In Cuba, charcoal and solar panels are being used to combat the energy crisis.

Along a road on the outskirts of the Cuban capital, a few vendors offer charcoal directly on the asphalt and some homemade braziers, some made from old washing machine drums.

"Everyone knows what awaits us now. We have no fuel in the country, we have to find alternatives," Niurbis Lamothe Robert, a 53-year-old state employee who has just bought a coal stove, told AFP.

"The situation has become even more complicated," says another shopper, who prefers to remain anonymous, looking at a bag of charcoal priced at 2.600 pesos ($5,25), which is nearly 50% of the average Cuban salary.

This mother of a young girl explains that her salary doesn't allow her to buy either a generator or a small lithium battery to cope with the long hours of power outages. "This is the most affordable option," she says, loading a bag of charcoal onto her electric motorcycle.

Yurisnel Agosto, 36, confirms that he has never sold "so much" charcoal. Until now, his main customers were pizzerias or restaurants specializing in grilling, but now more and more individuals are buying for their homes.

"People come and buy three bags to prepare in case there is no electricity," he says, as the lack of power prevents the use of electric cookers and the country suffers from a shortage of gas cylinders.

Cuba has seen its economic situation deteriorate sharply over the past six years with shortages of all kinds, and power and fuel cuts that have worsened in the last two years.

Now the energy strangulation decided by the United States, which has already imposed an embargo on the communist island for more than 60 years, raises fears of the worst.

"Desperate"

Cubans, some of whom already experienced the "Special Period," the very serious economic crisis that followed the fall in 1991 of the USSR, then Cuba's main oil supplier, are trying to adapt, forced to constantly reorganize their daily lives.

The announcement of the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, whose country had taken over sending oil to Cuba from the 2000s onwards, sounded the alarm in a country which, before Washington's power grab, was already struggling to meet half of its electricity needs.

The wealthiest now see their salvation in solar panels, the installation companies of which have multiplied since 2024, thanks in particular to the import facilities opened by the Cuban government.

"People are desperate, they want to find a solution," Reinier Hernandez, 42, owner of a private solar system installation company who has been facing exponential demand for the past month, told AFP.

Since mid-January, he has hardly slept, between phone calls, preparing quotes and organizing the work of his twenty or so employees who work very long days, including weekends.

"I haven't even been able to rest these last two weeks," confirms Orley Estrada, a 30-year-old team leader. "Sometimes I get home at one in the morning" and "there are always more customers calling non-stop," he says.

In the Guanabacoa neighborhood of eastern Havana, her workers are busy installing 12 solar panels on the roof of a Catholic-run retirement home. The nuns will be able to prepare meals for about 80 elderly people who are destitute or homeless.

"Without electricity, we had no solution," Sister Gertrudis Abreu, a Dominican nun who takes care of the home and who launched an appeal for donations to raise the $7.000 needed for the installation, told AFP.

But while the smallest solar installation offered by Reinier Hernandez's company costs $2.000, it is far from being affordable for all Cubans.