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BY JOSÉ DE CÓRDOBA ( Copied from the WSJ)

From one end of their 800mile-long, crocodile-shaped Caribbean island to the other, Cubans are suffering through hot, sleepless nights and trudging through exhaustion and hunger by day.
Never before has the Communist island been so cut off from the world, strangled by a U.S. fuel blockade, more American sanctions and a government unable to keep the lights on.
Conversations with people on the island show a nation that feels under siege.
Sleepless in Santiago
Long before the sun rose over Cuba’s eastern coast recently, Yasser Sosa woke up drenched in sweat. It was 80 degrees and muggy, and he couldn’t turn on his fan because Santiago de Cuba, the island’s second-largest city, hadn’t had any power for 20 hours.
At 6 a.m., Sosa set out to buy groceries for the free-meal program he runs five days a week for 350 mostly elderly people, using donations from friends and relatives in the U.S. “This may be the only meal they will have,” he said.
It took three hours to visit shops from one end of the city to the other looking for the best prices to buy meat, cabbage, sweet potato and bread, as he tried to stretch his budget.

‘Country of zombies’
Two clients wandered into Luis Fonseca’s tiny barbershop. The 33-year-old is a trained tattoo artist, but he moved to Havana to try his hand at cutting hair. The men paid him about 60 cents each. “Nobody is going to get a tattoo, but hair grows every day,” Fonseca said.
The night before, Fonseca had tried to sleep on his apartment building’s roof, where he tried to escape the heat. “Nobody in this country sleeps,” he said. “It’s a country of zombies.”

Euphoria, depression
Activist Manuel Cuesta Morúa, 63, woke before dawn recently in his apartment in a Soviet-style block built in the 1970s in east Havana. He ate a piece of bread and a slice of cheese, opening and shutting his refrigerator door quickly to preserve the cold air.

Cuesta Morúa feels lucky. He lives alone and doesn’t have older parents or young children to care for.

Walking around his neighborhood, he sees people acting strangely more often. The old and young rummage through garbage bins searching for something to eat. “People oscillate between euphoria, depression, anger and hatred,” he said.

A new life
Iris Mariño, 37, an actress and independent journalist in the city of Camagüey in eastern Cuba, is in her last month of a high-risk pregnancy.
Cuba’s once highly regarded medical services have deteriorated, so Mariño has bought all her own medical supplies for the birth of her daughter, including sutures and surgical tape. “There is nothing in the hospital, just a doctor who will receive me,” she said.

Sanitary catastrophe
Yoani Sánchez’s listeners were worried. Sánchez, one of Cuba’s most popular independent journalists, had written on her website, 14ymedio, that she was sick with an unknown virus. In painful detail, she described the splitting headaches, chills and hallucinations.
Then Sánchez went silent. A few weeks ago, Sánchez reappeared. She recounted more days of fever, sweats, hallucinations and temporary blindness. One night, a nearby pile of burning garbage sent plumes of smoke into the air, making her gag at the smell, she said. She worried that many older Cubans living alone wouldn’t survive.

Food, but no money
After a career as a college professor in Camagüey, Maria Antonia Borroto didn’t think she would ever be in such dire straits. She makes about $12 a month but estimated she needs at least $150 for her and her 99-year-old father to survive.
She thanks relatives and friends living in the U.S. for the support without which she couldn’t make it. The best part of her day is when she spends evenings practicing tai chi with friends at a nearby park. She doesn’t talk politics. “We go to escape,” she says.

This a threat to the Collective Socialist mentality

One awesome plane