How a Four-Generation Cuban Family Survives on $60 a Month

The U.S. oil blockade has deepened a humanitarian crisis, forcing Cubans to lean on the island’s long tradition of community solidarity to provide a cushion.

Adrián Silva Guerra saw the streetlight flicker back to life. It was 2:08 a.m. on a Thursday. An electric repairman, Mr. Silva Guerra quickly got up from his concrete stoop and went inside, leaving the front door ajar so the night air would drift over his 7-year-old son sleeping on a foam mattress.

He walked into his workshop, sat down next to a stack of broken televisions he cannibalizes for spare parts and began to solder. A ribbon of smoke wafted from a green-and-copper circuit board he was working on to repair a television. He did as much as he could until, two hours later, he was plunged back into darkness.

“I’m a slave to the current,” said Mr. Silva Guerra, 32, haggard and sleep deprived.

Shortly before the lights went out, his mother, Zucel Guerra Brise, 52, left their house in Santiago de Cuba, the country’s second-largest city along the southeastern coast. Thanks to the trickle of electricity, the ovens at a local privately owned bakery made bread that night.

She lined up to buy 100 small rolls of bread, preparing to walk the city’s streets and resell them so her family would have money for lunch. She paid 7 cents per roll and sold each for 9 cents.

Mr. Silva Guerra, his mother, and his father, Luis Silva Aldana, 64, a primary-school teacher, cobble together the equivalent of less than $60 a month. With this they must sustain their four-generation family, which also includes Mr. Silva Guerra’s wife, Analeidis, their two young children and Zoe, his grandmother.

Over nearly two days in May, we watched as the family struggled under some of the most miserable conditions they said they had ever endured.

Their circumstances are a microcosm of the struggles facing Cuba, which is experiencing its worst humanitarian crisis since a revolution nearly seven decades ago paved the path to Communist rule.

The Trump administration has applied a stranglehold on Cuba, demanding political and economic change from its leaders. The Cuban government’s repression and failed economic system have exacerbated the consequences of a decades-old U.S. trade embargo.

Since the start of the year, an effective American oil blockade and a wave of new sanctions on top of existing ones have crippled the Cuban state, leaving it without enough fuel to run the country. (Cuba experienced a nationwide power outage on Monday.)

All this has left Mr. Silva Guerra and his extended family living on the edge — eking out a pittance of income, unable to feed themselves adequately and at the mercy of short bursts of power at unpredictable times.

- Author: Ed Augustin, The New York Times.
(Ed Augustin and Lisette Poole González traveled to Santiago de Cuba to chronicle Cuba’s intensifying humanitarian crisis.)