Needless to say, trying to maintain an ice-making and ice-selling business was unthinkable during the Special Period when electricity was as hard to come by as fresh fruit and nutritious, varied food. Perhaps one of the greatest barometers of economic stability in Cuba was the appearance of vendors selling ice out of their homes in the early 2000s. Thanks to the election and consolidation of Hugo Chávez’s authoritarian, officially “socialist” state in Venezuela, Cuba enjoyed more than a decade of relief from oil shortages, the collapse of public transportation and regular (sometimes constant) blackouts at the turn of the twenty-first century. Havana, December 2012.
