| For the Cuban Revolution, the oil cutoff couldn’t come at a worse moment. The island is in the dark most of the time. The lights are more often out than on, even in Havana, the capital. Blackouts last for 18 hours at a time – which means food rotting in fridges, no water if supply relies on electric pumps, no communications. Huge mounds of rubbish have piled up in the streets - the state’s garbage trucks are barely making their rounds.
As tough as it may be for committed revolutionaries to accept, these circumstances are creating new social problems, ones the Cuban Revolution has traditionally prided itself as having avoided. Anecdotally, as the government doesn’t release figures on these things, I’ve witnessed a marked uptick in acute hunger, people begging, children selling candies in the street, people washing windscreens at the traffic lights. |
