Cuban families devise ingenious solutions to endure frequent power shortages
Since December, when the government stopped supplying their cooking gas, the family had relied on an electric burner — until persistent blackouts made that solution impractical.
'The blackouts are quite severe and, with gas in short supply, I have to be running around to get food on time," said Álvarez, a 50-year-old cosmetologist living with her husband and two teenage daughters in the populous Bahía neighborhood in Havana.
But what happens when even the electricity is gone — a reality for several days a month and often for hours each day? That's when the family's ingenuity truly kicks in: with no gas and no power, they turn to their charcoal stove.
Leisure time also requires creative solutions. Álvarez's husband, Ángel Rodríguez, an auto mechanic, found a way for the family to catch up on their beloved telenovelas even during blackouts. He ingeniously assembled a television using an old laptop screen and an electric motorcycle battery.
'It doesn't last very long," Rodríguez said, 'but it's good enough for my family to watch TV or have some entertainment.'
Electricity cuts, a problem for months, have intensified in recent weeks due to persistent fuel shortages at power plants and aging infrastructure. With summer's rising demand approaching and no apparent solution in sight, families face a grim outlook.
'We do our best,' Álvarez said.
Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel recently acknowledged that power outages are among one of his government's biggest challenges.
In the last eight months alone, Cuba has experienced four total blackouts, plunging the entire island into darkness.
Highlighting the nation's severe energy deficit, Díaz-Canel said last week that while electricity demand soared from 2,580 megawatts in March to 3,050 in May, availability barely increased, rising only from 1,790 megawatts in March to around 1,900 these days.
The government has said that a plan to address the problem includes the installation of solar parks and repair its generators with the support from China and Russia. But little progress has been made so far.
In the meantime, Cubans must continue to find ways to navigate the crisis.
In the outskirts of Havana, 45-year-old blacksmith Edinector Vázquez is busier than ever, serving a growing clientele of less affluent families.
Vázquez makes charcoal stoves from metal scraps that he sells for around $18 — the equivalent of a Cuban state worker's monthly salary — but he says he offers discounts to low-income families.
Natividad Hernández, with slightly more resources than the Bahía neighborhood family, invested in solar panels, but her budget didn't allow for installing batteries and other components, limiting their use to daytime hours and when there's some grid electricity.
As blackouts increase, Cuba's online shopping pages are inundated with ads for rechargeable fans, lamps with chargers and charging stations — mostly imports from the United States and Panama — making them unaffordable for many.
'Lack of oil, gas, and increased electricity consumption for cooking, combined with high summer temperatures and possible hurricanes — not even a good Mexican soap opera can paint a more dramatic picture,' said Jorge Piñón, a researcher at the University of Texas at Austin's Energy Institute.
According to Piñón, solving Cuba's energy crisis would require 'three to five years" and up to $8 billion.
Faced with this grim prospect, Cubans are not optimistic.
'This is difficult," said Rodríguez as he set up his rustic television and a soap opera's first images flickered to life before his family's eyes.
'The time will come when we will run out of ideas.'
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Telegraph
4 days ago
- Telegraph
How dating celebrities became a Trudeau family tradition
Of all the many rumours and conspiracy theories surrounding the former Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, perhaps the most outlandish argues that he is the illegitimate son of late Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. The thinking, if you can call it that, is this: Trudeau's father Pierre, who also served as Canadian prime minister, visited Cuba with his wife, Margaret, in early 1971, and Margaret and Castro supposedly had a brief, short-lived affair. The end result, the cranks falsely claim, was the birth of Justin, Christ-like, on December 25 that year. This titillating falsehood has been enthusiastically taken up by many of Trudeau's detractors (including Donald Trump), who were incensed by Trudeau's warm words after Castro's death in November 2016. However, this ignores many basic chronological facts, not least that there is no official record of Pierre and Margaret visiting Cuba that year, or indeed Pierre meeting Castro until 1976. The Canadian government at one point became so sick of the story that in 2018 it was forced to issue a denial. Margaret Trudeau's romantic life has long been a subject of fascination; Robin Williams even made a quip about 'Margaret Trudeau's friendly thighs' as he performed the South Park song Blame Canada at the Oscars in 2000. Yet it was her former husband, Pierre, who had a far wider reputation as a womaniser and ladies' man, with a string of conquests that included A-list actors, singers and musicians. By comparison, their son Justin has been seen as little more than a shiny nepo baby politician, boringly right-on to a point that even his own country tired of him. (Never mind his habit of wearing blackface as a younger man.) Now, however, Trudeau is back in the headlines for wholly different reasons. He was spotted in the audience at a Katy Perry gig, and was later seen having what looked like a romantic dinner with the singer, who separated from her partner Orlando Bloom earlier this year. Although both Perry and Trudeau have denied rumours that they are romantically involved – the politician split from his wife Sophie Grégoire in 2023 – he was nonetheless seen singing along to Perry's song Dark Horse at her