The Cuban Generation Growing Up Amid Scarcity
HAVANA TIMES — Childhood in Cuba in 2026 is a hostile territory that many children learn to navigate before they even learn to read. There is no exact moment when they discover that the world works this way, because they have never known anything different. Hunger has ceased to be an emergency and has become the permanent backdrop of daily life. And it is not only about the lack of food, but also the slow and constant deterioration of everything that should sustain a child’s life: education, health care, stability, and the presence of parents.
Many grow up in the care of their grandparents because their mothers and fathers emigrated in search of a way to support the family financially from another country. Family relationships are reduced to video calls where voices arrive broken and images freeze in the middle of a smile. Some children have learned to say “I love you” while looking at a pixelated screen. Others wait days for a phone recharge so they can hear their parents’ voices for a few more minutes.
Grandparents carry the burden of an exhausting old age on their shoulders. They wake up before dawn to stand in endless lines, search through empty markets, and manage pensions that barely allow them to survive. Children sense this silent exhaustion: they see it in hushed conversations, in evenings when money is counted several times before deciding what can be bought and what will have to wait. Some still ask when their parents will return. Others have learned not to.
The crisis has also accelerated childhood. Many children learn far too early how to “get by.” They know how much a phone recharge costs, when the bread arrives, or who sells cheaper cooking oil in the neighborhood. They grow up hearing words like “remittance,” “MLC,” “blackout,” or “dollars” before they fully understand what they mean. While other childhoods are built around games and discoveries, the childhood of many Cuban children revolves around scarcity and daily survival.
In many streets across the country, it is common to find minors selling candy, peanuts, or anything else that might bring a few extra coins into the household. Others learn not to ask for things because they know there is not enough money at home. Poverty does not always appear in large, visible tragedies; sometimes it hides in small gestures: a birthday without a cake, a snack shared among siblings, or a child saving part of their meal for later out of fear of having nothing left.
Schools remain open, but they have fewer teachers and more empty desks than ever. Many educators leave the classroom in search of better-paying jobs or emigrate from the country. Children arrive at school tired after nights marked by heat, blackouts, and mosquitoes. Some begin to grow up with the feeling that studying no longer necessarily guarantees a better future. For many teenagers, a life plan is no longer built around a profession and instead becomes reduced to a single idea: leaving the country.
When night falls and another blackout occurs, many families sit outside their homes in search of a little relief from the heat. The neighborhood sinks into a strange silence, broken only by scattered conversations and battery-powered radios. Children play in the darkness because they know no other routine. They have grown accustomed to the absence of electricity, water, transportation, food, and, often, the company of their parents as well.
The most painful thing about this generation is not only what it lacks, but the naturalness with which it has learned to live with absence. They grow up believing that survival is the normal way of living. And perhaps that is where the deepest wound lies: to demand a better life, one must first have imagined that such a life was possible.
Read more from the diary of Safie M. Gonzalez here on Havana Times.