Can Cuba resist the US?

“This is the worst crisis since the Revolution,” says Alvaro Miranda, 57, a history teacher standing on the sun-soaked streets of Old Havana between crumbling white buildings. His face looks gaunt and malnourished, his eyes sunken. “I am eating one meal a day with whatever we can get. I let my children have most the food. They are still young and need to grow.”

When I visited Cuba last week, the country looked like it had been hit by an immense natural disaster — a hurricane, say, or an earthquake — that had shaken it to the core. But the crisis ravaging the island is man-made: a US blockade on fuel and goods is hammering a nation with an already dysfunctional economy under a dictatorship.

At night, power-cuts unleash a black cloud that envelopes vast swathes of the tropical Caribbean island; residents huddle in candle-lit homes away from the dark, threatening streets. By day, you can see mountains of rubbish clogging up corners of Havana: mosquitos, potentially carrying disease, buzz around the waste, while desperate men and women leaf through old boxes and tins for food. Highways are eerily quiet: sporadic buses go by along with the odd bicycle and even horse-driven carts, while scattered motorists search to buy gasoline at exorbitant prices. Many people look stressed, upset, and visibly hungry as they fight to get through another day.

While government food handouts used to keep Cubans in decent health, despite extremely low salaries, shops now only have a fraction of the rations to give them. The rice, beans and pork they provide are keeping people alive — and so far preventing a full-on famine — but the population is facing malnutrition, with the UN human rights chief Volker Türk saying that the blockade is “directly harming Cubans, especially the most vulnerable”. Even the public hospitals, long one of the Revolution’s key achievements, lack sufficient medicine and power.

‘The US blockade on fuel and goods is hammering Cuba.’ (Yamil Lage/AFP/Getty)

On the seafront, I find a fisherman called Joaquín, 50, holding two fish he caught in a red plastic bucket. He also has a job as a TV repairman but says that has ground to a halt in the crisis. “The government is meant to provide us with [television] parts, but they haven’t got any. And there is no electricity most the time so who wants to fix their TV anyway,” he says. “This is rock bottom. I don’t care what happens now. It can’t get any worse.”

Cubans are exceptionally open and warm people. While many at first say they don’t talk politics, it often doesn’t take them long to get into it. I meet many Cubans who have government jobs but are also out hustling on the street, trying to buy and sell goods, to borrow and to scavenge, to get food for their family for that day. But the American blockade is squeezing them ever harder, with more foreign companies leaving the island , from French freight ships to Spanish hoteliers. Cubans try to withdraw their savings, but the banks only let them take out a few dollars worth each day. People form endless queues for small sums of cash. There are many other queues too: for rice rations, for medicine, for papers to get off the island.

Washington’s blockade is cruel and inhumane, and punishes the same poor people it purports to liberate. Yet America isn’t the only problem: Cuba suffers an authoritarian government whose proclaimed socialism is now a mere echo of the past. Billboards display revolutionary slogans and glorify guerrillas in the mountains in the Fifties, but this means little to most Cubans fighting for life’s basic needs in the 21st century. Meanwhile, a small clique of politicians and military officers cling to power for the spoils. Without Cuba’s revolutionary founding father Fidel Castro, who died in 2016, there is no charismatic strongman to lead the country.

“This is rock bottom. I don’t care what happens now. It can’t get any worse.”

How did Cuba reach this point? For decades, the Soviet Union provided the island with canned goods, resources and technology in return for sugar. However, after its fall in 1991, Cuba was hit by a major recession. It found a lifeline in tourism, with Europeans, Latin Americans, and Americans flocking to the island for its vibrant culture, beaches, and revolutionary chic — and in many cases for sex. In 2016, President Barack Obama encouraged this opening by visiting Havana, symbolising a thaw in relations. But President Donald Trump refroze them in his first term. Then the tourist industry was clobbered by Covid and with the blockade it is now on the verge of collapse, with gigantic hotels almost empty.

“I just pray to make something in the day, to get one customer,” says Arienne, 50, a tour guide with thick black dreadlocks who shows people round the historic sites of Havana, sometimes with the help of a partner driving a classic Fifties Ford motorcar. As we walk down the narrow streets, the sounds of percussion pour out from a deteriorating colonial building and a…