided with lunch or the nutrition they need," she recounts.
The youngest of her children is still nursing because the mother has no other way to feed her: “It’s hard, very hard and painful, as a mother, to see your little girl crying, wanting food, and being unable to give her anything. Thankfully, she still nurses, and I spend the whole day breastfeeding her so that my little girl can get by.”
Food insecurity is compounded by electricity outages of up to 36 consecutive hours —in some areas of the country surpassing 90 hours without power in recent days— and a complete lack of medications in pharmacies and hospitals.
Yudiezka also denounces that the regime denied her the food module for underweight individuals and the one designated for children aged zero to four: "Right now, they send the module to the store, and they decide who they will give it to... they want to decide about your life."
This system, reformed in June 2026, replaced universal subsidies with targeted assistance for individuals classified as “vulnerable” by local community groups, resulting in complaints of arbitrariness and exclusion. In Santiago de Cuba, authorities acknowledged that more than 10% of the provincial population requires emergency food assistance.
Yudiezka's testimony is not an isolated case. According to the IX Report from the Cuban Observatory of Human Rights, published in August 2026 and based on more than 1,300 interviews across 79 municipalities, 94% of Cubans live in extreme poverty, compared to 61% just four years ago, and eight out of ten people have had to skip a meal due to lack of money or food.
The Cuban regime attributes this situation to U.S. sanctions, but the data indicate a structural deterioration accumulated over nearly 67 years of communist dictatorship that eliminated economic freedom, banned free enterprise, and subjected the production and distribution of food to the absolute control of the state.
UNPACU, which managed to feed more than 1,200 people daily in Santiago de Cuba, has faced systematic repression: police cordons, confiscations, and arrests of activists. Recently, authorities attempted to arrest a member of the organization for distributing food without "legal authorization".
"I work, I am a working mother, my salary should be enough for me and to feed my family, but as I said, it doesn't even suffice for us to eat poorly," concludes Yudiezka, with a sentence that encapsulates the irreconcilable contradiction of a system that promised equality but delivered misery.
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