Without gas, Cubans cook with charcoal and firewood to survive

He used a lighter to start a small fire.

Toxic smoke spread through his 18th-floor apartment, eventually reaching the former military barracks where the Cuban Revolution is said to have begun and the green mountains surrounding Santiago de Cuba, the country’s second-largest city.

Little by little, the coal began to glow.

He placed a grill made from old hangers on top and cooked spaghetti for his family’s dinner.

“You shouldn’t cook with charcoal,” said Castellano, 58, who has asthma and lately suffers from shortness of breath and a constant cough.

“But if I don’t cook, I’ll die.”

Castellano’s rudimentary cooking methods have become the norm throughout the complex of five 18-story buildings, each with 120 apartments, where she lives and which were once inaugurated four decades ago to show the promise of the revolution.

Nowadays, some people cannot even afford to buy charcoal and resort to chopping firewood to cook at home.

Life here and in much of Cuba, already difficult due to an economy that has been in ruins for years, has gotten even worse since the Trump administration launched its escalating pressure campaign against the country’s communist government.

First, the Trump administration halted oil shipments from Venezuela, Cuba’s main benefactor, after U.S. forces captured the Venezuelan president in January.

Later, the president Donald Trump used the threat of tariffs to almost completely cut off foreign fuel shipments, including those from Mexico, Cuba’s other crucial supplier.

The Cuban government says its oil reserves have been depleted and its aging power grid is increasingly unstable.

The country produces some oil, but nowhere near enough to cover its needs.

Outside Havana, the capital, power outages now last 20 hours a day.

The lack of energy has triggered a huge humanitarian crisis that has turned deadly.

Santiago’s main refinery has stopped producing liquefied petroleum gas, a cooking gas made primarily from Venezuelan and Mexican oil.

In December, Castellano picked up a small cooking gas canister at a state store located on the ground floor of his building.

The cartridges were supposed to be refilled monthly, but by then they were refilling about every two months.

However, gas has not been supplied since January.

Having breakfast at Castellano’s house has become something exceptional.

Since the elevator no longer works most of the time, the delivery man who used to bring the bread is not willing to go up 18 floors.

But the family has no choice.

Five mornings a week, Castellano’s niece accompanies her mother, Giorgina, 87, with dementia, downstairs to a state day center for seniors a few blocks away.

In the afternoon, both must go back up the stairs.

“The country is being strangled,” said the niece, Yailen Menéndez, 38.

Residents suffer from lack of sleep.

Since no one knows when the power will come back on, they leave the lights and fans on.

If the power comes back on, the sudden glow or cool breeze will wake them up so they can do their homework before another outage.

“The night has turned into day,” said a neighbor of Castellano, who quickly went to leave him a sprig of oregano.

“Everyone wakes up when the lights come on to wash, cook, do everything.”

While many homes in Havana still have natural gas in their kitchens, Santiago, like the rest of the country, lacks that infrastructure.

(According to the last census in 2012, Santiago’s population was approximately 431,000, but this was before a huge wave of migration from Cuba. Many apartments in the Castellano complex are empty.)

The city, where the majority of the population is Afro-Cuban, has traditionally been a pillar of government support, but is poorer than Havana, has a less developed private sector and receives fewer remittances from abroad.

With fewer resources to cushion the crisis, Santiago has been particularly affected by the economic collapse.

Haydee Gómez Suárez, 63, who lives in a different tower from Castellano, sells thin plastic bread bags for the equivalent of 2 cents each in front of private bakeries.

But bakery ovens are electric.

“If there is no light, there is no bread,” he said.

“And if there is no bread, I cannot sell a single bag.”

According to him, he has lost more than 9 kilos in recent years and only eats once a day.

Water seeps through her damp, dingy apartment.

He cooks with cardboard and pieces of wood that he finds among piles of garbage.

She pours buckets of water over the walls of her kitchen, but the smell of the stove permeates her furniture and the soot has darkened her walls.

It is a far cry from where it was when the towers opened in 1983.

A Cuban magazine described the complex, built with anti-seismic technology, as “the face of the city’s future.”

