Another night without electricity

By Kamil Kenders

HAVANA TIMES — Once again, Cuba’s National Electric System collapsed on Friday—for the second time in less than a week. The news spread almost immediately. But the truth is that, for many people, it hardly makes any difference. At my house, we’ve been sleeping without electricity for more than a month. Nights have ceased to be a time for rest and have become a test of endurance. The heat, the mosquitoes, the darkness. The lukewarm water you drink without ever managing to quench your thirst.

There are nights when sleep seems to give up before we do. I thought I had already grown accustomed to hearing stories about blackouts.

Then, while talking with a friend, I learned the story of Margarita, his mother—an 84-year-old woman who underwent hip surgery some time ago and has always been a strong woman, the kind of person you imagine capable of handling any hardship with remarkable composure. But today, her strength has taken on a different form.

For the past fifteen days, she has been sleeping on the roof of her house. Not because she enjoys looking at the stars, or because she wants to escape the noise. She sleeps there because the heat inside the house has become unbearable.

Every night she slowly climbs the stairs. She spreads several blankets across the rooftop floor and then lays a sheet over them. For some time now, that has been her mattress, her bedroom. That is where she wakes each morning, alongside her daughter Tania, 55, who is recovering from cancer surgery and also seeks a little relief in the rooftop breeze. I try to picture the scene as my friend describes it: two women lying on a roof that is still warm, slowly releasing the heat it absorbed during the day.

The mosquitoes, the dampness of the early morning, the exhaustion, and the quiet fear that the rain might come before dawn. As we talked, my friend, Margarita’s son, confessed that she has become very thin and frail. Then he said something that broke my heart: “She has always been a strong, determined woman.”

It made me realize that strength is not about enduring everything without complaint.

Sometimes strength means getting up with a hip prosthesis, climbing the stairs every night to sleep on a rooftop, and then climbing back down at dawn to begin another day exactly the same.

We live surrounded by numbers: hours without electricity, megawatts, generation deficits… the collapse of the electrical system.

But the numbers never tell us where Margarita sleeps, or about the blankets spread across a rooftop. They never tell the story of an 84-year-old woman searching for a little cool air beneath the open sky because she can no longer bear the heat inside her own home.

Perhaps one day the blackouts will be nothing more than a memory. I hope so.

What I fear is that, when that day comes, stories like Margarita’s will also be forgotten. And that would be an injustice, because countries are not explained by statistics alone. They are also explained by people who, at 84 years of age, end up sleeping under the stars—not to admire the night sky, but because they have nowhere else to find a little relief.

Read more from the diary of Kamil Kenders here on Havana Times.