In the shimmering heat of Havana, where the mojitos are cold but the electricity is not, the residents of high-rise towers have been reduced to vertical prisoners in a concrete labyrinth. The rolling blackouts, the kind that make your fridge weep and your television resort to mime, have left the upwardly mobile truly immobile. The lifts, those electric chariots of the modern age, have become metal tombs. And what, pray tell, is Her Majesty’s Government doing about this travesty? Sending a humanitarian response, they say. A response. One imagines a crate of Marmite and a sternly worded letter about the importance of a steady 240-volt supply.
Let us sit for a moment, shall we, in the dimly lit bar of the Hotel Nacional, a gin and tonic sweating in hand, and contemplate the sheer absurdity of it all. These blackouts are not mere inconveniences; they are existential crises for the 85-year-old widow on the 12th floor who must now descend 144 steps to buy a loaf of bread. Each flight a small Calvary, each landing a station of the cross. The UK response, I am told, involves ‘technical assistance’ and ‘coordination’. Translation: a British chap in a linen suit will arrive with a clipboard and a troubled expression, murmur something about ‘load shedding’, and then depart for a weekend at Varadero.
But let us not be churlish. The Foreign Office, that bastion of bumbling benevolence, has sent words of comfort. “We stand with the Cuban people,” they said, in that sanctimonious tone usually reserved for natural disasters in faraway places where the wine is cheap. Stand with them? Standing is precisely what the residents of these towers cannot do without risking a coronary. They need lifts that work, lights that glow, fridges that chill. They need, in essence, the very thing the UK has in spades: a reliable grid. But we send the equivalent of a round of applause to a drowning man.
The blackouts are not random acts of God. They are the slow-motion collapse of a system built on a dream and fuelled by desperation. And here, in the land of tea and empathy, we pat ourselves on the back for dispatching a few solar-powered torches. The sheer gall of it. The unadulterated, gin-soaked gall.
Meanwhile, the residents adapt. They gather on rooftops, swapping stories in the Stygian gloom, sharing candles and the occasional bottle of rum. They have discovered a truth we have forgotten: community is the only lift that never breaks. But try putting that in an aid package. The UK response, like a bad review of a play one has not seen, misses the point entirely. It is theatre, dear reader. Mere theatre.
So raise a glass, if you will, to the blacked-out souls of Havana. And another to the deluded notion that a few government bureaucrats in Whitehall can fix what only a political miracle can. The lifts will remain broken, the lights will stay off, and the UK will send another memo. And I will be here, at the bar, documenting the farce with the only tool left to me: a pen dipped in gin.
In the end, the irony is this: the UK, a nation that once ruled the waves, cannot now power a lightbulb 4,000 miles away. Perhaps the real blackout is in our imagination. Or perhaps it is just the gin. Either way, the lifts are still not working.
