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.
The bodega, a state system that once guaranteed food staples at extremely low prices, began faltering because the government lacks enough money to import food. Now, it’s all but vanished.
In some months the Silva Guerra family doesn’t receive any rice, beans, eggs or chicken from the state — just a roll of bread for each of them every third day. The government says it is out of diesel fuel needed to transport food. Food prices at markets have surged nearly 20 percent this year, according to official figures.
With electricity available for barely four hours a day, their income has shrunk: even working as fast he can at night when the power usually flows, Mr. Silva Guerra, once the family’s main breadwinner, contributes little to the family pot.
The family yearns for “chorote,” a thick breakfast drink native to eastern Cuba made from toasted corn flour, sugar and milk. Instead, in the morning, Ms. Silva Guerra tore loaves of white bread into quarters and swirled together some water with a sachet of white powder to make a mango-flavored soft drink.
This was breakfast. And not just for the family.
“If I don’t eat breakfast here, I don’t eat breakfast at all,” said Lazaro Figueroa Tamayo, 52, a longtime family friend who once cut sugar cane but now works as a cook in a hospital.
Also at the table was another family friend, Rolando Galan Labrada, 59, and his 6-year-old daughter, as well as a neighbor’s 7-year-old son who comes by every morning to eat.
Ms. Silva Guerra then walked her children — Alejandro, 6, and Anna Jeline, 4 — up steep hills to school. Legend has it that their neighborhood, Chicharrones, was named after street vendors who during the Spanish colonial period sold pork cracklings to people watching troubadours.
In the late 1950s, residents here — including Mr. Silva Guerra’s great-grandfather — helped Fidel Castro’s rebels wage urban guerrilla warfare, hiding them from a police force under the control of a dictator aligned with the United States.
Everyone in this tight-knit community seems to know each other. Doors open directly out onto the street. Vendors sit on stools selling washing detergent, coffee and lollipops. People carry buckets of water from houses that have water to houses that do not, either because of shortages or broken pipes.
Most of the food people here eat now comes from the private sector. Money sent from the Cuban diaspora in Florida and Spain buys chicken, rice, and beans.
The Mexican government, which stopped shipping oil to Cuba after the Trump administration threatened tariffs against countries that continued providing fuel, is shipping packs of rice, bags of split peas and bottles of vegetable oil to children under 4 and adults over 65.
People in the neighborhood fortunate to have enough to eat give whatever extra they have — a chicken leg, a pound of rice, a cup of sugar — to those going through harder times, particularly families with children.
These humble acts of generosity multiplied many times over coupled with targeted state food programs to vulnerable groups “is what’s keeping people alive,” said Walter Mondelo, a law professor at the Universidad de Oriente, Santiago’s major university, who is suffering the same hardships as many other Cubans.
Analysts say that Cuba’s socialist model, while squelching individual freedoms, encouraged people to care for each other — through egalitarian ideology and mass mobilizations that reduced illiteracy, vaccinated the population and sent doctors abroad.
“People who have the least show the most solidarity,” he said. “Despite all its failures, the Cuban revolution taught people to share and help one another. A lot has been lost, but part of that remains.”
This street-level solidarity persists because it works — people give out of altruism, but also on the understanding that they may need something in the future.
For Mr. Silva Guerra, who fixes some of his neighbors’ work tools for free, “it’s a way of living together.”
Mr. Figueroa Tamayo, the family neighbor, has a tender relationship with Zoe Brise, 73, Mr. Silva Guerra’s grandmother, who had been bed bound and in a cast since she fractured her hip in a fall.
He lifts her from her bed, which is in the kitchen since there is no space anywhere else, to the bathroom and to the living room so she can socialize.
“He carries me with a bit of spice because he wants to marry me,” she said laughing.
When the lights flicked back on at 1:23 p.m. that afternoon, everyone in the home suddenly got excited. Beyond the front door, the street cleared out as people hurried inside to wash clothes and charge their devices.
“Electricity!” Zucel Guerra Brise, Mr. Silva Guerra’s mother, shouted. She plugged in a hot plate her son had cobbled together from a wooden stool, a sheet of zinc, and the coil of an old rice cooker and started to boil chicken.
Salsa music played from speakers inside Mr. Silva Guerra’s workshop. Within minutes, two women arrived with a DVD player that wasn’t working.
He smiled for the first time that day: “When the power comes on, I can put my skills to use.”
But it did not last. Fifty-seven minutes later the music died. He did not have enough time to fix the DVD player and it was another day Mr. Silva Guerra earned no income.
“It torments me,” he said. “When there’s no power, my mind starts to wander. I think about what I can sell to buy a packet of spaghetti.”
He said he has started getting migraines because of stress.
Without public transport, with no money to go out and have fun, and with having to make sure someone is home when the power comes on, people’s worlds have gotten smaller. The days are monotonous and predictable.
The next morning, the two Silva Guerra children were kept home from school. The family had no money to pack them snacks. “I have nothing to give them,” Mr. Silva Guerra said.
In the afternoon, he was repairing a television. As he removed the plastic casing, the power failed again.
Out of pocket and with no money for the lunch, he borrowed 80 cents from a neighbor to buy a pound of rice and a cube of tomato purée.
Back home, he and Mr. Figueroa Tamayo began dismantling the state-issued wooden cot that his 3-year-old daughter had been sleeping on.
“Either we wait for the power to come back on,” he said, knocking out the slats, “or we improvise.”
Even during the so-called “special period” in the 1990s after the Soviet Union, Cuba’s biggest benefactor, collapsed and the country plunged into misery, the family never had to improvise cooking.
Now they did.
Ms. Silva Guerra rested a shelf of their dead refrigerator across two blocks in their small back yard, assembled the wooden slats between the blocks and placed a sooty pan filled with water, rice and tomato purée on top.
Then she lit the fire.
