{"id":513606,"date":"2026-07-07T22:14:22","date_gmt":"2026-07-08T02:14:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/deultimominuto.net\/en\/uncategorized\/the-crisis-in-cuba-through-a-family-surviving-on-60-dollars-a-month\/"},"modified":"2026-07-07T22:14:22","modified_gmt":"2026-07-08T02:14:22","slug":"the-crisis-in-cuba-through-a-family-surviving-on-60-dollars-a-month","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deultimominuto.net\/en\/international\/the-crisis-in-cuba-through-a-family-surviving-on-60-dollars-a-month\/","title":{"rendered":"The crisis in Cuba through a family surviving on 60 dollars a month"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Adri\u00e1n Silva Guerra<\/strong> saw the street lamp turn on with a flicker<\/a>. It was 2:08 AM on a Thursday. Silva Guerra<\/strong>, an electrician, quickly got up from the porch, went into the house, and left the door ajar so that the early morning air could reach his 7-year-old son, who was sleeping on a foam mattress.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>He entered his workshop, sat down next to a pile of broken televisions he was taking apart to get spare parts, and began to solder. A wisp of smoke rose from a green and copper circuit board he was working on to repair a device. He did everything he could until, two hours later, he was plunged back into darkness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

L\u00e1zaro Figueroa Tamayo, 52, left, and Luis Silva Aldana, Silva Guerra’s father. Figueroa Tamayo stops by the family’s house every morning to eat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI am a slave to the current<\/strong>\u201d, said Silva Guerra<\/strong>, 32, bleary-eyed and having not slept.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>Shortly before the power went out, her mother, Zucel Guerra Brise<\/strong>, 52, left her home in Santiago de Cuba, the country’s second-largest city, on its southeastern coast. Thanks to the small glimmer of electricity supply, the ovens at a private bakery were able to bake bread that night.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Silva Aldana in bed at the Silva Guerra family home. He works as a primary school teacher <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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She stood in line to buy 100 rolls and prepared to walk the city streets and resell them so her family would have money to eat. She paid 7 cents per roll and sold them for 9 cents each.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>Silva Guerra<\/strong>, his mother and his father, Luis Silva Aldana<\/strong>, 64, a primary school teacher, barely scrape together the equivalent of less than 60 dollars a month<\/strong>. With that, they have to support their four-generation family, which also includes Silva Guerra’s wife, Analeidis, their two young children, and Zoe, his grandmother.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For almost two days in May, we watched how the family managed in some of the most difficult conditions they said they had ever experienced.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

L\u00e1zaro Figueroa Tamayo takes Zoe Brise out of the bathroom. She cannot walk after a recent injury.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Their circumstances are a microcosm of the difficulties facing Cuba, which is experiencing its worst humanitarian crisis<\/strong> since a revolution paved the way for a communist regime nearly seven decades ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Donald Trump<\/strong> administration has imposed limitations on Cuba and has demanded political and economic changes from its leaders. The Cuban government’s repression and its failed economic system have deepened the consequences of a U.S. trade embargo that has already lasted for decades.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Guerra Brise, center, waits in line to buy bread at a private bakery. He pays 7 cents for each roll and sells them for 9 cents each (Photographs by Lisette Poole Gonz\u00e1lez\/The New York Times)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since the beginning of the year, a de facto U.S. oil blockade and a wave of new sanctions, which were added to those already in place, have paralyzed the Cuban state and left it without the fuel necessary for the country to function. (Cuba experienced a nationwide blackout on Monday).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These circumstances have caused Silva Guerra and her extended family to live on the edge: they earn their living with meager incomes<\/strong>, have not been able to eat properly, and are at the mercy of brief periods of electricity at unpredictable times<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The bodegas<\/strong>, a state system that once guaranteed basic food at extremely low prices, began to fail because the government lacks the money to import food. Now, they have practically disappeared.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are months when the Silva Guerra family does not receive rice, beans, eggs, or chicken from the State, only one small bread roll for each of them every three days<\/strong>. The government says it ran out of the fuel needed to transport food. Food prices in the markets have risen by almost 20 percent this year, according to official figures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since electric light is available for barely four hours a day, his income has been reduced: even if he works as fast as he can at night, when there is usually power, Silva Guerra<\/strong>, who used to be the main breadwinner for the family, now barely contributes anything to the family budget. The family misses chorote, a thick drink typical of eastern Cuba that is consumed at breakfast and is made with toasted corn flour, sugar, and milk. Instead, in the morning, Silva Guerra sliced the white bread loaves into quarters and mixed a little water with a packet of white powder to prepare a mango-flavored drink.