Yunia Figueredo, an independent journalist in Havana, sent me a voice message recently from her daughter's phone because her own had no data connection.

Earlier that morning, she had tried to boil eggs for her youngest daughter's breakfast during one of Cuba's brief bursts of electricity.

“The electricity came on for one minute, then three minutes later they cut it,” Figueredo said. “The egg is still there in the pot.”

Her daughter has health conditions that prevent her from eating staples like rice or beans. With charcoal nearly impossible to find, almost everything in her kitchen depends on electricity that may last only minutes at a time.

"This is not life," Figueredo said. "We are dying here."

Cuba is in the grip of its worst crisis in decades. Blackouts last most of the day. Pharmacies are empty. A liter of gasoline now costs more than a Cuban worker’s monthly salary.

Over the past several days, I contacted Cubans by WhatsApp and Signal – journalists, activists and ordinary citizens across the island – and asked them three questions about daily life, the national mood and what they think about the United States and its role in Cuba's crisis. Some asked to be identified only by their first name or not at all, fearing reprisals.

Across Cuba, daily life has become an exhausting, round-the-clock struggle to secure the basics. Food exists, but at prices most Cubans cannot afford. A carton of eggs costs 3,800 pesos. The minimum wage for public workers is 2,500 pesos per month (roughly $4.50).

"I don't know how Cuban workers eat," Niober Garcia Fournier, a freelance journalist who lives in Guantánamo, told........

© USA TODAY