My grandmother sent me a photo last week. In it, a white candle burns inside a metal bucket.

Balanced on the bucket’s rim are the cast-iron grates from the gas stove—the stove that no longer has gas. And, on top of the grates, sits the coffee maker. The idea is that the candle’s small, dying flame will heat the stovetop espresso maker just enough for the coffee to brew. The whole contraption looks like something a child would build at a survival camp. My grandmother is over 80 years old, and she built it because in Cuba right now she has no gas to cook with, virtually no electricity at any hour of any day, and her morning coffee is non-negotiable.

I stared at that photo for a long time. I was sitting in my apartment in Houston. Outside the window, Texas was still Texas.

Cuba is in the dark. Literally—for most of the day, most of the country has no electricity. The national power grid, known by its Spanish acronym, SEN, has collapsed seven times in the past eighteen months. The last two collapses happened within a week. The government’s energy ministry admitted that 2025 was one of the nation’s worst years for fuel scarcity and promised that 2026 would be only “slightly better.”

My homeland generates roughly half the electricity its people need. The main thermal plant, Antonio Guiteras, breaks down constantly. Its boilers, designed to last only 25 years, are over four decades old and run only through faith and improvisation. More than a hundred diesel generators sit idle across the island for lack of fuel.

The result: In many provinces, people get about two hours of electricity a day. Sometimes none.

Houstonians know what it’s like to lose power. In February 2021, Winter Storm Uri left millions of Texans without electricity for days in the dead of winter. In Cuba, such blackouts are common. The refrigerator shuts off. The food rots. The water pump cuts out. Bread goes unmade because the bakeries can’t run their ovens. People walk or bike kilometers to work because the buses lack fuel. They do laundry at three in the morning when the power sometimes flickers on without warning. They set their phones on windowsills to catch a signal, because even the cell towers fail. 

A friend in Havana recently wrote: “We’ve been without power for 48 hours and I can’t connect.” Another: “They gave us two hours of electricity. Not even enough time to breathe. The fridges didn’t cool down. The battery packs didn’t charge. This system is diabolical.” Another, commenting after a rare hour of power: “I woke up scrambling. Just in case the SEN goes down again.” This is the grammar of daily life in Cuba now—“just in case”—every sentence conjugated in contingency, every plan built on the assumption that everything could collapse before you finish thinking it through.

A few weeks ago, a fake government communiqué circulated on WhatsApp. It announced the imminent activation of “Option Zero” due to the country’s imminent total paralysis: no transportation, no electricity, no water, no food distribution, no internet. People were told to immediately fill every available container with water. To organize their block, their building, their neighborhood. That “revolutionary discipline and resolve” would be needed in the days ahead. Millions of people received it and thought, That sounds right.

The bogus notice was shared so many times that the government had to issue a denial in the newspapers. The fake communiqué was indistinguishable from reality because reality resembles apocalyptic fiction.

The United States—the country that gave me refuge and where I pay taxes—has spent several months now making it nearly impossible for Cuba to import petroleum.

One friend, a 33-year-old who has never left Cuba, sent me a voice message from Havana. He was eating a pizza at one of the rare street cafes that still runs on its own generator.

He told me that when Cubans talk about wanting freedom, they’re not really thinking about who specifically governs them. They’re thinking about survival. “What we want is food. What we want is opportunity. What we want is an economy, a salary, openness, prosperity. After that, we can think about other things,” he told me. Then he laughed a little. “The Cuban has never been about the future. The Cuban lives in the present. Give it to me now, I’ll enjoy it, and we’ll see.” 

I left Cuba in 2022. Before that, state security had detained me many times for doing journalism. The first time, in 2018, I was covering hurricane damage in the province of Pinar del Río when two officers on motorcycles stopped me and my photographer, confiscated our phones, held us for 12 hours, and asked—over and over—what we were doing there, who was funding us, what kind of organization was “independent.”

An “independent journalist,” for them, was synonymous with a counterrevolutionary. In Cuba, everything that cannot be directly controlled by the government—including the press—is prohibited.

Another time, in 2019, they held me for seven hours at a police station in the province of Holguín, where I had traveled to cover the closure of a sugar mill. They erased the files from my laptop and camera and made me sign a warning letter. A lieutenant colonel told me: “Here, I am the law.” On my way out, an officer mentioned my son. He suggested I dedicate myself to him. My son was 5. 

