Life in communist Cuba has never been exactly luxurious. The Libreta de Abastecimiento (or “supplies booklet”), introduced by Marxist leader Fidel Castro in 1962, once guaranteed households enough to live on, more or less: allowances of eggs, pasta, cooking oil, sugar, white rice, black beans, bread and coffee, plus extra for pregnant women, children and the elderly (with perhaps a tot of rum on your birthday).
Today, though, shelves at government shops are now often bare, and the system will reportedly soon change to subsidise products for only the most vulnerable. Thanks to the inherent challenges of top-down economic management, hit-and-miss agricultural policies and decades of US sanctions, the Caribbean leftist experiment has hit hard times.
The Cuban Observatory for Human Rights, a think tank, last year observed that 89 per cent of Cuba’s 11 million people were living in extreme poverty. Then in January, US President Donald Trump ratcheted up the pressures when he embargoed imports of oil to the island nation from its major supplier, Venezuela, after deposing its president, Nicolás Maduro, and threatening Cuba’s other trade partners, particularly Mexico, with punitive tariffs if they also supplied oil. By late February, he was floating the possibility of a “friendly takeover”. “They have no oil, they have no food,” he told reporters. “It’s really right now a nation in deep trouble. And they want our help.” This week, after the US and Israel’s strikes on Iran, he told US news outlet Politico, “Cuba’s going to fall, too.”
Getting petrol in Cuba can entail a 24-hour queue for a dribble (unless you know a guy who knows a guy). Garbage has piled up in the streets (trucks need fuel), electricity (mostly from creaky, Russian-built oil-fired power stations) is intermittent, hospitals have paused non-emergency surgeries, schools have skipped classes, internet is sketchy and even water supplies (powered by electric pumps or delivered by truck) can be unreliable.
“I don’t know that there’s ever been a squeeze like there is right now,” Adria Ellis, a photographer in Havana, the Cuban capital, tells us.
Yet this is a stubbornly resilient nation: Cuba’s government has somehow endured for more than six decades in the shadow of its much larger and often hostile neighbour. It survived the collapse of the Soviet Union, its patron state, in the early 1990s, which robbed it of much-needed trade and aid in a desperate time now known wryly as the “Special Period”. Can it survive Trump’s latest salvo? Or is regime change imminent?
How has Trump increased pressure on Cuba?
On January 3, US special forces struck the Venezuelan capital, Caracas, snatching Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, who were whisked to New York to stand trial on charges of narcoterrorism.
Why Trump was so energised to strike Venezuela has never been entirely clear. He initially claimed it was about stopping a drug trade but later made comments about oil. US companies had invested heavily in Venezuela before it nationalised its industry in the early 1970s. “Venezuela unilaterally seized and stole American oil, American assets and American platforms, costing us billions and billions of dollars,” Trump claimed.
Removing Maduro, meanwhile, has offered the US an opportunity to settle an old score with Cuba.
Venezuela had been supplying Cuba with much of its fuel, Cuba in return supplying medical and educational expertise, security forces and military hardware (including anti-aircraft installations that proved ineffective against the US strike on Caracas, in which some 32 Cuban members of the military and intelligence services were killed).
With US forces massed in the Caribbean, Trump quarantined Venezuela’s oil reserves, threatening larger strikes if the government, now headed by former vice president Delcy Rodriguez, did not co-operate. He demanded “total access” for US oil interests and, critically, ceased oil shipments to Cuba, posting to his Truth Social platform: “THERE WILL BE NO MORE OIL OR MONEY GOING TO CUBA – ZERO! I strongly suggest they make a deal, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE.”
It was not spelt out what a deal might entail. Trump later told reporters: “Cuba is a failing nation. It has been for a long time, but now it doesn’t have Venezuela to prop it up. So we’re talking to the people from Cuba, the highest people in Cuba, to see what happens.”
‘That’s a system in collapse and they need to make dramatic reforms.’
Exactly what he wants to have “happen” is, again, opaque, although Trump’s secretary of state, Marco Rubio, has suggested the US wants Cuba to open up further to private business. Cuba’s economy needed “to change dramatically”, Rubio told reporters during a recent visit to the Caribbean island of St Kitts. “That’s a system that’s in collapse, and they need to make dramatic reforms.”
Rubio is a Cuban-American from Florida, where many Cubans have settled after escaping their homeland in several waves of migration since the Castro revolution (his own parents left in 1956 and returned several times, he has said, but left for good soon after the 1959 revolution). Many Cuban migrants, or children of migrants, numbering a total 2.5 million (some half of whom live in Florida), see themselves as political exiles and are a vocal and influential political force in the US.