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Adri\u00e1n Silva Guerra, 32, at his home in Santiago. A month ago, the Silva Guerra family did not receive rice, beans, eggs, or chicken from the State, only one small bread roll for each of them every three days.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That was breakfast. And not just for the family.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIf I don’t have breakfast here, I don’t have breakfast<\/strong>,\u201d said L\u00e1zaro Figueroa Tamayo<\/strong>, 52, an old family friend who used to cut sugarcane but is now a cook at a hospital.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Also at the table were another family friend, Rolando Gal\u00e1n Labrada<\/strong>, 59, and his 6-year-old daughter, as well as the 7-year-old son of a neighbor who comes over every morning to eat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Afterwards, Silva Guerra accompanied her children\u20146-year-old Alejandro and 4-year-old Anna Jeline\u2014to climb the steep hills to school. Legend has it that her neighborhood, Chicharrones<\/strong>, owes its name to the street vendors who, during the Spanish colonial era, sold pork rinds to the people who went to see the troubadours.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the late 1950s, residents here\u2014including Silva Guerra’s great-grandfather\u2014helped Fidel Castro<\/strong>‘s rebels wage an urban guerrilla war, hiding them from police controlled by a dictator allied with the United States.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Zucel Guerra Brise, 52, prepares to go out to sell bread.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this close-knit community, it seems like everyone knows each other. The doors open directly onto the street. Vendors sit on little stools and offer detergent, coffee, and candies. People carry buckets of water from houses that have water to those that don’t, whether due to shortages or broken pipes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most of the food consumed here now comes from the private sector<\/strong>. With the money sent by the Cuban diaspora from Florida and Spain, chicken, rice, and beans are purchased.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is said that the Chicharrones neighborhood, where the Silva Guerra family lives, got its name from the vendors who, during the Spanish colonial era, sold pork rinds to the people listening to the troubadours.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Mexican government, which stopped sending oil to Cuba after the Trump administration threatened to impose tariffs on countries that continued to supply fuel, is sending packages of rice, bags of split peas, and bottles of vegetable oil to children under 4 years old and adults over 65.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The people in the neighborhood who are lucky enough to have enough to eat share what they have left over\u2014a chicken leg, a few grams of rice, a cup of sugar\u2014with those who are having a harder time, especially families with children.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These humble gestures of generosity<\/strong>, multiplied and combined with state food programs aimed at vulnerable groups, \u201cis what keeps people alive<\/strong>,\u201d said Walter Mondelo<\/strong>, a law professor at the University of Oriente\u2014the main university in Santiago\u2014who suffers the same hardships as many other Cubans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Analysts say that Cuba’s socialist model, while curtailing individual freedoms, encouraged people to look out for one another through an egalitarian ideology and mass mobilizations that reduced illiteracy, vaccinated the population, and sent doctors abroad.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mondelo said that, despite the failures of the Cuban Revolution, it taught people to share and help each other, and, he stated, part of that continued: those who have the least are those who support others the most<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This grassroots solidarity persists because it works: people give out of altruism, but also knowing that they might need something in the future<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Silva Guerra said that these practices are a way of living together. He, for example, fixes the work tools of some of his neighbors for free.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Figueroa Tamayo<\/strong>, the family’s neighbor, has a very affectionate relationship with Zoe Brise<\/strong>, 73, Silva Guerra’s grandmother, who has been bedridden and in a cast since she fractured her hip after a fall.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He lifts her from the bed\u2014which is in the kitchen, since there is no room anywhere else in the house\u2014and carries her to the bathroom and the living room so that she can have company. Brise said with a laugh that Figueroa Tamayo treats her this way because he wants to marry her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When the lights came back on at 1:23 PM that afternoon, everyone in the house was thrilled. Beyond the front door, the street remained empty as people rushed inside to do laundry and charge their devices<\/strong>. Silva Guerra works in the workshop he has at home to fix a DVD player for his neighbors while they wait. He makes the most of it when there is light to do everything he can.