Halloween at El Proyecto: costumes and makeup by lamplight
Young people gathered in Vedado in a space without electricity. The celebration coexisted with a reality marked by blackouts and everyday hardship without making them disappear.
Around Halloween, young people gathered at El Proyecto, a cultural space operating in a large Vedado house. Reports place the event on the last day of October, although one says Friday the 30th and another gives Halloween itself, the 31st. The discrepancy prevents the exact date from being established confidently without clarification from organizers.
The venue is at the corner of 11th and 14th streets, according to the available information, and had no electricity that night. The celebration therefore occurred under a specific limitation at the venue, not only within a national context where blackouts are common. The two scales should be distinguished: the outage that night and the broader crisis are not the same measurement.
The entrance was decorated with red fabric suggesting a ghostly figure and artificial cobwebs. Inside, a makeup artist used a desk lamp to prepare attendees. The details describe a practical adaptation to conditions at the site; they do not establish how long the outage lasted or whether other light sources were available.
The described outfits included a young man wearing a Joker mask and a young woman in a nun's veil and heels. A person named Marcos is also mentioned without a surname or identifying details. Those elements provide a partial picture of the party, not a complete list of participants or enough information to reconstruct how the gathering was organized.
The activity unfolded amid power cuts, deteriorating housing and difficulties obtaining food, problems mentioned in coverage of the day. Having a place to gather and apply makeup does not diminish those shortages. Nor is the description of a single evening enough to conclude that the encounter had a lasting effect on participants.
An energy figure circulated with the story concerns an earlier episode: on October 16, a fire at the Santa Cruz power plant left 740 megawatts available against demand of 2,900. Those figures describe that moment, not Vedado's electricity balance during Halloween. Applying them to the night of the party would confuse different dates and scopes.
The scene allows for a less complacent reading than a picture of creativity in the face of scarcity: the lamp allowed one activity to continue, but did not replace electric service or its everyday uses. The gathering's cultural value lies in providing a shared space; holding it under those conditions also shows how deeply supply interruptions can shape ordinary life.
The number of attendees, the gathering's duration and the exact date remain unspecified because reports differ between October 30 and 31. The location, several costumes and the light used for makeup are described. Those facts can characterize the activity, but cannot measure its reach or prove that the difficulties had been left behind.
