HAVANA, Cuba. – “My daughter doesn’t want to go back to Camagüey; she is terrified of the blackouts,” she told CubaNet Inalbis Hernández Ferrin, a Cuban resident of the municipality of Florida, who came to visit the capital with her 10-year-old daughter in early September.
The woman said that the situation in her province due to power outages and shortages of basic products is “extremely critical.”
“They have 12-hour power outages that cause all the food in the refrigerator to spoil, starting with the girl’s milk,” Hernández Ferrin explained.
She also said that on many occasions she has been forced to not send her daughter to school because she has not had anything to give her for breakfast.
“There are the bad nights, the mosquitoes and, on top of that, the food that goes bad. It is hard because everything is expensive in the SMEs“We simply decided not to send our children to school,” he said, also referring to the experience of other families in Camagüey.
He also said that after spending the first few days in Havana, where blackouts are less frequent and prolonged, his daughter said she did not want to return to Camagüey.
“We are seriously thinking about emigrating to Havana. The situation here is as critical as it is there, but the power is barely out,” he said.
The interviewee stressed that the privileges enjoyed by the capital, even though the country is in a critical context in general, cause the majority of residents of the eastern provinces to want to settle in Havana.
“Not now that everything is bad, Havana has always been better than the rest of the provinces, even for the notebook [de racionamiento] They have always produced more products than in other provinces. For us easterners, coming to Havana is like going to Miami for Havana residents,” he said.
Critical comments can often be read on social media about the disproportionate nature of the blackouts between Havana and the rest of the country’s provinces, where power cuts have lasted up to 14 hours a day in recent weeks. In the island’s capital, on the other hand, blackouts have only lasted six hours a day during daylight hours.