concert. If we ignore the age gap (he is 53 to her 40) and the slight sense of second-hand goods that Trudeau might convey, the romance buzz might not do either of their somewhat tainted public reputations any harm. Perry, like Trudeau, is coming off a steep decline in public popularity, not helped by her much-mocked decision to travel into space with Jeff Bezos's wife, Lauren Sánchez, and the dismal sales of her latest album. Yet in Trudeau's case, association with an A-list celebrity may suggest that the apple has not fallen too far from the tree. As a nepo baby politician, he knew all too well that his father, who served as the 15th prime minister of Canada, was a legendary figure in his country. Pierre Trudeau was a rock star among his fellow politicians, and regarded as a hipster long before that term came into use; he certainly did not object to the media's suggestion that he was a 'hip and happening person', even a swinger. Had the byzantine complexities of his romantic life at the time been better known, there may have been other, unkinder terms used. Shortly after he became prime minister, Pierre embarked upon a relationship with Barbra Streisand, who was then coming off the success of her musical and film Funny Girl. When she first read about him, she supposedly remarked to a friend: 'That's the kind of man I'd like to date.' As luck would have it, the opportunity swiftly presented itself. Streisand rhapsodised in her recent memoir, My Name is Barbra, that Pierre was 'very dapper, intelligent, intense … kind of a combination of Albert Einstein and Napoleon (only taller). And he was doing important work. I was dazzled'. Although there was again a significant age gap between politician and singer – she was 27, he was 50 – Pierre was enraptured by the star, too. When she was seated in the visitors' gallery during a session of the Canadian parliament, having travelled to see her idol, another politician remarked: 'I should like to ask a question of the prime minister – if he can take his eyes and mind off the visitors' gallery long enough to answer it.' Streisand wrote that she 'blushed and laughed' at the obviousness of the politician's interest in her. They embarked upon a relationship, and Streisand professed herself smitten by the 'captivating combination of contradictions … an elegant man who was still enough of a free spirit to wear sandals to parliament'. Yet she also had to admit, eventually, that 'there was something missing. My brain was in love, but not my body'. The two separated amicably, and remained friends until Pierre's death in 2000, upon which Streisand commented 'the world lost a great leader … and I lost a great friend'. When Trudeau's father separated from Streisand, he did not spend his days gazing forlornly into the fire. Not only did he marry the considerably younger Margaret Sinclair in 1971 – he was 50 and she was 22 – but he used his charm and political standing alike to attract a string of younger, well-known mistresses, who included the actresses Margot Kidder and Kim Cattrall – Lois Lane and Sex and the City's Samantha – as well as the classical guitarist Liona Boyd and songwriter Gale Zoë Garnett. He was very popular with these women, all of whom saw the frightened, hurt little boy underneath the swaggering carapace of success and fame. 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Not only did Pierre reportedly beat up his wife, but he was excessively mean about money. Margaret revealed in her tell-all 1982 memoir Consequences that every night for two years, she would whisper before bed 'Pierre, please give me a divorce.' She also pursued her own string of relationships with well-known public figures, including the actor Ryan O'Neal, JFK's brother Ted Kennedy, the musician Tom Sullivan (to whom she was drawn, she wrote – in a clear dig at her older ex – because of his 'extreme youth') and the bottled water entrepreneur Bruce Nevins. She separated from Pierre in 1977 and met Jack Nicholson shortly afterwards, describing him as 'the first real rival to Pierre'. The relationship did not last, because Nicholson was involved with Anjelica Huston, but Margaret at least got her money's worth while she was with him. The night before they parted, she wrote in her memoir, 'we made love all night'. Margaret was also something of an Anglophile, and as she put it once, 'ran off' with the Rolling Stones. She enjoyed a fling with Ronnie Wood in the late Seventies, and was the subject of rumours involving Mick Jagger. 'We played dice until about five in the morning, in my hotel suite. Smoked some dope, talked,' she said in 2016. 'It was a good night, and it was my new world. But no one knew I was separated from my husband yet, and it brought a huge scandal.' Jagger himself mockingly alluded to the stories in 2024 when he quipped on stage in Canada: 'We love your Mr Trudeau. I mean, his family has always been such big fans of our band.' Despite Pierre's appalling treatment of his wife and cavalier attitude towards fidelity, he was (and is) perceived in Canada as a great charmer and Romeo, the kind of man who, even in his late 70s, was still able to twinkle away at otherwise hard-bitten journalists and turn them into putty. The writer Margaret Wente observed, after he kissed her hand and said her name 'with exaggerated appreciation', that 'it was all I could do to keep from asking for his room number'. He may not have charmed every single woman in his orbit; Margaret Thatcher, who had been warned about Pierre's 'complex personality' and 'unsound personal views' before meeting him in 1983, was entirely resistant to his charms. But the decidedly cordiale entente that he formed with many public figures – several of whom, such as Streisand, continued to extol his virtues long after his death – cannot simply be dismissed as political chicanery. So it may yet prove with his son. Whether or not he is embroiled with the Firework songstress, Monsieur Trudeau can be sure of one thing. As Streisand wrote of Justin in her memoir: 'Pierre would have been so proud of him.'