I did not want to leave Cuba. I loved my life there—my routine, my streets, my language, and even the specific weight of the air in August. I left because the alternative was to stop being a journalist, become a journalist who writes only what they’re told, or end up in prison. I left because staying required either submission or suffering, and I’d already had enough of both.

I left my son behind. He is now 12 years old. He lives in Havana with his mother and, like everyone in Havana, has two hours of electricity a day or less. The image I can’t get out of my head is his face in the dark, lit only by the phone screen. A 12-year-old illuminated by that small rectangle because there is no other light. He rations the phone’s battery because he doesn’t know when he’ll be able to charge it again. I send money when I can. Life in Houston is not cheap, and I am a freelance journalist who also drives Uber and does odd jobs. I know the money I send doesn’t really fix anything.

Nearly all of Cuba’s power plants run on fuel that the island cannot buy because the United States—the country that gave me refuge and where I pay taxes—has spent several months now making it nearly impossible for Cuba to import petroleum.

People spend the night in the dark on the Malecón during a blackout in Havana on March 21. (AP Photo/Ramon Espinosa)

The Cuban government has been blaming the United States for its problems since 1959—sometimes rightly, sometimes not. At this point I am no longer interested in that argument. My only position on the Trump administration’s oil blockade comes from seeing a 12-year-old rationing his phone battery and a grandmother heating coffee with a candle. I care about the suffering of the people there, even as a Cuban forced to come to the United States for protection. And now the country that gave me that protection is tightening the screws on the place where my relatives live in the dark.

The coffee contraption my grandmother built—the candle, the metal bucket, the cast-iron grates, the espresso maker balanced on top—is the most Cuban thing I have ever seen. It is ingenious. It is absurd. And it is dignified—because dignity in Cuba has always been a form of resistance built from whatever materials desperate people can find. 

She makes  coffee every morning. The candle is small. It takes longer than it should. The coffee, I’m told, comes out fine.

The post Making Coffee with a Candle—and Other Notes from a Cuba Gone Dark appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Victoria Hernandez, 23, was brought into work at the Blanco Road San Antonio Starbucks location in August 2025. 

She’d begun working for the company at 17, while still in high school, dutifully weathering the often thankless rush of caffeine-seeking customers for just $10 an hour—even throughout COVID. Soon, Hernandez was helping the $115-billion company open up new stores and train employees. 

Since December 2021, Starbucks workers began unionizing nationwide—demanding an end to understaffing, pay raises, and an end to union-busting practices—but the stores she worked at hadn’t joined in the organizing wave. Using common union-busting tactics, managers had told her that union workers would get less benefits and were “just trying to stir up trouble.” She said management thought she could help tamp down organizing at the Blanco Road location.

Things didn’t go that way. Less than three months later, in mid-November, Hernandez was leading her coworkers in a strike at the store as part of a national “Red Cup Rebellion” after negotiations between Starbucks Workers United and the company broke down. 

“I made connections with my other coworkers … and it made me realize this is actually empowering and unifies us,” Hernandez said. “I was very excited for the opportunity to show that you can exercise your right and it should be normal to organize your workplace and show your strength as a worker.”

In Texas, workers at 29 Starbucks stores have unionized since June 2022. Nationally, that figure stands at 582, out of nearly 17,000 nationwide, according to a spokesperson at Starbucks Workers United. It’s the fastest-growing union campaign in modern history, part of an organizing wave that’s recently halted organized labor’s statistical decline nationwide and even, in Texas, reversed the downward trend. But forming a union is just the first step in using federal labor law to improve working conditions, and the next step—collective bargaining—has proceeded at a glacial pace as the company stonewalls workers. Nearly five years in, a first contract is still nowhere in sight, though the corporation did agree in 2024 to work on a framework that would cover all union stores and negotiations did resume earlier this month.

Kate Bronfenbrenner, a senior lecturer emeritus at Cornell University’s Industrial and Labor Relations School, told the Texas Observer that Starbucks’ practice of dragging out negotiations is a common tactic deployed by employer-side law firms such as Littler Mendelson, which represents Starbucks. She added that getting an employer to follow the law and bargain in good faith is often a prolonged legal process, but to “get Starbucks to settle a contract, the union has to really organize as many of the stores as possible and build allies with other unions, and make it so the cost of not recognizing the union is greater than the cost of bargaining.” 

