Cuba Blackouts Turn Elevators Into Traps and Kitchens Into Clinics

In Alamar, an eighteen-story building has learned to listen for silence. When the power cuts, an elevator can become a small metal room filled with strangers. The oil squeeze, fragile plants, and inflation turn outages into policy.

The Elevator Door That Never Really Closes

"Is anyone trapped in the elevatooor?" Heidi Martínez calls out, her phone held high like a lantern, the light bouncing off concrete and metal.

She is the administrator of an eighteen-story apartment building in Alamar, on the outskirts of Havana. She is fifty-three. Not a technician, not a mechanic, not someone trained for this. But necessity is an aggressive teacher, and she has become practiced at manually opening the elevator when it stalls.

It happens several times a week. A neighbor gets stuck. The building loses power. The elevator stops between floors. And Martínez, with her phone light and her hands, becomes the difference between panic and air again.

"We've already developed a culture of blackouts," she told EFE, standing at the building entrance.

In Cuba, the daily electricity cuts, driven by a power generation deficit, have been chronic for years. In places like Alamar, they are a familiar burden. The trouble is that in recent weeks they have intensified into something harder to bear, with between fifteen and twenty hours a day without power across the country, as noted in the notes, tied to Washington's oil pressure on the island.

Official data describe Tuesday as the most extensive blackout on record. At peak demand in the afternoon and night, more than sixty-four percent of the country was simultaneously without electricity.

Alamar carries its own particular version of this nightmare, and Martínez names it the way people name a recurring illness. They call it quita y pon, she explains, repeated cuts with no discernible pattern that can stretch for hours, every day. In a neighborhood of around 100,000 residents, unpredictability is not a detail. It is the whole point.

If a blackout arrives, you prepare. If it arrives like a flicker, you live in a constant state of half-readiness.

Martínez's elevator is the sharpest illustration. You can hear it in her voice when she shouts into the shaft, a sound that mixes duty with worry. A building can be tall. It can be ordinary. And still, with the wrong kind of darkness, it becomes a trap.

Quita y Pon as a Way of Life

Out front, in the improvised workshop near the building's garages, Erleny is repairing a tire camera. He is forty-nine, working with his hands in a place that looks like it was assembled from what was available, because that is often how workspaces are built when supplies are scarce.

He describes the power cuts the way you describe a bad habit that refuses to be trained out of the body. "It can be twenty minutes, it can be half an hour, it can be an hour. Nobody adapts to that. That's like, well, what remedy?" he told EFE.

That sense of resignation is not passive. It is active endurance. It is people building their day around the possibility that the lights will fail in the middle of a task, and then return, and then fail again.

Gladys Berriel, a retired special education teacher of seventy-four, says the problem began in twenty twenty three and stayed. There is no surprise in how she tells it. The phrasing carries the tired certainty of someone who has watched an emergency become routine.

The frustration is so deep, she adds, that some neighbors would trade the quita y pon for the longer, scheduled blackouts other regions endure. It sounds backward until you sit with it for a moment. Predictability is a kind of dignity. A schedule means you can plan dinner, charge a phone, store food, time a shower, and manage a medication.

"If at least we had a schedule, because we understand the situation with fuel perfectly, you adjust," Martínez said.

What this reveals is a social contract that people are still trying to honor, even as it frays. Many residents are not denying the crisis. They are asking for the most basic courtesy a system can offer in a shortage: tell us when.

When Repairs Cost More Than Work Ever Paid

The elevator scares you, but the real damage spreads quietly through appliances and budgets.

The quita y pon, this irregular pulsing of electricity, burns through household electronics without mercy. And in a country marked by product scarcity and high inflation, replacing or repairing a refrigerator or a fan is not an inconvenience. It is a crisis that sits atop the larger crisis.

Berriel says repairing her refrigerator costs more than her pension. She paid five thousand pesos for the repair, she told EFE. Her retirement income, she added, is 3,156 pesos after 37 years of working in education.

Numbers like that do not just describe a personal hardship. They describe a society where the math no longer works, where the cost of keeping food cold can exceed the monthly reward for a lifetime of public work.

This is where the story stops being only about electricity and becomes about how people are forced to ration everything at once. Light. Food. Time. Sleep. Money. Calm.

The notes frame the latest surge in blackouts as part of a broader energy crisis worsened by the United States oil pressure, layered onto an already critical situation. Cuba has faced prolonged daily outages since the summer of twenty twenty four, as the text ties them to frequent breakdowns at obsolete thermoelectric plants and a lack of foreign currency to import crude.

Since January 9, the notes say, no external fuel has entered Cuba, while the island produces only about a third of its energy needs. The government announced a contingency package last week aimed at surviving without imported oil: hospitals, state offices, and public transport operating at minimum service, universities shifting to remote teaching, cultural and scientific events canceled, and severe fuel rationing.

Independent experts cited in the notes believe that, between February and March, the lack of fuel will begin to hit Cuba severely, as it is indispensable and its absence cuts across every sector.

In recent days, the notes add, several countries have announced humanitarian aid shipments. The U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights said Friday that the United States is violating the U.N. Charter and international law with the oil pressure.

Back in Alamar, the policy arguments are real. Still, they arrive through a narrower door: the sound of an elevator stopping, the sudden quiet of a fan, the jolt that kills a refrigerator, the small flashlight beam of a phone in a stairwell.

Martínez listens, then calls out again. Is anyone trapped? The question is practical. It is also a summary of the moment Cuba is living through.

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