The Cuban broadcaster and presenter Laritza Camacho described in a post on Facebook three scenes she witnessed while passing through the intersection of 10 de Octubre and Vía Blanca in Havana, which starkly portray the desperation of the population amidst the crisis.
In the middle of the street, people were drawing water from a well using buckets. Not far away, a neighborhood protest was being held back by police as tankers arrived on the scene, presumably brought in by the pressure of the demonstrators. And a block and a half away, a blind old man was banging a pot and shouting, "How long is this going to last? Turn on the electricity, bring the water, turn on the gas..."
Camacho was traveling in a "riquimbili" when a passenger spoke up. The woman stated she had gone seven months without running water and declared she was "tired of speeches and lies." To explain the selective distribution of resources, she used a metaphor: "If you invite me to your house and tell me you don't have any coffee or anything to offer, that's fine, but if, while I'm visiting, someone else arrives and you brew coffee, then it's not that you didn't have any; it's that you didn't want to give me any..."
The passenger concluded with a phrase that Camacho described as "absurd and incoherent": "I am not against this, I am a revolutionary, but this government is brazen."
The host replied in a low voice: "Madam, they are this... and as long as we continue to support this and oppose them, the universe will not understand us."
The analysis by the announcer suggests that the scarcity is not absolute, but rather managed: "months without water, protests in the neighborhood, and they send a water truck... three weeks of power outages lasting more than 20 hours, and just when you're about to scream, the DAF kicks in and the fan cools your throat."
And he concluded his narrative with the image of the blind old man as a metaphor for the country: "There is no worse blind person than one who does not want to see."
The DAF —Automatic Frequency Disconnection— is a protective mechanism of the National Electrical System that automatically disconnects circuits to prevent a total network collapse. During this crisis, provincial electric companies assign zones a kind of "grace period," during which power outages are shorter. Many people, fed up with the situation, even find reasons to celebrate when their area experiences the DAF.
The water supply is going through one of its most critical moments: the liquid does not reach the homes of 2.7 million Cubans, nearly 29% of the 9.4 million inhabitants of the Island. Yunior González, an official of the national Water and Sanitation Company, acknowledged to the news agency AFP that between 80% and 85% of the distributed water must be pumped to reach households, which turns every power outage into an automatic disruption of the supply.
The Diez de Octubre municipality in Havana has been experiencing months of tension. In July, several women blocked Calzada de 10 de Octubre itself to demand water and electricity.
In September, residents of Lawton protested to prevent a facility from being connected to the network while the community relied on water trucks.
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