By Julianne Malveaux
(CUBA) – Trice Edney Wire – Imagine having electricity for only four hours a day. Now imagine not knowing which four hours.
Can you make coffee? Refrigerate medicine? Charge your phone? Will your child have school? Will the bus come? Will the internet work? Will your food spoil? For the remaining twenty hours, you wait.
Americans are so dependent on electricity that the thought itself feels jarring. Unless you live in Cuba.
I recently returned from Cuba as part of an all-African American delegation organized by the Institute of the Black World and led by Dr. Ron Daniels. We traveled to learn, to listen, and to better understand a nation Americans are often encouraged to view through slogans rather than lived experience.
Our experience was not the experience of most Cubans. We stayed in a hotel that generally had electricity. We experienced only brief outages in restaurants and public spaces. But everywhere we went, people described blackouts lasting as long as twenty hours a day—planned outages, unplanned outages, neighborhoods going dark without warning, daily life organized around uncertainty.
Imagine trying to run a school, a hospital, a restaurant, or simply a family under those conditions. And still people move forward.
One woman traveled nearly three hours to meet a member of our delegation. Part of her journey involved walking. Part involved hitchhiking. Three hours.
She simply wanted to spend time with her friend. We shared lunch together at a paladar, one of Cuba’s small private restaurants. She was thirty-one years old, attractive, warm, and funny.
I asked whether she had children. She shook her head.
“How can I afford it?” she replied. She was once a teacher. Now she picks up part-time work.
She cannot afford to have children. That answer has stayed with me.
Because this crisis is not only affecting the present. It is shaping the future. I also spoke with a ten-year-old boy.
I asked when he attended school. He shrugged. “Tuesday and Wednesday.” That was his answer. Not Monday through Friday. Tuesday and Wednesday.
What opportunities disappear when school becomes irregular? What happens when uncertainty becomes normal for children?
Race hovered over many of our conversations. Cuba’s laws prohibit racial discrimination, and senior leaders we met with—including the President and parliamentary leadership—acknowledged that racism persists. Yet when our delegation asked direct questions about race, we often received answers that felt cautious and rehearsed.
As an economist, I know laws matter. I also know laws rarely eliminate inequality by themselves.
At Cuba’s medical school, one of our colleagues asked doctors about mental health. Who takes care of the caregivers?
One physician, who had seemed eager to speak, suddenly broke down in tears. That moment stunned me.
These are people trained to care for others while living amid shortages, uncertainty, and extraordinary pressure. And yet; herever we went, people offered coffee. Or water. Or hospitality. Again and again.
Despite shortages. Despite hardship. Despite not having enough.
The debates about Cuba are loud and ideological. Some blame socialism. Others blame the blockade and decades of economic isolation. Most acknowledge that today’s crisis emerged from multiple forces colliding at once. I know economists prefer macro explanations.
But I keep returning to micro realities: A woman who cannot imagine motherhood. A child with only two days of school. A doctor who breaks down in tears. People with almost nothing still offering coffee. People debate Cuba endlessly. So do I.
But after returning home, I find myself thinking about something simpler. What kind of people continue offering hospitality when scarcity shapes nearly every aspect of life? That is the Cuba I met. Not the slogans. Not the talking points. Not the abstractions. The people.
And that is the Cuba I cannot unsee.
Dr. Julianne Malveaux is an economist and author.
