By Ed Augustin and Frances Robles
The lights came back on Sunday night in Lidia Núñez Gómez’s Havana neighborhood — the first time since Friday morning — so she rushed to use her electric cooker to save the frozen chicken legs and pork her son had sent her from the United States.
Meat is scarce, the power was sure to go out again soon, and Núñez, 81, needed to keep food from rotting.
Her daughter, Nilza Valdés Núñez, 61, fury in her voice and tears in her eyes, took stock of months of power outages, plus food and gas shortages.
With a hurricane slamming the eastern coast of the country and a four-day blackout that plunged the entire country into darkness, she summed up the past few days like this: “super bad.”
“The lack of electricity, of gas, and all the other problems we have here,” Valdés said, pausing to weep, “make you feel bad.”
Cuba, a communist country long accustomed to shortages of all kinds and spotty electrical service, is in the throes of a crisis so severe that experts say it threatens to explode into social unrest.
Smatterings of street protests have already broken out and the president has warned of severe punishment against those who promote disorder.
For months, millions of people experiencing food shortages at local stores have also been enduring electricity cuts that last hours. But a power cut for a whole day was not typical until late last week.
On Friday, just after officials announced the cancellation of cultural events and weekend university classes to save energy, the power went out nationwide.
That also shut off the water supply, infuriating many Cubans who viewed the latest disruption as the last, intolerable straw.
Authorities in Cuba are struggling to turn the lights back on to stave off widespread discontent, a potential threat to the government’s grip on power.
Not since the particularly painful years after the collapse of the Soviet Union — Cuba’s longtime patron — has the country seen such a constellation of hardships all at once.
The number of people who have emigrated in recent years is without precedent in Cuba’s history. So, arguably, is people’s lack of hope. The threat of upheaval is real, experts said, which would likely lead to a harsh crackdown on human rights.
Nearly 2 million people — almost 20% of the population — have left the country in the past two years, sapping the nation of its workforce, according to analysts and estimates.
“It’s chaos. Really, the word you would use is ‘chaos,’” said Omar Everleny, a Cuban economist in Havana. “Anyone who was thinking of leaving is now accelerating those plans. Now you’re hearing ‘I am going to sell my house and go.’”
Power was restored to much of Havana, the capital, on Monday, but the authorities canceled school nationwide through Wednesday to try to save electricity. The power grid is being split up into smaller systems in the effort to keep one failure from knocking out power to the entire country.
The Cuban government blames the power crisis on the U.S. trade embargo, and sanctions that were ramped up by the Trump administration, which severely restricts the Cuban government’s cash flow. The U.S. Treasury Department blocks tankers that have delivered oil to Cuba, which drives up the island’s fuel costs, because Cuba has a limited pool of suppliers available to it.
In addition, Cuban power plants are nearly a half-century old and the government has put off important maintenance and upgrades, leaving the power grid to rely on decrepit, aging and unreliable infrastructure, analysts say. A fuel shortage exacerbated the problem, officials said.
“The country is experiencing an exceptional situation, marked by two fundamental and complex events: the energy emergency and, on the other hand, the cyclone alarm phase for the eastern provinces,” President Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez said.
He acknowledged the dire situation, but after some people in Havana publicly protested, he also issued a clear threat that they would be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
“We will not accept or allow anyone to act by provoking acts of vandalism, and much less disturbing the civil tranquility of our people,’’ the president said. “And that is a conviction, and that is a principle of our revolution.”
Blackouts and challenges related to the coronavirus pandemic set off major protests in 2021, with thousands of people taking to the streets. Hundreds were sent to prison.
Many discontented younger people have left the country since then, which could actually wind up being a lifeline for the Cuban government. Not only are millions of unhappy people gone, but they tend to send money back home, which prevents a total collapse of the economy.
In addition, many dissidents, activists and independent journalists who openly criticized the government were forced into exile.
Most Cubans would rather leave than collectively protest, said Ted Henken, a Cuba scholar at Baruch College in New York, “especially when the government has clearly demonstrated its willingness to violently repress protesters and imprison even those who protest peacefully or those who post about such protests on social media.”
Every time Lázaro Manuel Alonso, a journalist for a state news outlet, posted an optimistic update about the progress to restore electricity this weekend, Cubans from all over the country responded, letting him know they were still in darkness.
“It’s already been 80 hours in Pinar, and it’s hopeless,” one user posted.
It had been 72 hours in Santo Suárez, another user said, “and not to mention that there’s no water either.”
“We are stranded in Alamar,” still another Facebook user posted.
In eastern Cuba, areas that were never before known to have flooded were under 3 feet of water after the passage of Hurricane Oscar, which made landfall on Sunday, the Cuban government reported. About 15,000 people had been evacuated from Imías and another nearby city.
In Baracoa and Maisí, both in the province of Guantánamo, more than 1,700 homes sustained roof damage, and dozens of others partially collapsed.
Coffee crops were also damaged.
Sebastián A. Arcos, the interim director of the Cuban Research Institute at Florida International University in Miami, said it would be unwise to speculate about whether the cascading problems threaten the future of the Cuban revolution. He remembers being convinced that the Cuban government would collapse after the fall of the Soviet Union. That was over 30 years ago.
Díaz-Canel assumed office in 2019, but former President Raúl Castro, a committed Marxist who along with his brother Fidel led the revolution that took power in 1959, still holds outsized influence, Arcos said.
“It’s a critical and dramatic moment,” said Arcos, who left Cuba in 1992 after spending a year in prison for trying to escape from the island. “It shows in a very dramatic way the collapse of the Cuban economy after 65 years of mismanagement by this regime.”
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