A virtual rickshaw ride through crisis-hit Havana: "Am I dreaming?"

Yosniel Fernández opens his eyes and sees the blades of the ceiling fan spinning. The room is cool, the 33 °C are not noticeable. Beside him, his wife is asleep. And beyond his bed, a few meters away, in a smaller bed, his eight-year-old daughter. He stretches out his arm and picks up his mobile phone, which is connected to the power outlet, from the floor. The phone is charged and shows 7:30 AM. "Am I dreaming?", he asks himself.It's the first time the family sleeps all night and since January, when the President of the United States, Donald Trump, after ordering the extraction of Nicolás Maduro from Caracas and his deposition in a New York prison, decided that not a single more drop of Venezuelan oil would reach Cuba and prepared to sanction any country that wanted to supply crude oil to the regime.Yosniel gets out of bed carefully so as not to wake his wife and daughter. He doesn't even put on his slippers. He leaves the room barefoot. He walks down the narrow hallway of the house and in the living room he finds his mother, 73 years old, and his father, 77, both retired, drinking coffee in front of the television which is broadcasting a morning news report. Of course this is a dream, he thinks again, before heading to the refrigerator and serving himself two glasses of cold milk that go down his throat with an "inexplicable" pleasure, which he hadn't felt for more than three months.His parents offer him coffee and he sits next to him to listen to the news, which explains the improvement of the national electrical system in recent hours thanks to the Russian tanker Anatoly Kolodkin, who unloaded 100,000 tons at the end of March, about 730,000 barrels of crude oil, with the approval of the United States government. Yosniel listens to the Cuban Minister of Energy and Mines, Vicente de la O Levy, who says: “With this ship alone, we have enough until the end of this month”.When Minister O Levy acknowledges that the relief is circumstantial and that the Cuban energy system is operating at 50% of its capacity, Yosniel gets up and returns to his room where his wife and daughter are still sleeping. He doesn't wake them: the previous night they had agreed that neither his wife nor his daughter would go to work and school. Mother and daughter are exhausted: both the shop where the mother works and the daughter's school are more than five kilometers away from home, a daily round trip they have been making on foot for weeks due to the absence of public transport. Yosniel puts on his work uniform: nylon shorts and a white polyester t-shirt. He leaves the room again in silence and asks his parents to tell them that he will return at noon with some food for lunch.Making a living as a bike taxi driver

Yosniel is 37 years old and lives in Old Havana. In 2012 he graduated in civil engineering, although he never practiced his profession. In those days, an engineer of his type was paid, at most, a little more than 300 Cuban pesos, about 14 dollars a month. That's why he decided to become a taxi driver, a job with which he earned ten times more. But with today's crisis on the island, where a liter of gasoline costs at least 3,000 pesos and at most 6,000, in a country where the minimum monthly wage is 2,100 pesos, Yosniel was forced to park his taxi. Now he makes a living with a bicitaxi.“I dismantled the central body of a bicycle and added to it, by welding, a metal bench that serves as a seat over two wheels. To this new artifact, which is a sort of tricycle, I put a layer of plastic to shield myself from the sun”. Thus, Yosniel built his new means of production with which he works morning and afternoon transporting people from one side to another. I ask him to accompany him virtually for a while on his trips through Havana. He says yes on one condition: “I’ll get you on the bicitaxi and we’ll go for a ride, but without talking when I have clients, because you might scare them away”.I am inside his phone. Yosniel places me on top of him, to one side, between the plastic layer and a metal tube. The camera has been perfectly secured after he tied the phone with a cable. I am a kind of rearview mirror. Can you see well? He asks while he is already pedaling. His knees go up and down, his shoulders don't move, but they start to show through a blanket of sweat. I can't see better, I reply. I see few people walking through the streets, which are full of garbage scattered on the ground.Yosniel advances agilely through narrow alleys. He passes by a couple of small squares. He takes an avenue and there he finds the first client of the day. It is a middle-aged lady who indicates her destination: Belascoaín y Reina. Now we go slower with the lady's weight. Yosniel struggles the first few meters, breaking the inertia.Propped-up houses and impeccable hotels

The buildings on Reina street, piled up next to each other, are worn out, unpainted, and some are held up by wooden beams. On the corner of Campanario, two men are burning a pile of garbage. With long sticks, they help the fire not to get out of control. The smoke from the garbage rises into the sky and clouds several street corners. The landscape becomes a grayish blanket into which we enter. Yosniel and the lady cover their noses."That's why I don't like going out at this hour, because of the stench from the garbage," says the lady. "It's unbearable," says Yosniel. Shortly after, the lady speaks again and says she went out because, even though the power went out for only fourteen hours in her neighborhood yesterday, one must have full reserves. "I don't have charcoal to cook with because it's extremely expensive. Luckily, a friend will give me some wooden planks, and that's what I'm going to get now," she adds.When the lady comes down after handing him 600 pesos, Yosniel turns to me and explains: “Look at the country's level, that because in some places manufactured gas distribution doesn't reach, today cooking with charcoal is a luxury, because it costs more than 2,000 pesos, a person's salary, and firewood is what people have left. Any wood, chairs, tables, windows, that are burned, and with that we cook.” On a corner of the promenade, another woman accompanied by her daughter, dressed in a primary school uniform, get on the bike taxi. To Prado, they indicate. From a distance, I observe how a couple of sea waves, after hitting the reefs, rise above the wall and wet the avenue. "Let's see if more people come to class today," says the girl. "Well, daughter. I can't stay home with you today, I have an important meeting," replies the mother.After leaving them at the entrance of a school, Yosniel explains to me that once the crisis exploded, the government determined a series of measures, among which the reduction of the working day and the flexibility of attendance, both in workplaces and schools. “Here now people work and study when they can, that is, when there is no electricity, people stay home. And since there is almost always no light, there is no country. Almost nothing works”.Yosniel pedals and sweats along the Prado promenade looking for clients. We pass in front of several hotels. Their facades contrast with the buildings surrounding them: they are clean and painted. I see people sleeping on cardboard outdoors, others rummaging in the trash containers. On Neptuno street, a man stops him and asks him how much he charges to go to Lealtad/Gervasio. It's 600 pesos, Yosniel replies. "Too expensive," the man tells him.