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cCurrent!<\/strong>\u201d, shouted Zucel Guerra Brise<\/strong>, Silva Guerra’s mother. She plugged in an electric hot plate that her son had improvised with a wooden stool, a sheet of zinc, and the coil from an old rice cooker, and began to boil chicken.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Salsa music was playing from the speakers in Silva Guerra’s workshop. Within minutes, two women arrived with a DVD player that wasn’t working.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He smiled for the first time that day, and said that when the light returned, he could put his skills into practice<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But it didn’t last long. Fifty-seven minutes later, the music stopped<\/strong>. He didn’t have enough time to fix the DVD player and it was another day in which Silva Guerra didn’t win anything.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Silva Guerra said that the lack of electricity tormented him and made him think about what he could sell to buy a package of pasta.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He said he has started having migraines due to stress.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Without public transport or money to go out and having to ensure that someone is at home when the power comes back on, people’s world has shrunk. The days are monotonous and predictable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The next day, Silva Guerra’s children stayed home without going to school. The family had no money to prepare food for them. Silva Guerra said he had nothing to give them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the afternoon, I was fixing a television. Just as I was removing the plastic casing, the power went out again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Luis Silva Aldana, 64, father of Silva Guerra, lights the fire to make coffee before going to work, at his home in Santiago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Without money for food, he borrowed 80 cents from a neighbor to buy a few grams of rice and a tomato puree cube.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Back home, he and Figueroa Tamayo began to take apart the wooden folding bed that the State had given him and on which his 3-year-old daughter slept.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While separating the bed slats, he said that his options were to wait for the light to return or to improvise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not even during the so-called \u201cspecial period<\/strong>\u201d of the 1990s, when the Soviet Union\u2014Cuba’s greatest benefactor\u2014collapsed and the country was plunged into misery, did the family have to improvise to cook.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now they really had to do it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Analeidis Silva Guerra<\/strong> placed a rack from her broken<\/a> refrigerator on two blocks in her small backyard, mounted the wooden bed slats between the blocks, and placed a soot-covered pot filled with water, rice, and tomato puree on top.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Adri\u00e1n Silva Guerra saw the street lamp turn on with a flicker. It was 2:08 AM on a Thursday. Silva Guerra, an electrician, quickly got up from the porch, went into the house, and left the door ajar so that the early morning air could reach his 7-year-old son, who was sleeping on a foam […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":133556,"featured_media":513970,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_members_access_role":[],"_members_access_error":""},"categories":[95],"tags":[44365,44366],"class_list":{"0":"post-513606","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-international","8":"tag-adrian-silva-guerra","9":"tag-silva-guerra"},"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/deultimominuto.net\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2026\/07\/5SDOLQDXARESVFYLU2DKTY24YI.avif","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/phj1q1-29BY","dum_api":{"author_name":"Yerandi Santana","author_image":"https:\/\/deultimominuto.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/cropped-WhatsApp-Image-2026-02-13-at-5.35.07-PM-96x96.jpeg","categories_name":["International"],"featured_media_url":"https:\/\/cdn.deultimominuto.net\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2026\/07\/5SDOLQDXARESVFYLU2DKTY24YI.avif"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deultimominuto.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/513606","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deultimominuto.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deultimominuto.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deultimominuto.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/133556"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deultimominuto.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=513606"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/deultimominuto.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/513606\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deultimominuto.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/513970"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deultimominuto.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=513606"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deultimominuto.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=513606"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deultimominuto.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=513606"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}