The elevators groan, then die. The lights flicker, surrender, and plunge the corridor into a stifling, tropical blackness. For residents of Havana’s high-rises, the scheduled blackouts have become an unpredictable recursion of modern life, a brutal algorithm of scarcity. This is not merely a failure of infrastructure; it is a systemic collapse of the digital and physical grid, a cruel user experience for a population stranded between floors and centuries.
These blackouts are not random. They are calculated, rolling outages designed to ration a failing electrical system. But for those dwelling in the vertical villages that punctuate Cuba’s skyline, the experience is anything but rational. Imagine being on the 15th floor, the lift a dead metal box, the stairs a humid labyrinth, and the promise of electricity a phantom notification that may or may not appear. The uncertainty is the true kernel of suffering. It creates a constant cognitive load, a background process draining human energy as effectively as a power surge.
This is where the human and the technical collide in the most visceral way. For the younger generation, the ones raised on mobile phones and fleeting internet connections, the blackout represents a digital excommunication. Social feeds freeze. WhatsApp goes silent. The cloud becomes a distant, mocking sky. They are abruptly thrown into a state of forced offline solitude, a Luddite experiment no one opted into. The irony is thick: a nation striving for digital sovereignty finds its citizens stripped of digital agency by a failing analog backbone.
From a technologist’s perspective, the crisis is a stark lesson in system design. A resilient grid requires redundancy, interconnections, and fail-safes. Cuba’s infrastructure, crippled by embargo and neglect, is a fragile single point of failure. Each blackout is a cascading event, a virus of instability that infects every dependent layer. Refrigeration stops. Medical equipment falters. Water pumps stall. The entire stack of modern existence crashes.
But there is a more profound, almost philosophical dimension to this crisis. We in the tech world talk endlessly about the user experience of apps and platforms, about frictionless interfaces and delightful micro-interactions. Here, the user is the resident, and the product is survival itself. The interface is a stairwell in the dark. The feedback loop is a broken promise. The error message is silence.
What of the ethical implications? The blackout, wielded as a management tool, strips citizens of predictability, a fundamental human need. It is a form of algorithmic governance without transparency, a system that feels designed with a callous disregard for the lived experience of its users. The residents of these high-rises are not data points; they are individuals making daily calculations: can I get groceries today? Is it safe to go up? Will I be trapped?
Yet within this darkness, there are glimmers of human resilience. Neighbours help neighbours. Candles flicker in windows like communal beacons. People gather on balconies, sharing stories and phone chargers. These are the makeshift patches, the human-enabled workaround. They are not a solution, but they are a testament to a different kind of network: social cohesion.
Looking ahead, the path must involve a radical rethinking of energy independence. Decentralised microgrids, solar panels on rooftops, battery storage as a public utility. These are not just engineering fixes; they are acts of digital sovereignty, giving people control over their own power, their own data, their own lives. The grid must become more like the internet: distributed, resilient, and user-centred.
For now, Cuba remains in a state of suspended animation, a beta test for a dystopian future we could all face. The blackouts are a signal for the rest of the world. Our systems are only as robust as their weakest node. The user experience of society cannot be relegated to a background process. We must design with empathy, build with redundancy, and always, always keep the lights on.
