On a recent evening, Yusimi Castellano knelt over her small iron stove, arranging charcoal and placing Styrofoam and plastic packaging atop it as kindling. Using a cigarette lighter, she ignited a small flame.
Acrid smoke filled her 18th-floor apartment before drifting toward the former military barracks where the Cuban Revolution began and the lush mountains surrounding Santiago de Cuba, the nation’s second-largest city.
Slowly, the charcoal glowed. She placed a grill fashioned from old coat hangers over it and boiled spaghetti for her family’s dinner.
“I shouldn’t be cooking with charcoal,” said Ms. Castellano, 58, who suffers from asthma and has recently experienced constant shortness of breath and coughing. “But if I don’t cook, I die.”
Ms. Castellano’s rudimentary cooking method has become commonplace across the five 18-story residential towers—containing 120 apartments each—where she lives. The complex, opened four decades ago, was once intended to showcase the revolution’s promises.
Today, some residents cannot afford charcoal and resort to chopping firewood for indoor cooking.
Life in the city and across much of Cuba—already strained by a faltering economy—has deteriorated further following the Trump administration’s intensified pressure campaign against the communist government.
Initially, the administration halted oil shipments from Venezuela, Cuba’s primary benefactor, after U.S. forces detained Venezuela’s president in January.
Subsequently, President Trump leveraged tariff threats to nearly cease all foreign fuel deliveries, including from Mexico, another vital supplier.
Cuban officials state that oil reserves are depleted and its aging electrical grid is increasingly unreliable. Although Cuba produces some oil, output falls far short of national demand.
Outside Havana, daily power outages now last up to 20 hours. This energy scarcity has triggered a vast humanitarian crisis with fatal consequences.
The main refinery in Santiago has ceased production of liquefied petroleum gas, the cooking fuel predominantly sourced from Venezuelan and Mexican oil.
Last December, Ms. Castellano collected a small gas canister from a state distribution point at her building’s base. While canisters were meant to be refilled monthly, by then refills occurred roughly every other month. Since January, however, no gas has been distributed.
Breakfast in Ms. Castellano’s household has become scarce. With elevators out of service most of the time, the delivery person who once brought bread is unwilling to climb 18 floors.
Yet the family has no alternative. Five mornings a week, Ms. Castellano’s niece walks Ms. Castellano’s 87-year-old mother, Giorgina—who has dementia—downstairs to a state-run senior day program a few blocks away. In the afternoon, the pair must climb back upstairs.
“The country is being strangled,” said the niece, Yailen Menéndez, 38.
Residents suffer from chronic sleep deprivation. With unpredictable power restoration, people leave lights and fans on. When electricity returns, the sudden illumination or cool air wakes them, allowing time to complete chores before the next outage.
“Night has become day,” said a neighbor of Ms. Castellano’s, who briefly stopped by to drop off a sprig of oregano. “Everyone wakes when the lights come on to wash, cook—to do everything.”
While many Havana households retain gas piped to kitchens, Santiago—like much of Cuba—lacks such infrastructure. (According to the 2012 census, Santiago had approximately 431,000 residents, a figure that preceded a massive migration wave from the island. Many apartments in Ms. Castellano’s complex now stand vacant.)
The city, with a predominantly Afro-Cuban population, has historically been a government support stronghold. Yet it is poorer than Havana, possesses a less developed private sector, and receives fewer remittances. With minimal cushioning, Santiago has been particularly devastated by the economic collapse.
Haydee Gómez Suárez, 63, residing in a separate tower from Ms. Castellano’s, sells thin plastic bags for bread—each costing two cents—outside privately owned bakeries. However, the bakeries’ ovens operate on electricity.
“If there’s no power, there’s no bread,” she said. “And if there’s no bread, I can’t sell a single bag.”
She has lost over 20 pounds in recent years and now eats just one meal daily.
Water seeps through her damp, shabby apartment. She cooks using cardboard and wood scraps scavenged from growing trash heaps.