In late January, Trump doubled down, issuing an executive order to declare a national emergency, claiming the “policies, practices, and actions of the government of Cuba constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat”. He said Cuba supported terrorist groups including Hamas, hosted Russian and Chinese intelligence operations, tortured political opponents and denied the Cuban people free speech and press (although he did not provide evidence to support his claims). He threatened to levy tariffs on goods imported into the US from countries that continued to supply oil to Cuba, which relies on imports for around 60 per cent of its needs, although in late February, as oil supplies dwindled, US Treasury said it would allow the resale of some Venezuelan oil to Cuba’s small private sector, but not its government.
“The Cuban government is talking with us,” Trump told reporters, “and they’re in a big deal of trouble, as you know … And maybe we’ll have a friendly takeover of Cuba. We could very well end up having a friendly takeover of Cuba.”
This week Trump was asked by news outlet Politico whether the United States was playing a role in the Cuban government’s demise. “Well, what do you think? For 50 years, that’s icing on the cake,” he replied, later adding, “How long have you been hearing about Cuba – Cuba, Cuba – for 50 years? And that’s one of the small ones for me.” And at an event with the Inter Miami soccer team at the White House, he suggested the US would turn its focus to Cuba after Iran: “What’s happening with Cuba is amazing. We want to finish this one first. But that will be just a question of time before you and a lot of unbelievable people are going to be going back to Cuba – hopefully not to stay, we don’t want to lose you.”
How do people in Cuba feel about their plight?
“It would be hard to find a moment in modern Cuban history where everyday life was easy but, certainly, looking back, we can say now that the current moment appears much more difficult than any time in the last 20-plus years,” says Anna Cristina Pertierra, an anthropologist at the University of Technology, Sydney and a leading Cuba researcher.
‘What I often see exaggerated online is the idea that everything has collapsed or that it’s dangerous to visit. That’s simply not accurate. It’s more complex than that.’
“In the early 1990s, with the very rapid withdrawal of support from the USSR, there was a period of acute shortages for food and fuel shortages that generated widespread hunger. And you saw some very significant declines in public health statistics and so on, as a result. But people today are saying that the current moment is even worse.”
Franca Visser lives in the idyllic town of Vinales, west of Havana, where she works in tourism. “There is definitely a real crisis happening,” she says. “I see daily life from both sides, residents and visitors. The fuel shortage is serious and it affects transport, electricity, food distribution and overall logistics. Power cuts are longer and more frequent in some areas. Public transport is unreliable. Some services operate irregularly. That part is not exaggerated. What I often see exaggerated online is the idea that everything has collapsed or that it’s dangerous to visit. That’s simply not accurate. It’s more complex than that. It requires flexibility, planning and patience, but it’s not a war zone or a lawless place.”
Fiona Wilson, an Australian proprietor of a guesthouse called Casa Los Mangos in the Cuban town of Trinidad, tells us the local hospital and other buildings on the same electricity circuit are given priority but “the rest of town receives a minimum of three hours of power during the day, followed by a blackout for up to 12 hours.
‘It is quite normal to be doing household chores, cooking, washing, in the middle of the night when the power comes on.’
“Most government shops and banks in the middle of town and in the historic centre are only open for three hours a day. ATMs are only operational when the bank has power and when it has enough cash. People queue for hours in front of banks to access pensions and government salaries.
“It is quite normal to be doing household chores, cooking, washing, in the middle of the night when the power comes on. Even though I have two solar generators, I still get up in the middle of the night sometimes to take advantage of the electricity.”
Only Cubans of means (such as those on private, not government, salaries) can afford to shop for produce at private markets, those in Cuba tell us. “They still call themselves a communist government, but it’s sort of a hybrid economy that relies on foreign currency from tourism,” explains James Trapani, a history lecturer at Western Sydney University with a special interest in US foreign policy in Latin America.
Inflation has had a “devastating impact”, says Erin O’Brien, an American married to a Cuban who spends some of her time in Havana. “For Cubans with no access to foreign currency, prices for a lot of things have almost tripled since I first started travelling to Cuba in early 2023.”
A typical monthly salary (in the public sector) is between 6000 and 8000 pesos, according to the Havana Times, an independent news site. A carton of 30 eggs can cost 2500 pesos. In the government shops in Trinidad, says Wilson, “This month all that has been made available in my barrio [neighbourhood] is raw sugar and legumes.”
