By Lien Estrada
HAVANA TIMES — There is no expression that makes my head explode more than when I voice one of my complaints and someone responds: “there are worse cases.”
That’s why I agreed so much with Yoani Sanchez when, at a press conference in Germany several years ago, she answered a man who asked her whether, in her sharp criticism of the Cuban government, she thought about the millions of people who die of hunger every day in Africa, in Latin America, and around the world. Sanchez replied (in my own words): “If I say: my tooth hurts, and you tell me: ‘two of my teeth hurt.’ I’m sorry that two of your teeth hurt, but your pain doesn’t take away the pain I feel from my tooth.”
I agree with her. And this reaction from my interlocutors has happened to me constantly when I complain about our odysseys. Even if, after generating that familiar feeling of helplessness, I sometimes have to admit they’re right.
It happens to me, for example, with the blackouts. I know there are places with power outages lasting more than 24 hours straight. I also know that in other places electricity is restored for only two hours, and then you have to struggle again with the darkness and the lack of power that entails. In that latter case, you have to keep up a frantic pace, because you can’t shake the anxiety of whether it will come back soon or not, “whether they’ll cut it quickly,” so you can rush to get household or workplace tasks done. And there are even more terrible cases, like what has been heard in rural Mayarí, where electricity has been available only one day a month.
The city of Holguín doesn’t escape this challenge, but at least it’s scheduled! What luck! You know that if you have power during the day, you won’t have it at night, and vice versa. Some people prefer being without “light” from 6:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. because they’ll have it in the afternoon and can use the Internet (if there’s no electricity, there most likely won’t be any connection either, except in exceptional cases). Others prefer — and I’m in this group — not to have power in the afternoon, because then I’ll have it from 6:00 p.m. to 12:00 a.m. And when I get this schedule, which is every other day, I feel privileged.
It becomes incredible, in lived experience, how this factor — “electric power” — can determine your entire day. Theoretically, one would say in response: Of course! But in reality, it feels overwhelming. That day you won’t accomplish what you want to do, nor what you have to do for work (if that work involves a computer and other resources needed for it to function — and we’re not talking about one job, but most of them). Nor will you be able to do what you need, like accessing a service at a bank or a state store. During that scheduled blackout you create and organize tasks that, of course, will not require electricity: exercising, visiting a friend or family member, cooking (with gas, firewood, charcoal; for electric stoves you have to wait for those six eternal hours to pass and hope there are no transformer failures on the street poles)…
When the long-awaited power arrives, you have to run, because you must make the most of it. Every hour, minute, moment… counts. If by chance that time with electricity at home finds you out running errands, you suffer it — like that long, carefully tended nail that, after so much care, you lose it from washing too many dishes after a party.
And amid this pressure you may encounter that crazy person who already declares: why not just cut it off altogether and let adaptation take care of the rest? We perceive no prospects for solutions, and the government’s responses no longer inspire anything; so many have been announced, so many failures endured.
Yet perhaps, because of that instinct for survival, we keep inside ourselves the hope that one day the story will be different. It’s true that we don’t know how to build it. And as a friend says, we haven’t had the capacity to put a full stop to this debacle. But it’s incredible how we resist the idea that it will always be like this — unless we emigrate.
But it is precisely from that hope that another kind of energy emerges — the energy to endure. Not because of the command heard in so many government speeches about “creative resistance,” but because we cannot convince ourselves that our entire existence will be equally challenging, with such scarce possibilities. I believe we will have to rethink everything again and start over, amid other kinds of events that could occur at any moment.
In any case, I hope that this experience at least serves us not to do what would force us to repeat it.
Read more from Lien Estrada’s diary here.