Down a side street off one of Havana’s grand, mansion-lined boulevards, Carlos is looking for lunch. His emaciated hands unpick the knot of a white plastic bag lying on a heap of rubbish and his fingers spread out the contents, filleting a chicken bone for scraps of meat. “The state gives us nothing,” he says. “Now we are fending for ourselves.”

Unthinkable until recently, scenes of hunger are being repeated across

communist Cuba

as food runs low in state-controlled shops.

After seizing Venezuela’s revolutionary socialist ruler Nicolás Maduro in a commando raid last month, the

Trump administration

is trying to bring Cuba to its knees by forcing its few remaining allies to

cut off fuel supplies

.

Queues of cars snake along the streets as drivers wait for hours to fill up, while the oil-fired power stations that generate electricity are idled for ever-longer stretches to conserve scarce fuel. Airlines have been told there is no more kerosene for their planes and rubbish piles up in the streets because refuse trucks lack fuel to collect it.

Diplomats and UN officials on the island fear the outbreak of epidemics and the spread of hunger. “The Americans are deliberately creating a humanitarian crisis in a country which never had one,” a Latin American diplomat in Havana says. “This is war waged by other means.”

Under pressure at home and ever more isolated abroad, Cuba’s President Miguel Díaz-Canel has started to give ground, saying last week said he was ready for talks with the

United States

“without preconditions and from a position of equals.”

“We’re starting to talk to Cuba,” U.S. President Donald Trump said on Jan. 31. “It doesn’t have to be a humanitarian crisis. I think they probably would come to us and want to make a deal… We’ll be kind.”

But can Havana’s famously stubborn communist leaders, who have ruled the one-party state for 67 years, appease a U.S. administration demanding regime change before the island succumbs to disease or starvation?

Cuba has duelled with Washington since Fidel Castro and his revolutionaries overthrew U.S.-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista in 1959, bringing communism within 100 miles of Florida. But Havana has entered its latest showdown with the U.S. weaker than ever.

The U.S. embargo on trade, dating back to 1962, has hurt the economy for decades but plenty of Cuba’s blows have been self-inflicted. Once one of the world’s top sugar exporters, Cuba’s harvests are now so modest it imports the sweetener from Brazil.

Some mistakes have been recent. When COVID-19 struck, Havana imposed a long and strict lockdown, devastating the tourist trade that generated vital foreign exchange.

The nearby Dominican Republic has lured European and American holidaymakers with newer hotels and better food. The Dominicans and other Caribbean rivals ate into Cuba’s traditional exports of rum and cigars by offering superior products without U.S. restrictions.

The hulks of abandoned hotels now loom over the Havana waterfront. They include the Riviera, built by a U.S. mafia boss just before the revolution. The white fish sculptures outside gasp for air above long-dry fountains, the paint on the facade is peeling, the revolving door long closed.

Undeterred by disastrous losses during the pandemic, Cuba’s central planning bosses bet big on a recovery in tourism. Gaesa, the military-controlled firm that runs almost half the economy, spent hundreds of millions of scarce dollars building new luxury hotels.

“Government officials told me they expected one million to two million Chinese and Russian tourists to arrive after the pandemic,” one Cuban businessman said. “They didn’t come. The following year, they were still expecting them. By 2024 they had to admit they weren’t coming.”

The US$200 million Torre K building is emblematic of the new projects. Havana’s tallest building at 42 storeys, it was opened last year and towers over the Vedado district, offering more than 500 luxury rooms to a virtually non-existent market.

On a recent weekday, nine uniformed staff looked after the only guests in the lobby, an Iberia flight crew. Upstairs, three bartenders served a lone client rum in an empty lounge.

International flights to Havana’s José Martí airport have dwindled along with the tourists and the fuel supplies. A Trump administration decision in 2021 to bar those who have visited Cuba from using the Esta visa waiver scheme devastated European tourism, hoteliers say. Near the main runway, parked Soviet-era jets owned by Cubana, the state airline subject to U.S. sanctions, gather mildew.

Cuba’s other big hard currency earner was the export of doctors, mainly to developing countries with sympathetic governments. Although Havana bills the medical missions as solidarity projects, they earn Cuba up to US$8 billion a year in hard currency, according to the U.S. state department, and rivalled tourism as the top foreign exchange earner.

Human rights organizations have raised concerns about the scheme, including political controls on the thousands of doctors taking part. Last year the Trump administration took aim at what it termed a “forced labour export scheme,” revoking the visas of officials involved in bringing Cuban doctors. Fewer and fewer countries are now willing to accept them.

Cuba used to be able to count on a network of sympathetic foreign governments when it fell on hard times. But these days Moscow is preoccupied with the war in Ukraine and China has bigger fish to fry. Latin America’s recent swing to the right has culled erstwhile regional allies and Mexico’s leftwing government is keener to please Trump than help Havana.

