Cuba’s picturesque Varadero peninsula, famed for its turquoise waters and powder-white sands, is now eerily quiet.
Its once-crowded beaches began to empty after the island announced a critical jet fuel shortage on 8 February, threatening to cripple its vital tourism industry indefinitely.
A Reuters survey of hotels, airlines, and local tourism workers reveals a sector brought to its knees by fuel scarcity.
This sudden paralysis could sound a death knell for an already hobbled industry, crucial to Cuba’s devastated economy.
Major Canadian carriers – Air Canada, WestJet, and Transat – have suspended flights, leading to 1,709 cancellations through April.
Cirium projects this will slash visitor numbers by hundreds of thousands. Russia, Cuba’s third-largest visitor group, also plans to evacuate tourists and suspend all flights until fuel eases, aviation regulator Rosaviatisa confirmed.
The crisis extends to accommodation: NH Hotels has closed all its Cuban properties. Spanish chain Melia, the island’s largest, has shut three of its 30 hotels, consolidating guests into better-equipped, higher-occupancy sites.
The idyllic image of Varadero is now overshadowed by an economic reality, as Cuba’s tourism sector faces a profound and immediate threat to its very existence.
“There is just total uncertainty,” said Alejandro Morejon, a 53-year-old tourism guide who began work in Varadero shortly after Cuba re-opened to international tourism in the 1990s. “Everything is beginning to fall apart.”
Tourism is poised to become the first major domino to fall in a U.S. push to pressure Cuba’s government into submission by blocking shipments of oil from reaching the island nation.
U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration has declared Cuba “an unusual and extraordinary threat” to U.S. national security, cutting off the flow of Venezuelan oil to the island and threatening to slap tariffs on any nation supplying Cuba with fuel.
Tourism earned the communist-run nation $1.3 billion in foreign exchange in 2024, the last time those statistics were reported in dollars, for a total of around 10% of export earnings.
Paolo Spadoni, an economist at Augusta University in Georgia who studies Cuba’s economy, said the tourism sector combined with the export of Cuban doctors and remittances are the country’s top sources of desperately needed hard currency.
All are under renewed attack by the Trump administration, whose tough sanctions had already helped prevent the island’s resort sector from fully bouncing back from the pandemic.
“The complete collapse of Cuba’s tourism sector would create an unsustainable situation for the Cuban economy and threaten its survival,” Spadoni said.
Cuba attracted just 1.8 million visitors in 2025, down from 2.2 million the prior year, and its lowest point in more than two decades.
Visitors said they were having a hard time unwinding, anxious over Cuba’s announcement just days prior that it was fast running out of jet fuel.
“We’re just winging it, trying not to stress, because we don’t want it to ruin our trip,” said Tyler LaMountaine, an Alberta-based oil and gas industry worker who had come to Cuba with his wife to escape Canada’s cold winter but worried they could end up stranded by the canceled flights. “But you get scared because everyone else is scared.”
Cuba’s communist-run government earlier in February announced a contingency plan to protect vital services like emergency care and primary education.
Top officials initially said tourism and international flights would also be unaffected, but two days later, the government notified aviation interests that the island would shortly run out fuel.
Airlines across Europe, South America, the United States, Russia and Canada have since slashed flights or been forced to change flight patterns to deal with the fuel shortfall.
On the surface, all appears normal in Varadero, a beach resort once a favorite wintering ground of the DuPont family prior to Cuba’s 1959 revolution, but now a favorite getaway for Europeans and Canadians during the northern winter.
Until late last week, trinket shops and most restaurants remained. Beach chairs and sun umbrellas dotted the beaches, and sunburned tourists picked up shells and swam in almost perfectly transparent water.
But at least two hotels had closed on the peninsula, Reuters confirmed.
A security guard at the Domina Marina resort, a massive complex with several towers overlooking a sprawling marina built in the early 2010s, stopped a reporter from entering the hotel and said it was closed. The hotel’s local phone number was out of service.
Keeping the doors at hotels and restaurants open will become harder as the U.S. fuel siege enters its third full week, local workers said.
Jorge Fernandez, who takes tourists for tours of the peninsula in a pink 1950s-era convertible, said late last week that he had enough fuel to last him for just one more day.
“After that, it’s back home to invent something else to do,” the 53-year-old said.
“Trump and (Cuban President) Miguel Diaz-Canel need to come to some agreement because the only ones that are suffering here are the people,” Fernandez said. “The country is shutting down.”