At the Blanco Road location, the Starbucks store was shut down for two months from November to December 2025. Hernandez had organized all 14 workers to participate in the strike. “It was very powerful for them to see that the store can’t run without us,” Hernandez said. 

Hernandez and her coworkers picketed everyday of the week from 7 a.m. to noon. When they weren’t protesting in front of the store, they hosted community events to raise money and awareness. “I cannot say enough how much people were willing to come out and support,” Hernandez said. 

Trey Runyan, who for three years has been working at the first unionized Starbucks in Texas on North Lamar and 45th Street in Austin, is a member of the nationwide bargaining committee. 

Unlike other unions with a traditional top-down structure, where paid union staff members bargain for workers, Starbucks Workers United ensures that baristas are at the forefront of the decision-making process. His shop’s coworkers voted for Runyan to represent their store. As a delegate, he attends monthly Zoom meetings with more than 200 delegates. Any agreement with Starbucks has to go through the delegates. 

“These are a lot of people that are all fighting the same battle,” Runyan said. “It’s just been so humbling and just so profoundly amazing to be a part of a group of people that really want to care about each other.” 

The union’s current demands include that there be at least three baristas on the floor at all times, that wages start at $17 per hour with a four-percent annual increase, that health and safety precautions be improved, protections against discrimination be strengthened, and union-busting practices end, among other demands. 

In September 2024, seven months after the company agreed to work on a general framework for contracts, Brian Niccol took over the company. Workers say Starbucks backtracked on its promises and increased union-busting activities. Niccol instituted the “Back to Starbucks” campaign to enhance customer service and decrease wait-time for orders, but workers the Observer spoke to said that just intensified their already heavy workload.

In September 2025, The Guardian reported Niccol received $97.8 million in total compensation the prior year—6,666 times more than the median annual salary of a Starbucks worker, $14,674, making it the biggest CEO-to-worker pay gap among the top 500 corporations in the United States. The outlet also reported the company paid $3.8 billion to shareholders in the 2024 fiscal year through stock buybacks and dividends. 

Runyan makes a little more than $17 an hour at the Austin store, but like most other Starbucks workers, he works less than 40 hours a week. This means he takes home only $2,000 a month. Over half of that goes to rent, $200 for groceries, and very little for savings. Runyan totaled his car in an accident recently, but he can’t afford a new vehicle on his wages. 

In Texas, the Dallas-Fort Worth metro has the greatest portion of unionized Starbucks stores. Fourteen of the 29 Texas Starbucks union shops are in the Metroplex area. 

Ben Estrello, a 24 year-old Starbucks barista, said the organizing there started with University of North Texas college students working at a Denton location and rapidly expanded from there, including to where he works at the Preston Royal shop in Dallas. 

Estrello told the Observer that before he started working at Starbucks, he delivered pizzas and worked at IHOP. “I’ve been doing food service for a while and was looking for something that had a little bit more community,” Estrello said. 

But he was disappointed to find out the company was not as progressive as he had heard, having admired its reputation for supporting the LGBTQ+ community and the environment. Working under Niccol’s policies, he found baristas were forced to write Charlie Kirk’s name on customers’ cups when they requested and subject to a new strict dress code. In the weeks leading up to the union election at Estrello’s shop, Starbucks executives constantly visited the store and held “captive-audience” meetings to dissuade workers from unionizing. 

“We saw people that we had never seen before in our store almost on a daily basis: higher-ups coming in and asking to sit down and talk with us, sometimes for hours while you were supposed to be working,” Estrello said. One time, Starbucks executives shut down the store for the night and took all the employees bowling. “It had the opposite effect,” Estrello said. “If the company is doing this much to try and get you to stop doing something, it’s going to give you a modicum of power.” 

Starbucks did not respond to the Observer’s request for comment. 

“Texas Starbucks workers have inspired workers around the state and around the country to fight for better jobs and a fairer economy,” U.S. Representative Greg Casar, an Austin Democrat whose current district stretches into San Antonio, told the Observer. “When Texas workers stand up for themselves, they stand up for the right of all of us to live in a country that works for everyone, not just the rich and powerful.” 

Despite the company’s tactics, in September 2025, Estrello and his coworkers won their union election. Two months later, they were swept into that national strike with hundreds of Starbucks workers from around the country. “We have great ambitions here,” Estrello said of organizing other Starbucks workers in the greater Dallas area. 