The buildings were inaugurated on the thirtieth anniversary of the failed rebel assault on the Moncada military barracks, which can be seen from the buildings.

The attack, carried out by Fidel Castro and his small group of rebels on July 26, 1953, was later mythologized as the beginning of the revolution that overthrew a dictator aligned with the United States.

(Fidel’s brother, Raúl Castro, who also fought in the nearby Sierra Maestra, was charged last week with murder for the downing of two civilian small planes 30 years ago, which killed four men, including three Americans.)

The complex’s apartments were given to families of rebel guerrillas and workers at a new textile plant that the government presented as one of the largest in Latin America.

The name of each building is linked to the rebel campaign.

“It was a projection of the future: a country that was advancing by leaps and bounds towards development and emancipation,” said Aida Morales, a researcher at the historian’s office in Santiago.

When asked what the current situation was, he laughed.

«We are an island; “You can’t go anywhere other than the sea,” Morales said.

“And there is no one to help us.”

As night fell, Anyerman Quiñones Goicoechea, 40, a resident of the complex and a painter of buildings for a state company, remained pensive in the darkness, sitting in a rocking chair.

After more than 20 years working for the State, he feels that he has nothing to show in return.

“The system has to fall,” he said.

“They have to leave. Or change their way of thinking.”

He attributes the blackouts primarily to the regime.

“This country prioritized the construction of hotels, not power plants.”

Four floors up, a couple had a different perspective.

Antonio Nieto Paneque, 83, and his wife, who did not want to reveal her full name, ate cold rice and beans that she had prepared at 11 the previous night, when the power came back on.

Nieto Paneque said that, as a teenager, he joined an urban guerrilla group in Santiago in 1957, dedicating himself to smuggling guns throughout the city.

“The revolution brought electricity to the countryside,” he said.

“We believed that farmers had the same rights as city people.”

His wife pointed out the rice cooker, hot plate, refrigerator and a “very good” pressure cooker, all distributed two decades ago when the government, with an abundance of cheap Venezuelan oil, tried to connect Cuban kitchens to the electrical grid.

“Before Trump came to power, we lived normally,” said Nieto Paneque, an LED headlamp strapped to his forehead.

“Our lives were stable.”

In 2019, the first Trump administration began imposing sanctions on companies exporting Venezuelan oil to Cuba, and in response the Cuban government introduced what it called temporary energy-saving measures.

These measures turned out to be permanent.

Even before the Trump administration’s recent round of measures, sanctions had left the Cuban government without enough funds to buy the fuel the country needed, according to some economists.

Trump administration officials blamed Cuba’s problems on what they call government corruption and incompetence, not the U.S. oil blockade.

However, while most Cubans now lack cooking gas, electricity and public transportation, the Cuban police and armed forces continue to receive fuel for their vehicles.

The Cuban electrical grid, which dates back to the Soviet era, is obsolete and weakened by decades of lack of investment and maintenance, a consequence of the island’s failed economic model and the sanctions imposed on the parts necessary to maintain the system.

In the middle of the dark tower where the Castellanos live, the orange glow of a fireplace illuminated the balcony of one of the apartments.

Figures silhouetted against the flames leaned.

In the park below, life continued its course. A street vendor banged on the metal box where he kept his paper-wrapped roasted peanuts warm.

Nearby, other vendors sold candy, condoms and candles.

Yoandris Garcia, 33, another resident of the complex, was sitting near them, preferring the cooler air to another sleepless night sweating in bed.

He said he lost his job last month when the minibus company he worked for ran out of fuel.

The next day, he matter-of-factly planned to walk 4 miles to chop firewood with a machete and carry it home on his shoulder.

On the other side of the avenue, the only streetlight went out.

Garcia said he hoped that meant the electricity was being diverted elsewhere, as it sometimes happens.

“Now they’ll put it here,” he said, nodding toward the apartment buildings. Nothing happened.

For many here, the question of why there is so little electricity is irrelevant.

Disillusioned, helpless 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 make a living.”