The Independent
16-07-2025
- The Independent
Cuban minister resigns after saying beggars in the country were all fakes
A Cuban minister who denied the existence of beggars in the country has resigned on Tuesday after facing a fierce backlash. Cuba's Presidency said in a post on X that Minister of Labor and Social Security Marta Elena Feitó Cabrera 'acknowledged her errors and submitted her resignation.' Feitó made the comments Monday before deputies in a National Assembly committee. The comments went viral, prompting calls for Feitó's impeachment and a wave of criticism in a country experiencing a tough economic situation in recent years. 'We have seen people, apparently beggars, (but) when you look at their hands, look at the clothes these people are wearing, they are disguised as beggars, they are not beggars,' Feitó said before the National Assembly committee. 'In Cuba there are no beggars.' She added that people cleaning windshields use the money to 'drink alcohol.' Feitó also lashed out against those who search through the garbage dumps, saying they are recovering materials 'to resell and not pay tax.' Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel was critical of the comments. Without mentioning her by name, but referring to the meeting at the National Assembly committee where Feitó participated, Díaz-Canel said on his X account: 'The lack of sensitivity in addressing vulnerability is highly questionable. The revolution cannot leave anyone behind; that is our motto, our militant responsibility.' The economic crisis in Cuba has increased social vulnerability and led to unusual scenes for the island, such as people — especially the elderly — begging or scavenging through garbage, or some cleaning windshields at corners. Until a few years ago, despite the poverty, there were no signs of begging or homelessness on the island thanks to benefits that have now been greatly reduced. The pension of a retiree is about 2,000 Cuban pesos per month, roughly $5 on the informal market, and just under the cost of a carton of eggs. For those who don't receive remittances from family abroad, it means going hungry. Self-employed Enrique Guillén believes the minister is wrong and that some people do not see the situation clearly, and hopes the government will take action. 'They are elderly people who count on a pension that does not exist. They cannot even buy a carton of eggs. It is the reality we are living in Cuba,' Guillén said. On Monday, island authorities reported that Cuba's gross domestic product fell by 1.1% in 2024, accumulating a decline of 11% over the past five years.
BBC News
16-07-2025
- BBC News
Cuban minister resigns after saying 'there are no beggars in Cuba'
Cuban Minister for Labour and Social Security, Marta Elena Feitó-Cabrera, has been forced to resign from her post after she made comments in a parliamentary session which denied the existence of beggars on the Communist-run minister had said there was no such thing as "beggars" in Cuba and people going through rubbish were, in essence, doing so out of choice to make "easy money", as she put comments were widely criticised by Cubans at home and abroad, and prompted a response from the island's president, Miguel Díaz-Canel. She resigned soon levels and food shortages have worsened in Cuba as it continues to grapple with a severe economic crisis. Feitó-Cabrera made the comments earlier this week at a session of the National Assembly, in which she spoke about people begging and rummaging through dustbins in Cuba. She appeared to deny their existence saying: "There are no beggars in Cuba. There are people pretending to be beggars to make easy money." Furthermore, she accused people searching through the rubbish of being "illegal participants in the recycling service".The minister clearly misjudged the outrage and anger her comments would cause and the extent to which they portrayed the country's leadership as unfeeling, authoritarian and deeply disconnected from the dire economic struggles of ordinary Cubans. A number of Cuban activists and intellectuals published a letter calling for her removal saying the comments were "an insult to the Cuban people".The Cuban president then criticised Feitó-Cabrera at the parliamentary session - albeit without mentioning her by name - saying the leadership could not "act with condescension" or be "disconnected from the realities" of the people. Cuban economist Pedro Monreal posted on X saying that there were "people disguised as ministers" in resignation was accepted by the Cuban Communist Party and the government. While the Cuban government does not publish official figures on the number of people begging, the rise in their number has been self-evident to most Cubans amid the island's deep economic crisis.
