In Havana, Cubans endure shortages, blackouts and water scarcity

Felicia de la Caridad Alvarez starts and ends her day in Old Havana measuring everything she does against scarcity. The 64-year-old former hospital custodian is blind in one eye, lives with hypertension and diabetes, and often has no dependable electricity or running water. Her refrigerator sits useless after the food inside spoiled. When water does come, she carries it home in plastic containers and pots from several blocks away, and when food runs short she turns to a nearby church soup kitchen.

Her routine has become a small map of Cuba’s wider breakdown. The island’s state-run economy, already hobbled by shortages, has been pushed deeper into crisis as sanctions tightened and fuel supplies dried up. In May, energy minister Vicente de la O Levy said Cuba had run out of crude oil, fuel oil and diesel, calling the national grid “critical.” In Havana, blackouts have stretched to as long as 22 hours a day, while one large Russian-flagged tanker delivered crude in April, offering only temporary relief.

Coping has become a form of improvisation. Farmers have kept markets supplied by finding diesel on the black market or replacing tractors with oxen. In Havana, that same improvisation shows up in the most basic tasks: hauling water, saving whatever food can still be eaten, and planning each trip around whether buses, lights or pumps will actually work. For Alvarez, the shortage is not abstract. It is the difference between a meal and an empty pot, between a working day and hours lost waiting for electricity or water that may never come.

Fear has also narrowed the space for protest. Alvarez said taking to the streets is out of the question because she worries about reprisals against her children, a concern echoed by other Cubans interviewed in recent weeks. That hesitation helps explain why the government has survived through the crisis even as daily life has frayed. The idea of resistir, or enduring through discipline and improvisation, remains part of the political culture, but in practice it now means living with spoiled food, stalled transport and water carried by hand across several blocks.

The dispute over blame has changed little. Washington says Cuba’s leadership is repressive and portrays the island’s unrest as foreign-fomented, while Havana argues that U.S. pressure is driving the suffering. The 2021 protests, sparked by food and medicine shortages, COVID-19 pressures and wider economic grievances, still hang over the island as the clearest warning of what can happen when scarcity breaks through the last layer of patience.