By far the biggest blow came when the U.S. military raided Caracas on Jan. 3 and snatched Maduro, Cuba’s most important foreign patron, from his bunker.

Venezuela had replaced the Soviet Union early this century as Havana’s key ally, first under Hugo Chávez and then his successor, Maduro. Caracas supplied more than half the island’s oil, provided billions of dollars in loans and funded large infrastructure projects in return for a supply of Cuban doctors, teachers and intelligence advisers.

Maduro’s capture in the dead of night was devastating: Cuban counter-intelligence failed to detect the CIA informers who betrayed Maduro’s whereabouts and the Americans killed 32 Cuban bodyguards who were defending the Venezuelan leader.

Now, Cuba’s once-revered army, which at its peak fought in Angola and Ethiopia, looks vulnerable. “In Cuba, they can’t even pick up the garbage,” says Joe Garcia, a former Florida Democratic congressman who has maintained links with Cuba.

“How are they going to contend with a superpower 90 miles away?”

Cubans are dealing with the latest crisis as they have weathered others — by enduring and improvising. Decades of hardship have inured the population to privations few other nations would tolerate.

But to many seasoned observers, this crisis feels different.

“I was around during the ‘special period’ and this is much worse,” says John Kavulich, president of the U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council, a not-for-profit group, referring to the economic slump after the collapse of the USSR. “Now the Russians, the Chinese, the Vietnamese, the Turks all have the same message to the Cubans: ‘You have to make changes.’”

Power cuts began in earnest in 2024 when Soviet-era oil-fired generators failed for lack of maintenance and have intensified as fuel supplies dwindle. In central Havana, electricity is off in some districts more than it is on, while outside the capital blackouts can last more than 24 hours. This makes it impossible to keep food fresh or fans whirring in the heat.

Mabe is doing a roaring trade in candles from a small shop in a backstreet of Havana’s historic centre. Priced at 50 pesos each, the modest sticks of wax come in three different colours and burn for a little more than an hour. “We make them ourselves,” she says. “People come all the way from the provinces to stock up.”

As the economy collapses, daily life becomes an ever-harder struggle. Those working for the state earn too little to shop in the private stores charging free-market prices, but these are the only places to find most foodstuffs and household goods. A doctor or university lecturer’s salary equates to US$20 a month at the black market exchange rate, a pensioner’s stipend half that.

“People have lost hope,” says José, a restaurant owner in Havana who like many others interviewed for this article did not want his surname used for fear of reprisals. “If you earn 3,000 pesos a month and your basic food supplies cost 10,000 pesos, then there is no hope.”

Some Cubans, he adds, find solace in “

el químico

“, a highly addictive synthetic drug costing as little as 150 pesos which triggers zombie-like behaviour when smoked. Others pull knives on passers-by in the darkened streets at night to steal money or food.

As the centrally planned economy crumbles, supplies have dried up at state-run stores. At Bodega 302-03, a shop in Havana’s old town, the only products on sale are three kinds of cooking sauce, sold in reused plastic jerrycans, tinned tomato soup and a lump of sickly pink mortadella sausage.

A nearby state-run pharmacy boasts a picture of revolutionary hero Che Guevara on the wall but no antibiotics or paracetamol on its shelves.

Despite the obvious hardships, most Cubans are wary of complaining in public because of the risk of being overheard by the ever-present security services, who lurk in plain clothes to pick up signs of dissent. The last big protests in 2021 were swiftly crushed.

“If I go to jail, who will look after my children and relatives?” asked Mario, a street vendor explaining the lack of appetite for protest. “We saw what happened to those who demonstrated in 2021. They are serving 20-year sentences.”

For decades, Cuba’s high standards of education and healthcare were the envy of many developing countries — but no longer. Álvaro, a university lecturer, stands outside a crumbling red-brick building missing some of its windows, its rooms shrouded in darkness.

“I’m waiting to pick up my daughter from school,” he says, gesturing towards the decaying edifice. “Yesterday I asked her what she had learned. Her reply was, ‘Dad, I’m hungry.’” The family’s last piece of chicken had gone bad owing to the power cuts, he explains. Like many others in the street, he asks foreigners for money to help feed his family.

Neli trained as a doctor but now works in a private guesthouse for tourists to earn a decent salary. “If you need an operation, the doctors write you a list of all the things you need to buy and bring to the hospital,” she says. “Things like gauze, scalpels, bandages, oxygen.”

Long in denial about the country’s decline, Cuba’s communist rulers have now been forced to acknowledge their citizens’ pain. In a rare act of censure, labour minister Marta Elena Feitó was forced to resign last July after denying that beggars existed in Cuba. She had claimed that those asking for money were faking poverty.