‘Tonight, I watched three different people walking down the street with buckets of water that they’ll take up to their apartments.’
Even those better off are feeling the pinch: Supermarket 23, a popular online service used by friends and relatives overseas to send supplies to the island, has paused deliveries due to the fuel crisis. An annual cigar festival, celebrating the island’s famously high-quality tobacco, was postponed in February.
Without gasoline, workers cannot commute, catch Cuba’s once-ubiquitous buses, operate water pumps, irrigate crops or run back-up generators. Factories are mothballed, radio stations have been off the air. “So many houses don’t have water at all,” Adria Ellis tells us from Havana, where she is documenting the situation, as seen in a social media post below. “Tonight, I watched three different people walking down the street with buckets of water that they’ll take up to their apartments.”
Airlines are detouring to nearby countries for refuelling; several, including from Canada, have paused operations. “I just had to leave Cuba a month into my three-month vacation,” Donna Eastabrook, a Canadian visitor, tells us. “My Cuban friends, even if they can find food, can’t afford to buy it; the four resorts in the area I was in are closing down, that’s hundreds of people out of work. My heart breaks for these people.”
Many of Havana’s once-buzzing restaurants and cafes are struggling, its iconic fleet of 1950s US-built taxis parked waiting for fares (and petrol). “You can see, compared to last year, a huge difference, less tourists,” says traveller Urszula Abolik, who has just returned home to the US from her 52nd visit to Cuba.
Why did US-Cuba relations sour?
Barely 150 kilometres from Miami, the island of Cuba was once America’s tropical playground, albeit with a rocky past. Brutally colonised by Spain after an expedition led by Christopher Columbus in 1492 (who thought he’d discovered India or the East Indies), many of Cuba’s indigenous “indian” people were slaughtered or died of imported diseases.
Cuba moved into the United States’ orbit in the 1800s, as a trading partner then a potential acquisition. Thomas Jefferson was an early advocate of absorbing Cuba into the US, calling it a potentially “interesting addition”, perhaps in part because of the economic potential of its already enslaved peoples (both indigenous and imported from Africa by the Spanish to dig for their much-loved gold, mostly fruitlessly; slavery was only outlawed in Cuba in 1886).
The US tried to buy the island from the Spanish – a policy that reverberates today in Trump’s attempts to purchase Greenland from Denmark. Its overtures were rebuffed and the resulting friction, coupled with Cubans’ frustrated desire for independence, eventually helped trigger the Spanish-American War of 1898, which ended with Spain’s capitulation.
Cuba became independent in 1902 but America ran it as a quasi colony. US companies were set up to sell Cuban properties to American buyers; the main cash crop, sugar cane, was dominated by US concerns such as the United Fruit Company and the Hershey empire (of chocolate bar fame). In 1903, the US struck a deal to occupy land on Guantanamo Bay, in the island’s south-east, to use as a naval base; Guantanamo is still leased to the US, an accident of history, now notorious, of course, as a detention centre for political prisoners.
Come the 1920s and the prohibition era in the United States, Cuba, famed for its steamy climate, pristine beaches, rum, cigars and recreational opportunities – including gambling, horse racing, prostitution and the high-speed racket-ball game jai alai – offered American visitors an irresistible release valve.
Ernest Hemingway was there when he wrote The Old Man and the Sea … and Graham Greene visited a dozen times, drawn by the “louche atmosphere”.
Tourism and US business interests of one kind or another boomed under the accommodating auspices of Cuban leader Fulgencio Batista, a former army sergeant “strongman” type who ascended to power after a 1933 military coup. Cuba was the place to be: Ernest Hemingway wrote The Old Man and the Sea there in 1951 (a tipple of choice, reportedly, the traditional daiquiri – just rum, lime and syrup); Graham Greene, author of Our Man In Havana, visited a dozen times, drawn by the “louche atmosphere”.
Life was not necessarily good, however, for ordinary Cubans. A popular movement to resist US interests emerged, led by Marxist revolutionaries Fidel Castro and the Argentinian Ernesto “Che” Guevara under the rallying cry “Cuba Sí, Yanquis No”, which needs no translation. They fought a guerilla campaign against Batista’s troops, marching into Havana in 1959 to assume government (a moment in history painstakingly replicated in Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather trilogy, when mafia boss Michael Corleone, brought to Cuba to invest in a casino, escapes the chaotic rebel takeover).
