Out of gas, Cubans cook with charcoal and wood to survive.
- The San Juan Daily Star
- 2 hours ago
- 4 min read
By ED AUGUSTIN and LISETTE POOLE GONZÁLEZ
On a recent night, Yusimi Castellano crouched over her squat iron stove, arranging charcoal and gently placing the Styrofoam and the plastic she used as kindling over it. She used a cigarette lighter to start a small fire.
Noxious smoke billowed through her 18th floor apartment, eventually sweeping out toward the former military barracks where the Cuban Revolution is said to have begun and the verdant mountains that wrap around Santiago de Cuba, the country’s second-largest city.
Slowly, the charcoal began to glow. She put a grill made of old coat hangers on top and boiled some spaghetti for her family’s dinner.
“I shouldn’t be cooking with charcoal,” said Castellano, 58, who has asthma and lately has been short of breath and coughing constantly. “But if I don’t cook, I die.”
Castellano’s crude cooking methods have become the norm across the complex of five 18-story buildings, each with 120 apartments, where she lives and that were once meant to showcase the revolution’s promise when they opened four decades ago.
Today, some people can’t even afford charcoal, and resort to chopping firewood to cook in their homes.
Life here and across much of Cuba, already difficult because of an economy that has been in shambles for years, has become even worse since the Trump administration mounted its escalating pressure campaign against the country’s communist government.
First, the Trump administration stopped oil deliveries from Venezuela, Cuba’s main benefactor, after U.S. forces in January captured Venezuela’s president.
Then President Donald Trump used the threat of tariffs to cut off foreign fuel shipments almost entirely, including from Mexico, Cuba’s other crucial supplier.
The Cuban government says its oil reserves have run out and that its aging electric grid is becoming increasingly unreliable. The country produces some oil but far from enough to meet its needs.
Outside Havana, the capital, power outages now last 20 hours a day. The lack of energy has set off an enormous humanitarian crisis that has become deadly.
The main refinery in Santiago has stopped producing liquefied petroleum gas, cooking gas mostly made from Venezuelan and Mexican oil.
While many households in Havana still have gas piped into their kitchens, Santiago, like the rest of the country, doesn’t have that type of infrastructure. (Santiago’s population, according to the last census in 2012, was about 431,000, but that was before an enormous wave of migration from Cuba. Many apartments in Castellano’s complex are empty.)
The city, where a majority of the population is Afro-Cuban, has traditionally been a bedrock of government support, but it’s poorer than Havana, has a less developed private sector and receives fewer remittances from abroad. With less to cushion the crisis, Santiago has been particularly hard hit by the economic collapse.
Haydee Gómez Suárez, 63, who lives in a different tower from Castellano’s, sells thin plastic bags for bread for the equivalent of 2 cents each outside privately owned bakeries. But the bakeries’ ovens are electric.
“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 more than 20 pounds in recent years, she said, and eats just one meal a day.
Water leaks through her damp, dingy apartment. She cooks with cardboard and scraps of wood she finds in mounting piles of trash.
She sluices buckets of water over her kitchen walls, but the smell from her cooking fires clings to her furniture, and soot has darkened her walls.
It’s a far cry from when the towers opened in 1983. One Cuban magazine described the complex, built with earthquake-resistant technology, 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 buildings overlook. The attack, staged by Fidel Castro and his small band of rebels on July 26, 1953, was later mythologized as the start of the revolution that toppled a U.S.-aligned dictator.
(Fidel’s brother, Raúl Castro, who also fought in the nearby Sierra Maestra mountains, was indicted last week on murder charges for the downing of two civilian planes 30 years ago that killed four men, including three Americans.)
The apartments in the complex were given to families of the rebel guerrillas and to workers at a new textile plant billed by the government as one of the largest in Latin America. Each building’s name is linked to the rebel campaign.
“It was a projection of a future — a country bounding forward toward development and emancipation,” said Aida Morales, a researcher in the historian’s office in Santiago.
Asked what the projection is now, she laughed. “We’re an island; you can’t go anywhere but the sea,” Morales said. “And there’s no one to help us.”
In 2019, the first Trump administration began imposing sanctions on companies shipping Venezuelan oil to Cuba, and in response the Cuban government introduced what it said were temporary energy-saving measures. They turned out to be permanent.
Even before the more recent round of actions by the Trump administration, sanctions had left the Cuban government without enough money to buy the fuel the country needed, some economists say. Trump administration officials have blamed Cuba’s woes on what they call the government’s corruption and incompetence, not the U.S. oil blockade.
Still, while most Cubans now go without cooking gas, electricity and public transportation, the Cuban police and armed forces continue receiving fuel for their vehicles.
Cuba’s Soviet-era electric grid is obsolete, weakened by decades of underinvestment and a lack of maintenance — a result of the island’s failed economic model and sanctions on parts needed to maintain the system.
For many here, the question of why there is so little electricity is irrelevant. Disillusioned, disempowered and exhausted, many say they no longer care. They are too busy surviving.
“Those in power know the truth,” said Felo González, 50, a furniture repairer. “Our job is to hustle.”