Cuba’s government has spent the last days attempting to get the island’s national grid functioning after repeated island-wide blackouts. Without power, sleep becomes difficult in the heat, food spoils and the water supply fails.

Parts of Cuba’s communist system still function: the municipality sent Maria food. “We are three families here,” she said. “I live alone, the lady who lives next to me [does] also, and there are two children, the children’s mother, her aunt and an elderly man.”

A week after the blackout, the island has returned to the status quo ante with regular power cuts of up to 20 hours a day. But the crisis has left a deep, melancholy dread about the future.