‘My own appraisal of [Fidel Castro] as a man is somewhat mixed. The one fact we can be sure of is that he has those indefinable qualities which make him a leader of men.’
At this stage, Castro had not yet declared himself Marxist-Leninist. But when he travelled to Washington DC a few months later, a wary president Dwight Eisenhower palmed him off to vice president Richard Nixon, who later wrote that Castro “was incredibly naive with regard to the Communist threat” and had an “obvious lack of understanding of even the most elementary economic principles.” Yet, Nixon concluded, presciently: “My own appraisal of him as a man is somewhat mixed. The one fact we can be sure of is that he has those indefinable qualities which make him a leader of men. Whatever we may think of him, he is going to be a great factor in the development of Cuba and very possibly in Latin American affairs generally … we have no choice but at least to try to orient him in the right direction.”
Their attempts failed. In 1960, Castro, who had plainly told Nixon he believed private enterprises would serve Cuba better under government control, nationalised the massive US sugar conglomerates. The US broke off diplomatic relations and imposed trade embargoes that, in one form or another, remain to this day.
Two famous incidents cemented mutual ill-will: the Bay of Pigs affair, a poorly thought-out attempt to trigger a popular uprising in 1961 using 1500 or so hapless Cuban exiles trained by the CIA, who landed at an inlet on the island’s southern coast only to be killed or jailed (echoed recently when Cuban forces shot four people and wounded six on a Florida-registered speedboat that it said was carrying out a “terrorist infiltration” plot); and the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, when the globe came to the brink of World War III after the USSR began stationing missiles in Cuba that could potentially reach most of the United States. The Soviets backed down after secret negotiations in which the US agreed to remove similar weapons from Turkey.
In 1963, with relations at rock bottom, then-president John F. Kennedy severely limited the ability of US citizens to travel to Cuba or to do business there. It wasn’t until 50 years later, in 2016, that Barack Obama’s administration allowed the resumption of commercial flights and cruise ship voyages from the US.
US citizens are prohibited from travelling to Cuba for tourism … and US credit and debit cards do not work in Cuba.
Trump, however, reintroduced severe travel restrictions in 2019, including a ban on US citizens visiting Cuba by cruise ship; and since 2021, foreign visitors to Cuba who also want to visit the US have been snared in red tape. Today, US citizens are prohibited from travelling to Cuba for tourism but can visit if they meet one of 12 authorised categories, such as educational or humanitarian trips or to see family, and they are warned to bring cash as US credit and debit cards do not work in Cuba. (Australian tourists can travel to Cuba with a visa.)
Says Wilson, who had worked in marketing in Australia before visiting Cuba in 2002 and marrying a local in 2012: “Tourism numbers have not recovered to pre-COVID levels, sadly, primarily because of the ineligibility for an ESTA visa waiver to the US, in my opinion, and many businesses have closed. I have been lucky until now. The economic crisis, reports of food shortages, Hurricane Melissa [last year] and now the fuel crisis are discouraging visitors and my four dogs are wondering when the next guests will arrive.”
What might happen next in Cuba?
Is Trump planning to overthrow the Cuban regime? Perhaps if this had been decades ago, when Cuba was ruled by Fidel Castro, a Maduro-style regime change would have been on the cards. Indeed, the cigar-smoking Castro survived several CIA-backed assassination attempts in the early 1960s, eventually dying from natural causes aged 90 in 2016. (His compadre Che Guevara, the face of a thousand student-dorm posters back in the day, was not so lucky, assassinated in Bolivia in 1967 by local forces with the assistance of US Green Berets and the CIA.)
“Cuba has been a general annoyance to the United States,” notes James Trapani, “because Cuba historically has funded anti-American activity, not just in Latin America, but in other parts of the world.”
Castro’s successors have been less prominent on the world stage. His brother Raul, now 94, became Cuba’s de facto leader when Fidel fell ill in 2006, and was elected to the top job of first secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba in 2011. He shared the surname but not the fame, his pop-culture high watermark being damned with faint praise in the Billy Bragg song Waiting for the Great Leap Forward as “Fidel Castro’s brother”. (Another Castro in the mix: Raul’s grandson and aide, 41-year-old Raul Guillermo Rodriguez Castro, who reportedly met with one of Rubio’s advisers on a recent Caribbean visit. “Within Cuba, because he’s a Castro he would certainly be among the best connected people that there are,” notes Pertierra.)
