Truthout is an indispensable resource for activists, movement leaders and workers everywhere. Please make this work possible with a quick donation.

For a Caribbean city known for its effervescent, out-of-doors culture, Havana has relatively few cars on its streets, not many people on its sidewalks, and a handful of places open for patrons. Life at midweek feels like a Sunday or a holiday. The background noise of competing internal-combustion engines, common to every modern city, has been replaced by the discrete whir of electric vehicles. The neoclassical buildings, with their arcades and front colonnades, stand out sharply in this uncanny calm, as if the city had time-warped back to the age of their construction. The reason for all of this is obvious: The U.S. oil blockade has made gasoline scarce, and without it, cars, generators, refrigerators, water pumps, incubators, and dialysis machines cannot operate. The point is to drive not only the economy but also everyone’s lives to a literal standstill.

But beyond this panoramic first impression, as one looks more closely, it becomes clear that life goes on. By day, the markets remain open and there is food in the stalls. By night, young people emerge from buildings darkened by blackouts and gather to play pickup soccer under whatever streetlight remains in operation. School hours and social events are rescheduled to make the maximum use of daylight hours. At a journalists’ conference, panel members simply wait out the power outages until the microphones work again; at the nightclubs in Old Havana, people take a break from dancing until the music returns. At a barrio party in the working-class neighborhood of El Fanguito, music blares from a Buena Vista-style band while organizers hand out cups of meat stew.

At home, many people leave something on when they go to bed — a light, a fan, or anything that makes noise — so they are woken up if the power returns in the middle of the night, allowing them to take care of tasks that require electricity . Rechargeable fans and light bulbs have become essentials. People who have withstood 64 years of economic blockade, including the so-called special period following the fall of the U.S.S.R. and a series of screw-tightening measures from that time onward, are not simply going to raise a white flag at the latest sign of adversity.

Indeed, it is in the insistence on maintaining the routines of daily life that a quiet resistance lies. “I’m out here just like I am every weekend,” said Juan, an electrical engineer out for a Sunday stroll on the seaside promenade known as the Malecón. Juan bristled at the media coverage that attempts to portray his compatriots as desperate, starving, at their wits’ end. “A foreign media crew shot some footage of a man who was recycling aluminum cans out of the garbage and tried to make it out like he was eating from it,” he grumbled. “That is how they twist things to make it look like we’re about to collapse.”

Still, no one denies the real hardship caused by the oil blockade — especially coming so soon on the heels of the COVID-19 pandemic. Educators said at........

© Truthout