The following is a personal account of the blackout in Cuba by journalist Laura Prada.
It has been more than 72 hours without electricity. The last time I spent so many days without electricity was in Venezuela, in March 2020, when an attack on the national electric power system left the country without electricity for a week.
The origin was the same: a tangled regime of sanctions and blockade; the refusal of a powerful country to accept the will of independent peoples determined to forge their own path.
At that time we were on the ground, informing Venezuela and the world about what was happening there, regardless of sleep, hunger, fatigue….
Today, four years later, a similar attack, a consequence of a blockade put in place more than 60 years ago, has caused Cuba’s electric power system to collapse and disconnect the country from one end to the other. Just as then, we are ready for whatever comes. The only worry, now we have a three-year-old child in our care.
The fire you have inside to go out and show what is happening burns you. You feel that the walls of the house oppress you. You know that your duty is to inform and go out to dismantle the lies that are being constructed about what is happening. Meanwhile, I hear in the background the occasional casserole pan looking for others to join in a chorus and the cries of those who bet on the lottery and lost.
A “Mom, I want water” breaks the lethargy. I run to the kitchen to satisfy the thirst of Ernesto, the three-year-old who has been asking for two days “what time does the power come back on?”
Outside it rains and the wind swirls, I go back to the living room to check that no water enters, I go back to check that the food is not burning, I climb to the top of a ladder to look for signal and data. In the distance I hear the echoes of power plants. They say that the island is gradually lighting up. A map with green and yellow dots circulates in social networks and is shared in groups.
Uncertainty sometimes takes over me, the desire to go out and tell what is happening outside is overshadowed, annulled, in light of the greater responsibility of protecting that child. While he rests, I resume my tour of the house in search of a point of connectivity.
There is something that does not leave my mind and I have been repeating it for hours. This is the reality of the f***ing Yankee blockade. This is one of its many faces and today we are looking it in the eye.
For more than 72 hours Cuba is in the dark, but not defeated.
Down with the blockade! Carajo
Laura Prada is a Cuban journalist based in Havana.
