Cubans adapt to a deepening U.S. oil blockade with solar-powered Chinese tricycles, charcoal pasteurization and blackout guides
In Cuba, blackouts are common enough that some of the most useful content on social media now has nothing to do with music or travel. It focuses on daily survival: where to find a cellphone signal, how to keep food safe without refrigeration and how to make a room livable when the air conditioner is not an option.
Dayán Marrero, a third-year computer science student at the Agrarian University of Havana, has built a following by treating those questions as a craft. From his home in Caraballo, a former sugar town outside Havana, he films tutorials lit by a rechargeable fan that also works as a lamp. His most-watched video, a guide to building a homemade antenna for Cuba’s patchy mobile internet, has nearly 800,000 views.
Marrero’s next ambition is to build a presence on TikTok. That will take extra work: U.S. sanctions restrict access to the app from Cuba.
The wider context is hard to miss. The U.S. embargo has limited trade, finance and investment for decades, and the more recent tightening around oil has deepened the damage. Cuba has also lost energy imports that once arrived from Venezuela and Mexico. The national grid now struggles to keep up with demand, and daily life is organized around scheduled blackouts and sudden outages.
The workarounds show up in nearly every corner of the island. Farmers heat milk over charcoal to pasteurize it. Tour guides grind coffee by hand for the few visitors who appear. In Havana, solar-powered Chinese tricycles have become a small transit fleet.
Viñales, Cuba’s ecotourism stronghold, illustrates how quickly the slowdown has altered daily life. Osiris Hernández, 57, has spent more than half his life as a guide there. He operates a boat inside the Indian Cave, moving visitors through an underground river that ends with a slow passage from darkness into daylight. The ride remains the same. The boats are mostly empty.
Viñales still looks the part: clean streets, rooms for rent, handmade crafts in the market. What it lacks is arrivals. Recent official figures show tourism in Cuba fell 62 percent in the first seven months of the year compared with the same stretch a year earlier. Hernández heard that one Chinese tourist had arrived recently, and it was enough to make him smile.
He has turned his home into a small guesthouse. Visitors eat meals cooked over charcoal; the coffee is ground by hand. A solar-powered inverter helps keep a freezer running through blackouts, and a rechargeable fan is passed along to guests, just like the ones Marrero promotes from his living room. Hernández says his goal is to offer decent service no matter what the grid does.
Just outside Viñales, at the El Olivo agroecological farm, Osnel Corrales and his family are doing something similar on a larger scale. Solar panels and batteries now support the dairy operation. They own an industrial generator, but there is not enough fuel to run it. On a recent morning, workers were making yogurt by heating milk over charcoal for pasteurization, then cooling it in vats powered by solar energy.
El Olivo’s restaurant, known for Mediterranean food, has few customers these days. The farm still produces yogurt and cheese because the cows need to be milked regardless of the tourist calendar, and its products are shipped to a company store in Viñales and to customers in Havana. But with fewer visitors around, demand has dropped, and the fuel shortage makes it harder for the few travelers who do arrive to reach the farm.
In Havana, the fuel shortage has produced one visible change: traffic is far lighter than it used to be. Buses are unreliable, so a growing fleet of privately operated electric tricycles helps fill the gap. Many are not ordinary battery vehicles; they come with solar rooftops and enough stored power to make several trips across the city.
Augusto, a longtime taxi driver, operates one of the latest-generation models. It has three batteries, a solar roof and a small fuel-powered engine for emergencies. He pays about 9,000 Cuban pesos a day, or roughly $15, to rent the tricycle. With room for six passengers, he moves people along routes that other drivers have divided by neighborhood, distance and the amount of charge available at the start of the day.
None of these adaptations are a full solution, but they are the Cuban way of keeping things moving. In local parlance, resolver means working around whatever obstacle stands in the way. The blockade has put a heavy obstacle in front of the country, and the people respond with what they have always used: inventiveness, patience and a great deal of improvisation.