When a country runs out of fuel, the shortages hit everywhere—including places you’d never expect. Cuba is now rationing communion wafers, the small flour-and-water discs used in Catholic mass, because the Carmelite monastery in Havana that produces them all can barely keep the lights on.
The problem traces back to extended power outages crippling the island. With a five-month-old US oil blockade draining fuel supplies, electricity has become scarce enough that outages now stretch beyond 24 hours at a time. The nuns operating the wafer presses at the monastery sometimes have just two hours of electricity per day to work—making it impossible to keep up with demand across Cuba’s Catholic parishes.
Dominican priest George Payano, who officiated at a mass at a local convent on Sunday, explained the reality plainly: “That means lower production and as they (the nuns) told the priests and bishops you have to ration them a bit so that there are enough for all.” Even the roughly 20 worshippers at his service received communion, but the future looks lean. As parishioners left the church to find the neighborhood power out once again, they faced an uncomfortable prospect—one 70-year-old pensioner, Mariela Shuman, summed up the spiritual workaround: “People who don’t receive communion can do so spiritually but let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”
It’s a stark illustration of how scarcity in Cuba isn’t abstract or distant. It reaches into the most intimate moments of faith, forcing people to choose between the symbol and the substance. When even communion is rationed, you know the crisis has penetrated deep.