Cuba’s president, trained engineer and long-time party apparatchik Miguel Diaz-Canel, has even less name recognition than Raul Castro snr and is not widely popular, his tenure marred by “utter economic, logistical, health, migratory, social and political catastrophe”, Ted Henken, a Cuba scholar at Baruch College in New York told The New York Times in January. “Cubans associate him with the crisis of the last five years.”
‘It feels like unfinished business from the Cold War; that is, it has more historical significance than direct geopolitical significance right now.’
The recent decline in Cuba’s health system is particularly telling, says Pertierra.“Even when many other elements of life in Cuba were difficult, the public health system has been a source of pride for believers and probably the most important flagship program of the revolution.” A surge in mosquito-borne diseases, including dengue fever and chikungunya, has been fuelled by erratic rubbish collections.
It is not entirely clear, though, what Trump and Rubio want from their Cuba squeeze. Would they like Cuba to not be communist any more? “Of course,” says Trapani. “In terms of concessions, obviously, the United States would like to have some more control over the Cuban economy to allow for reciprocal trade and tourism. But it doesn’t feel like Venezuela. It feels different. It feels like unfinished business from the Cold War; that is, it has more historical significance than direct geopolitical significance right now.”
Rubio has offered that the Trump administration “would love to see regime change” but has also counselled, “That doesn’t mean that we’re going to make a change.” And if it did, what would it be for? Unlike Venezuela, Cuba has few natural resources that could interest a superpower.
‘[Cuba] is aggressed upon by the United States for 66 years and it does not threaten. It prepares, ready to defend the Homeland to the last drop of blood.’
Will Cuba’s crisis stir support from US rivals China and Russia? On February 25, reports emerged of a tanker allegedly carrying Russian fuel en route to Cuba using “dark fleet” tactics, such as cloaking its radio signals to obscure its ultimate destination from the US coastguard. If that’s truly the case, says Trapani, “If the Russian oil comes in, Cuba can probably continue surviving as they have for the last 65 years. If the oil doesn’t come in, I don’t see how Cuba can hang on. Maybe a year, but it’s not going to continue long-term.”
Pertierra doesn’t believe any of Cuba’s erstwhile friends will see any upside in challenging the US embargo. “[Cuba has made] efforts to generate more support from places like China,” she says. “But none of that has worked out, and none of that is a realistic option right now. There is no visible way out of the current crisis in terms of geopolitical support.
For its part, Cuba has remained relatively staunch. “[Cuba] is aggressed upon by the United States for 66 years and it does not threaten,” Diaz-Canel responded to Trump on social media. “It prepares, ready to defend the Homeland to the last drop of blood.”
Says Franca Visser, “People are tired and frustrated, yes, but daily life continues. Music continues. Art continues. Private businesses are trying incredibly hard to stay open.”
Some endure by working the system as they can, the petty corruption known as “sociolismo”, partner-ism, a portmanteau of partner and socialism. “The corruption that most people would experience is really more about friends helping friends in desperate circumstances,” says Pertierra. “If you have a friend or a neighbour who works in a hospital, they might give you a hand by letting you know what time to arrive to have any hope of receiving some service. Or if you have a friend who works in a shop, they might be able to let you know when certain goods will arrive and put something aside for you. These kinds of favours, networks of reciprocal favours, are the fabric of everyday life.”
‘People are hurting and frustrated. I don’t want to downplay that. But Cubans don’t panic.’
As for the mass protests you might expect from a hungry populace, several commentators told us the same thing: who has the time? “Cuban people living in Cuba have no means available to them to alter the situation,” says guesthouse operator Fiona Wilson. “They voice concerns and as in any society there is a diversity of opinion about economic and political policy and who or what is to blame for the current crisis. No one is happy about blackouts and everyone is angry about the US-imposed fuel blockade. Protesting in the streets, which is not tolerated by the government, is not seen as a means of achieving anything from here nor, I would argue, do people have the time or energy.”
Says Erin O’Brien: “Cubans survived COVID when there were literally no tourists coming in. I have no doubt Cuba would find a way to endure if this goes on, but I hope the situation is going to ease in the next few weeks, and everyone I’ve talked to here feels the same. People are hurting and frustrated. I don’t want to downplay that. But Cubans don’t panic.”
Bottom line, suggests Urszula Abolik: “They are not afraid, but they think Cuba has reached the bottom, they think that only good things can happen now.”
Get fascinating insights and explanations on the world’s most perplexing topics. Sign up for our weekly Explainer newsletter.
