From beauty to transportation, a lack of water and power forces Cubans to change their routines
HAVANA (AP) — Eduvirgen Zamora hides her hands out of embarrassment these days.
Her nails are down to the quick, except for her thumbs, which feature inch-long talons covered in fancy silver swirls.
Unable to afford a new set of nails as Cuba’s economic crises grind on, the 56-year-old cafeteria worker opted instead to do her lashes, a cheaper alternative she hoped would draw people’s attention upward.
Severe shortages of water, power and money combined with a U.S energy blockade have deepened poverty and increased hunger across the island as severe blackouts persist. Even those who are more affluent are now eliminating long-established and often beloved routines as they adapt to increasingly dire realities.
“The Cuban woman likes to look beautiful — to do her hair, do her nails, do her feet — and wear perfume,” Zamora said. “I don’t look how I would like to look.”
Melina Colás knows the feeling.
The young manicurist who works in Havana recently got long braids to celebrate her birthday but quickly realized it’s a difficult style to maintain given chronic water shortages.
She used to wear her hair long and straightened but has decided to cut it and wear it natural, even though she thinks it would not suit what she called her short stature and round face.
“Before, you could do whatever you wanted,” she said of hairstyles when water was readily available. “Not now.”
Colás also has tweaked things at the salon where she works.
She has learned patience, aware clients show up late because public transportation is scarce.
And she now relies on a mix of water and vinegar in a spray bottle to offset water shortages – a concoction she said also helps soften clients’ cuticles and staves off a growing number of fungus cases because time between manicure appointments is growing longer for many.
“Some cases are critical,” Colás said.
She also lamented how the island’s economic crisis and shrinking budgets have led to a drop in customers, a trend that hairstylist Betty Ramírez Aldana, 50, also has noticed.
“It really came as a shock to me, because I’ve lost a lot of clients,” he said on a recent afternoon at a makeshift hair salon with bubblegum pink walls. “Normally by now I’d have five, six, eight clients. Look at the hour. And no one has showed up.”
The hair salon where he works recently spent three weeks without water, since electricity powers many pump stations on the island and severe outages are commonplace. He no longer can provide certain hair straightening treatments, so he offers clients options including flattering cuts.
“A lot of them have opted to embrace their natural curly hair,” he said.
An increasing number of women also have been forced to grow out their roots because they can't make it into a salon given a lack of gasoline and public transportation, coupled with withering budgets, Ramírez said.
Those who can afford it call him for home visits, with the original customer likely joined “by her aunt and the upstairs neighbor. I don’t serve one, I serve two or three,” he said.
Beauty aside, Cubans also are agonizing over being forced to cut corners on basic hygiene: Some say they are washing their hair only twice a month, and that clothes stay dirtier longer.
Antonia Isalgués Barrién, 60, who works for a state-run company running boats from eastern Havana to the heart of the capital, said she hangs her clothes outside every day after working on a boat because she doesn’t have water to wash them.
“It’s very hot here in Cuba; you sweat a lot,” she said, recalling how she used to wash clothes nearly daily. “I’ve never been forced to hang clothes in the fresh air… and then put them on again.”
Isalgués said she has noticed a surge in the number of passengers as a growing number of gas stations close and only a handful of public buses remain in circulation.
Cuba had spent three months without fuel shipments until a Russian tanker arrived in late March with 730,000 barrels of oil. That amount, once fully refined and distributed, normally would meet less than two weeks of the country’s fuel demands.
Iván de los Ángeles Arias, a 44-year-old boat pilot, often boards the boat for a five-minute ride across the Bay of Havana, keeping his car at home for emergency use only.
“That’s the reality we’re forced to live,” he said. “You deal with it as best you can.”
U.S. diplomats flew to Cuba earlier this month to meet with top government officials for the first time since 2016 as tensions remain high between the two countries.
Cuba’s government has said that the elimination of the U.S. energy embargo was a top priority for its delegation, calling it an “act of economic coercion” and “unjustified punishment.”
In late January, just weeks after the U.S. invaded Venezuela in a move that halted critical oil shipments to Cuba, President Donald Trump threatened tariffs on any country that sells or provides oil to Cuba, which produces only 40% to meet its needs.
The U.S. has called for an end to political repression, the release of political prisoners and liberalization of the island’s imploding economy as part of several conditions to lift its sanctions on Cuba.
Arias, the boat pilot, said he didn’t think the talks will change anything for him.
“I have no hope,” he said. “That means nothing if living conditions remain the same.”
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