Video call with my father: his ravaged face is a reflection of Cuba

I can't see my father in the darkness. I only hear him: "Wait, we'll find somewhere with light." He guides me to his left hand, to the screen of his phone, which he hasn't used in the last 18 hours so he can make this video call. El Cerro, his neighborhood, has been without electricity all that time. We walk together through his house, and although everything is dark, I can make out the silhouette of my grandmother's porcelain vase on the living room table, the tapestry of the rearing horse hanging on the wall, the two pots with taro stalks dangling from the macramé, and the photo we took the day we were taken. It's midday, and my father is celebrating his birthday, 67, the same age as the Revolution.

"We're going outside because there's no solution in here," my father says. He opens the door, and the sun illuminates his face. His face is more gaunt than the last time I called him. He's sadder, more opaque. He's a reflection of the country.

The island is sinking into total crisis. Between decades of government inefficiency, which have left the country producing nothing; the aftermath of the pandemic and the decline in tourism; Donald Trump and his economic strangulation measures; and now, the US decision to cancel crude oil shipments from its main supplier, Venezuela, following the capture of Nicolás Maduro, Cuba is on the verge of collapse.

The establishments that once provided basic supplies to the entire population are now empty. The same goes for pharmacies, markets, and stores. The only place Cubans can get a few basic goods to survive is in state-run stores, where they pay in dollars, but the state pays its citizens in Cuban pesos. Small businesses also use dollars, given that they have flourished thanks to remittances and emigrants. Public transportation operates at a bare minimum. Garbage trucks take weeks to empty the overflowing containers that clog the already meager streets. And homes, schools, and industries spend more than half their days without electricity.

I sense the calamity when my father says to me from his doorway, "I'll show you the neighborhood, see if you remember." He turns the camera, and his image disappears. In a slow, silent sweep, I observe the building across the street. It has lost its blue color; now it's grayish. On one of the balconies, Alfredo leans his elbows on the railing, his gaze lost in thought. He has aged. I was a child then, and he was the neighborhood's famous young man, because he was one of those who hunted cats on the rooftops during the nights when there was nothing to eat in the nineties, when the USSR collapsed and the country, once again, hung by a thread.

"Today the situation is worse," my father replies when I ask him about what Fidel Castro coined the "Special Period," that bygone era. And it's true. At that time, at least the government managed to give each family live chicks to raise at home so they would have something to eat later. I remember my parents putting ours in a cardboard box with a heater on top.

Also, like many people, we raised pigs in our bathtubs for months, animals we children loved like pets, and we even gave them names. I remember Macorina. But the misery we lived in, the need to survive, meant they became food months later. Luckily, at least for me, they never told me I had Macorina in front of me.

"Look, Juanita," my father alerts me. Juanita, over eighty years old, is crossing the street. On her back she carries what looks like a broken wooden chair. Juanita has been the president of the neighborhood's Committee for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR) for 35 years. The neighbors hate her because all this time she has been in charge of monitoring everyone's every step, every conversation. She records this information in a notebook that she later gives to some officer of State Security, the secret police. Juanita throws the chair she's carrying onto a pile of wood on the sidewalk. Then she lights a match and throws it on top. There, in the open air, is where she will cook today, like many Cubans, because the distribution of gas cylinders has been paralyzed for weeks due to the lack of fuel.

It starts to rain. Before my father enters the house, I see two cheerful, barefoot boys in their underwear run outside with a half-deflated basketball to play soccer and enjoy the downpour. I hear a woman shout, laughing, to the boys: look up at the sky and open your mouths, the water is cold and there isn't any at home. It's advice disguised as a joke.

As he closes the door, my father tells me he's been called up to participate in a military exercise. He's a retired officer from the Ministry of the Interior, and Cuba has declared a "state of war" in response to Trump's insinuations of attacking the island.

He's already inside. My father's voice reappears as a black blur on the screen. Without seeing his face, I sing "Happy Birthday" to him. I hang up after hearing him sob.