Record summer heat has combined with hurricanes, relentless power cuts, water shortages and crumbling housing to tax Cubans' traditional patience with President Fidel Castro's government and the strains caused by the US embargo.

"I've never seen people talk this way about Fidel. That they want his head. Most of them really do not mean it. It's more like they are really frustrated with their father," a Havana housewife said the other night sitting in her pitch-black home in the La Lisa district.