Only the country’s third leader since 1959, Díaz-Canel admitted this month that Cuba had a “complex energy situation,” with no oil delivered from Venezuela since December. But he offered no solutions beyond more austerity. The one-party state’s success in repressing protest and purging dissent is also its biggest weakness: there is no organized political opposition to the government and no visible reformists inside it.

“Political conditions there are tougher for the government than in the 1990s,” says William LeoGrande, professor of government at the American University in Washington. “There’s no Fidel Castro anymore to rally support. There’s more of a sense of blaming the government for the economic mess. But the fact that the United States is so blatantly saying, ‘We’re going to cut off all your oil’, gives the government a rallying cry.”

Scenting victory after toppling Maduro, the Trump administration is moving in for what it hopes is the kill in Cuba: the end of 67 years of communism.

On Jan. 29, Trump issued an executive order declaring the bankrupt island “an unusual and extraordinary threat” to the U.S. and allowing Washington to impose additional tariffs on any country selling it oil. Díaz-Canel described the move, which is tantamount to an oil embargo, as “fascist, criminal and genocidal.” Cuba produces only about 30,000 barrels per day of the 110,000 b/d it needs.

Some in the powerful Cuban-American lobby on Capitol Hill want Trump to go further still. Carlos Giménez, a south Florida Republican congressman who fled Cuba for the U.S. as a child, has called for an immediate halt to all flights and money transfers from the U.S. “That regime is a cancer,” he says. “And the way that you cure cancer, sometimes the cure is painful but in the end the patient survives.”

His fellow Cuban-American congressman Mario Díaz-Balart, whose aunt was once married to Castro, said at the same press conference that it was time for the Trump administration to “finish the job” and “end the nightmare in Cuba.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, another Cuban-American, has been more cautious. He testified before the Senate that the administration “would love” to see regime change in Cuba but added: “That doesn’t mean we’re going to make a change.”

Former White House officials involved with Cuba policy say Rubio does not want to push the Havana government into complete collapse, fearing it would unleash a flood of refugees towards the Florida coast and undo one of Trump’s biggest boasts, a massive reduction in illegal immigration.

“The Cubans have the ability to nuke us with a migratory bomb,” says one former U.S. official. “Trump doesn’t want a crisis in Cuba — he wants to drive them to the negotiating table.”

Following Trump’s claim on Feb. 1 that “we are dealing with the Cuban leaders right now,” speculation has swirled about what a deal between Washington and Havana may look like.

Trump has not specified what he wants, beyond broad references to freedom and the return of Cuban-Americans to their homeland. Cuba lacks the oil riches of Venezuela, its rundown infrastructure requires huge investment and U.S. legislation requires specific conditions to be met before the economic embargo is lifted.

For his part, Díaz-Canel has demanded respect for Cuba’s sovereignty and ruled out any discussion of “topics which could be understood as interference in our internal affairs.”

Experts say the model used in Caracas — decapitation of the regime to make way for a successor willing to follow a US agenda — will not work in Cuba, because there is no alternative leader, in the mould of Venezuela’s Delcy Rodríguez, willing to dismantle state control over the economy.

Díaz-Canel is a loyal apparatchik but lacks the charisma of the Castro brothers, who ruled Cuba from the revolution until Fidel’s brother Raúl stepped down in 2018. Now 94, Raúl maintains influence behind the scenes but has no formal role. His son Alejandro Castro Espín, an army colonel, recently visited Mexico, sparking reports in Cuban dissident media that he had met American officials.

Although Castro Espín was involved in Obama-era talks with the U.S., many are skeptical that he could emerge as a leader now. “It would be very hard for the U.S. to digest another Castro in government,” points out Kavulich, of the U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council.

In the meantime, the regime maintains a tight grip, conserving resources for key government buildings and the security forces. Indoctrinated for decades, many officials remain loyal to the revolution and ready to fight for it.

Despite the economic crisis sweeping Havana, the lawns at the Fidel Castro Centre in Havana are still lovingly tended. Inside the grand mansion-turned-shrine to the revolutionary hero, the power is on and the guides fired up.

After showing a video simulating the Bay of Pigs battle in 1961, when Castro repelled an invading army of US mercenaries, tour guide Julio Eduardo Torres fixed his visitors with a steely gaze: “I grew up in the revolution,” he says. “I am convinced that we will triumph or we will all perish. We will never allow what happened in Venezuela to happen to us.”

Faced with a Cuban regime seemingly unwilling to make the compromises Washington wants, some fear that the U.S. chokehold may tip the island into chaos.

“Administration officials keep saying, ‘We don’t want to destabilize Cuba,’” says the American University’s LeoGrande. “But at the same time, they have an economic strategy that is designed to collapse the social system. So they’re making a bet, a dangerous bet, that the government will surrender before the society collapses. I think they may be wrong about this bet.”

© 2026 The Financial Times Ltd

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