By Julio Antonio Fernández Estrada (El Toque)
HAVANA TIMES – During the Special Period crisis of the 90’s ―I feel a little bad writing those words in capital letters― this joke was told: someone knocks on the door of a house…
-“Who is it?!”
-“It’s the light!”
-“Come in!”
-“No way, I was just leaving!”
Now, the light almost never knocks on doors in Cuba. It seems to have moved out forever. It seems it no longer wants to enter homes and stay there, still and unmoving.
When I was a child, power outages were picturesque, extraordinary events that were received with shouts of surprise, excitement, and play. Often, they came with air raid sirens, and adults took the matter very seriously, not daring to light a cigarette on the balcony because that light could easily be detected by the hypothetical enemy plane.
The blackouts of the eighties were accompanied by games, songs, mischief; and even the arrival of the light was poorly received, frustrating the closeness of lovers, the complicity that opened the door to adolescent confessions, the moment of family play and gathering everyone together (which, with the light, was very difficult to maintain).
Then, in the nineties, the power outages changed; they started to be constant, long, scheduled, offensive, annoying, part of the decline of a way of life, no longer part of the experience of the unusual.
In the nineties, some of the songs survived, but when food started to smell bad in the kitchen due to lack of cold, when we missed our favorite Brazilian soap opera or the baseball game we had been waiting for, when we had to endure until dawn to study for the exam the next morning, no one celebrated the blackout anymore, no one made apologies for it, nor did anyone see it with the innocence of ten years earlier.
In 2025, the blackout is the enemy of everyone in Cuba. It is a known, unscrupulous enemy that delights in the misery of the darkened people, needing all types of light; it is a cold, sadistic enemy that feeds on poor, tired, sweaty, bored souls with no hope.
In the eighties, we played “I see, I see” and “blind man’s bluff” during blackouts, and my father would tell us riddles and strange stories from the past and sing boleros we had never heard. The small apartment in Santos Suárez would fill with neighbors who attended this performance, made possible only by the lack of electricity.
In the nineties, sometimes, you could hear someone shouting from afar, and from close by, “Down with Fidel!” risking their lives; and glass bottles would shatter in the night, and everyone thought something else was about to explode, but it didn’t.
In 2025, mosquitoes know the hours of the blackouts, though they also bite under the sun, during cold fronts, and amid summer downpours. Without light, the fans are dead, and the refrigerators continue to be dead, because those are empty corpses, kept dark and uninhabited, with or without electricity, and they don’t remember the last time they felt the softness of melted butter in their innards.
In the eighties, I wanted to play “I see, I see” when there was no light. You couldn’t see anything, but it made you want to play this delightful game.
-“I see, I see…”
-“What do you see?”
-“One thing.”
-“What color?”
-“Yellow…”
In a blackout in the nineties, my father told me, leaning against the balcony railing, that it was all over, that there was nothing to do, that totalitarian systems don’t fall suddenly but glide down, and that in those moments we were in the middle of that subtle descent.
In 2025, I don’t live in Cuba, and I don’t see anything. I can’t play “I see, I see” with my family there, and I don’t think anyone in that house would want to play in the middle of a procession of darkness.
First published in Spanish by El Toque and translated and posted in English by Havana Times.
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