Havana residents cope with daily power outages and heat
Melia said it was exiting Cuba after the U.S. tightened sanctions this spring.
Durruti said Cuba’s strong culture of neighbors helping neighbors — a sense of solidarity forged over decades on the island — helps blunt the impact of the severe shortages. But there are limits.
“Everyone can share a small bucket of water,” she said. “But in this crisis, more than that is impossible.”
A prophecy come true
The island’s aging infrastructure, including its electrical grid, has been deteriorating for years. But the tenement building’s residents said the occasional energy cuts from years past have grown interminable in recent months, as the U.S.-imposed oil blockade set in.
On Saturday afternoon, Thalía Castillo, 28, nursed her 3-month-old infant, Thayler, as a small rechargeable fan kept the hot air and mosquitoes off his back in their first-floor apartment.
Unlike most of their neighbors, Castillo and her husband, Lazaro Herrera, enjoyed electricity for hours after the grid collapsed, thanks to a power station sent to them by Castillo’s grandmother in the United States.
Lazaro Herrera, 26, carries his backup power supply to charge it on Saturday as Cuba’s national power grid collapsed, marking the second total blackout in a week amid a severe energy crisis that has turned power outages into a daily reality in Havana.
But that power quickly ran out. A frozen package of meat — another luxury funded by their U.S.-based relatives — was thawing in the freezer. Every few hours, Castillo cleaned the pools of blood seeping into the refrigerator.
Small statues of Yoruba deities decorated their kitchen. Herrera is a priest — known as a babalawo — in the Afro-Cuban-based religion, which is widely practiced on the island. Each year begins with a series of predictions, issued by community elders. This January, the prophecy warned of convulsions and conflict.