While most other Starbucks workers around the country returned to work in December, Estrello and his coworkers remained on strike for 102 days until February 25 this year. (His store was kept running in the meantime using non-union workers from other locations.) During the entire time, they’ve been forging networks with baristas from other Starbucks stores, hitting non-union stores during their off-hours to guide workers there through the unionization process. 

“We have an in everywhere,” Estrello said. “It’s not hard to talk to other people that do the same thing that you do on a daily basis, and oftentimes they have the same grievances that you do. They don’t necessarily know what the alternative is to putting up with those grievances, and if you let them know, they’re more likely to join you.” 

Estrello calls other Starbucks workers his “second family” and said their organizing has “given me a great amount of purpose.” 

Like Estrello, Hernandez—the worker at San Antonio’s Blanco Road location—told the Observer her life has changed since organizing with other Starbucks workers.

“It’s taught me the amount of strength that I have and all the things that I can do,” Hernandez said. “It showed me how far you can go, and how much power you have as a worker.” 

The post As Contract Negotiations Drag On, Texas Starbucks Workers Have Learned the Power of Organizing appeared first on The Texas Observer.

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It’s the day after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to revive her lawsuit against the local officials who orchestrated her arrest nearly a decade ago, and Laredo citizen-journalist Priscilla Villarreal is on Facebook Live to deliver a much-awaited statement.

For several minutes, viewers are treated to little more than the radio playing in the background and a scowl that would be the envy of an old-school cop shop reporter. The delay is a tactic; Villarreal is waiting until enough people have started watching to begin her stream-of-consciousness diatribe. Then, the music changes to English band Chumbawamba’s 1997 hit “Tubthumping,” with its on-the-nose refrain of “You’re not ever gonna keep me down.” 

Despite the dire concern about press freedoms that the ruling in her case has created among mainstream journalists and First Amendment experts, the social media personality and provocateur known as “La Gordiloca” is defiant, as she explains the prosecution had only managed to raise her profile.

“I’m already in the lawbooks; that’s enough for me,” Villarreal said on the March 24 livestream before switching into expletive-filled Spanish. “This was a fucking nine-year squeeze that had everybody shitting themselves. And if you mess with me again, we’ll go back to fucking court.”

Villarreal’s oft-recounted origin story is that in 2015, she livestreamed the aftermath of a murder-suicide on her Facebook page, garnering her attention across Laredo and unexpectedly launching her journalism career. As La Gordiloca, which translates to something like “the chubby, crazy lady,” her Facebook following has topped 200,000 as she operates in a border city of only 250,000. But her penchant for inventively foul language isn’t all that separates Villarreal from more buttoned-up journalists. She often violates industry ethics: The disturbing video of police carrying dead children out of a building that launched her career is something most outlets would think long and hard about publishing, and she openly casts her lot for or against local officials.

This has put her crosswise with some of those officials, including in 2017 when, after she’d  criticized the Laredo Police Department and the Webb County district attorney, she called a police officer to confirm the names of people who’d died in very public incidents. For this, she was arrested under a state law that makes it a crime if someone “solicits or receives from a public servant information that: the public servant has access to by means of his office or employment; and has not been made public” and the person does so “with intent to obtain a benefit.” A local judge tossed out the criminal charges, but Villarreal filed a civil suit in federal court. 

In 2024, a majority opinion throwing out Villarreal’s case, written by Fifth Circuit appeals court judge Edith Jones, raised concerns among First Amendment advocates across the country. Jones wrote that the officials were entitled to qualified immunity, a judicial doctrine that protects most government employees from lawsuits related to their on-the-job actions, because police and prosecutors were reasonable in thinking Villarreal broke the law. The Texas Observer reported on Villarreal’s story and highlighted the implications for journalism of Jones’ opinion in 2024.

The U.S. Supreme Court then told the Fifth Circuit to reconsider Villarreal’s case in light of the top court’s decision in favor of a former Castle Hills City Council member who was arguing she’d also been arrested as political retaliation, another case the Observer covered in depth, but in April 2025, the Fifth Circuit stood by its decision to grant qualified immunity. Then, last month, the high court declined to hear Villarreal’s appeal.

First Amendment experts say this decision sends the message that if police make a bad-faith or far-fetched interpretation of a law in a way that violates someone’s constitutional rights, including those of journalists or protesters, the courts will protect the cops and prosecutors from consequences.