She splashes buckets of water on her kitchen walls, but the odor from her cooking fires clings to her furniture, and soot has blackened her walls.
This contrasts sharply with the towers’ 1983 opening. One Cuban magazine described the earthquake-resistant complex as “the future face of the city.”
The buildings were inaugurated on the 30th anniversary of the failed rebel assault on the Moncada military barracks, which the towers overlook. The attack, led by Fidel Castro and a small rebel force on July 26, 1953, was later mythologized as the revolution’s inception that overthrew a U.S.-backed dictator.
(Fidel’s brother, Raúl Castro—who also fought in the nearby Sierra Maestra mountains—was indicted last week on murder charges related to the downing of two civilian aircraft 30 years ago, an incident that killed four men, including three Americans.)
Apartments in the complex were allocated to families of rebel guerrillas and to workers at a new textile plant, which the government promoted as one of Latin America’s largest. Each building bears a name linked to the rebel campaign.
“It was a projection of a future—a country advancing toward development and emancipation,” said Aida Morales, a researcher at Santiago’s historian’s office.
When asked what that projection is today, she laughed. “We’re an island; you can’t go anywhere but the sea,” Ms. Morales said. “And there’s no one to help us.”
As darkness fell, Anyerman Quiñones Goicoechea, 40, a building painter for a state-owned firm who lives in the complex, sat brooding in the unlit apartment in a rocking chair. After more than two decades of state employment, he feels he has nothing to show for it.
“The system has to fall,” he said. “They have to go. Or change the way they think.”
He attributes the blackouts primarily to the regime. “This country prioritized building hotels, not power plants.”
Four floors above, a couple held a differing perspective. Antonio Nieto Paneque, 83, and his wife—who declined to give her full name—ate cold rice and beans she had cooked at 11 p.m. the previous night when power returned.
Mr. Nieto Paneque joined an urban guerrilla group in Santiago as a teenager in 1957, smuggling pistols throughout the city.
“The revolution brought electricity to the countryside,” he said. “We believed peasants had the same right as people in the city.”
His wife pointed to their rice cooker, hot plate, refrigerator, and a “very good” pressure cooker—all distributed two decades ago when the government, benefiting from cheap Venezuelan oil, sought to transition Cuban kitchens to the electrical grid.
“We lived normally before Trump took power,” Mr. Nieto Paneque said, an LED headlamp strapped to his forehead. “Our lives were stable.”
In 2019, the first Trump administration began imposing sanctions on firms transporting Venezuelan oil to Cuba. The Cuban government responded by implementing what it termed temporary energy-saving measures, which ultimately became permanent.
Even prior to the Trump administration’s latest actions, sanctions had left the Cuban government without sufficient funds to purchase necessary fuel, according to some economists. Trump administration officials blame Cuba’s hardships on what they describe as government corruption and incompetence, not the U.S. oil embargo.
Nevertheless, while most Cubans now lack cooking gas, electricity, and public transportation, Cuban police and armed forces continue receiving fuel for their vehicles.
Cuba’s Soviet-era electrical grid is obsolete, weakened by decades of underinvestment and neglected maintenance—a consequence of the island’s failed economic model and sanctions on parts needed for system upkeep.
Midway up the darkened tower where the Castellanos live, the orange glow of a wood fire lit one apartment’s balcony. Silhouetted figures bent over the flames.
In the park below, daily life continued. A street vendor clanged the metal box holding his warm roasted peanuts, sheathed in paper cones. Nearby, other vendors sold candies, condoms, and candles.
Yoandris García, 33, another complex resident, sat nearby, preferring the cooler outdoor air to another sleepless, sweaty night in bed.
He said he lost his job last month when the minibus company he worked for exhausted its fuel supply. The next day, he said matter-of-factly, he planned to walk four miles to chop wood with a machete and carry it home on his shoulder.
Across the avenue, the single streetlight extinguished. Mr. Garcia hoped this meant electricity might be redirected elsewhere, as occasionally occurs.
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