By Lien Estrada

HAVANA TIMES – With these prolonged blackouts we’ve been suffering, I’ve had to go, here where I live, to places with generators—or to those with a “preferential status” (areas that are less affected)—so I can recharge what I need. Places like the doctors’ apartment building, the “Twelve-Story Building,” and the Vladimir Ilich Lenin Hospital. Yesterday I was lucky because the barbershop in the “Twelve-Story Building” was open, and the young barber kindly let me charge what I needed. But today, when I went back, I wasn’t so lucky—he wasn’t there, and I had to go to the hospital.

I was surprised to find that all the places where there should have been an outlet or a switch were broken or covered with blank plates. It wasn’t the first, the second, or the third one I came across—it was all of them (!) in the areas I passed through. I don’t know why it surprised me so much, because even in times of less crisis (this is a country that always suffers from it—sometimes more, sometimes less, but always in survival mode), outlets and switches are stolen from almost every establishment: schools, workplaces, clinics… Now, when everything is even more critical, it’s only logical that I wouldn’t be able to find one easily.

So I went to the hospital cafeteria, which is a rented space. Well, yes, I had better luck there—I found three spots. Two were already occupied, and the third one I went to didn’t work; the outlet was there, but it was detached. Waiting for the others to finish charging their devices could be exasperating. It’s something that takes a long time. So I headed to the Medical Sciences classrooms on the other side.

I arrived and, somewhat nervously, asked for permission to see if I could charge there. Thanks to my Divinity, I was treated kindly and shown where I could. And here I am, “happily,” sitting on a bench with a working outlet on the wall behind me.

And honestly, right now I don’t want to think about anything. Just hoping to solve this as soon as possible and go back home. Although, for some reason, a memory comes to me—something I experienced at the Martin Luther King Jr. Ecumenical Center, when an economist was invited to give a talk about his vision for solving the country’s economic problems. When he finished and sat down in front of the blackboard, one of the participants asked him: “And why isn’t it done?” And the economist just shrugged.

What we are going through is nothing new; it’s just that now we are feeling it much more harshly, and, of course, hope tends to falter. Even so, I believe it’s not a good idea to generate more feelings of helplessness than we already carry. What remains for me is to look for solutions and to trust that, after all this, things will come to a good end.

Read more from the diary of Lien Estrada here on Havana Times.