“It is kind of crazy that a journalist can be arrested for doing her job, and there’s nothing she can do about it in terms of bringing officers who arrested her into the court and having to answer for what they did,” said Anya Bidwell, a senior attorney at the libertarian-leaning public interest law firm the Institute for Justice. “It’s a bit disturbing, especially in the context of what’s happening in America today, where we do have ICE agents across the country, exercising excessive force, but also punishing people for recording them and punishing people for criticizing them.”

In response to an Observer request for comment, Webb County District Attorney Isidro “Chilo” Alaniz said: “Qualified immunity is critical in order for law enforcement and prosecutors to do their job. Everything that was done by law enforcement and prosecution on this case was proper and within the law.”

Increasingly, Americans are getting their news from alternative sources, with the border region especially being a wild west of influencers and indie media, and—though they’re entitled to the same protections as anyone else whether they follow traditional journalism ethics or not— Villarreal and her local nontraditional competitors are some of the most exposed by the Supreme Court ruling, added Daxton “Chip” Stewart, a journalism professor and assistant provost at Texas Christian University. 

“Until a journalist is actually able to bring a civil rights lawsuit to trial against the government for violating their First Amendment rights, it’s open season on anyone doing journalism, and especially those without an in-house lawyer handy,” Stewart said.

Though Jones’ 2024 opinion never explicitly stated that what the officials did was constitutional, she wrote that the government has an interest in preventing Americans from learning certain information, and that the officials who arrested Villarreal were acting reasonably in believing Texas law could criminalize asking questions of public officials. The decision is currently limited to the Fifth Circuit, which covers Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, but the Trump administration recently used a similar argument elsewhere.

In a March filing, as part of a Washington, D.C., federal court lawsuit against the Pentagon’s restrictions on reporters covering the Defense Department, Justice Department lawyers wrote that a journalist “does solicit the commission of a criminal act, and that solicitation is not protected by the First Amendment, when he or she solicits (classified information) or other non-public information from individuals who are legally obligated not to disclose that information.”

Both Jones’ opinion and the Trump administration’s argument are trying to work around a 1970s Supreme Court ruling that found “Reporters remain free to seek news from any source by means within the law.” JT Morris, Villarreal’s lawyer and a senior attorney at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, told the Observer: “To have officials in Laredo do that is bad enough, but now that federal attorneys are echoing that same line of thinking, that’s a really dangerous result for the First Amendment.”

Still, local observers in Laredo think Villarreal’s defiant response to the Supreme Court’s decision is probably well-founded. Her drawn-out legal fight with the officials who had her arrested was embarrassing and time-consuming for them. 

“Regardless of what the Supreme Court said, or what they didn’t do, [local officials] looked bad for doing it,” said Joey Tellez, a Laredo attorney who helped Villarreal fight the criminal charges after her 2017 arrest. “At the local level, I think everyone thinks you put your hand on the hot stove and you got burned.”

The local judge who threw out Villarreal’s criminal charges also declared the statute used to arrest her unconstitutional—though that ruling is limited to Webb County. Villarreal’s relationship with the current Laredo police leadership has also vastly improved. She attributes that in part to department brass acknowledging that, to update an old journalism adage, it’s best not to pick a fight with someone who gets Facebook views by the barrel. 

Still, in an April interview, Villarreal struck a more nuanced tone than in her initial bombastic video.

“Now that I had a couple of days to think, it was disappointing obviously,” she said. “It not only affected me, it affected everybody nationwide … because that only makes people think cops can do as they please and not get punished for it.”

These days, Villarreal isn’t as journalistically active as before. She’s raising four children, the oldest of which is five years old. She lost access to her old Facebook page with 200,000-plus followers, and her new profile, “Lagordiloca fan club,” has a more modest 44,000 followers. Local police news and invectives against Laredo politicians make up less of her Facebook feed than they used to, while there are posts about national news, used vehicles for sale, and an ad offering “Promote with Lagordiloca!”

Meanwhile, she’s spawned a wave of local competition, including Laredo Hood News and Hammrod News.

“I’m not going to lie, she opened the door for a lot of us,” said Abraham Rodriguez, who runs Hammrod News and posts content across multiple social media platforms. “She took the biggest bullet out of all of us. If it wasn’t for her, then the police department would be a lot more strict on us independent journalists.”

The post ‘La Gordiloca’ Lost at the Supreme Court but Won in Laredo appeared first on The Texas Observer.