A Cuban man stops me on a street in old Havana as I take a photograph of graffiti saying: “2+2=5” and “Necesitas ser feliz” (You need to be happy).
“It’s a protest symbol,’ says 36-year-old Eusebio. The artworks, scrawled on walls and buildings across the Cuban capital, reflect the chasm that now exists between the official narrative of the Cuban government and the daily reality for millions of Cubans.
After organising a soup kitchen that provided meals to people struggling to buy food, Massy Caram (33), says she was fined several times by the police. “They didn’t like it,” she says. “If people need to make food for people on the street, the government has failed.”
After nearly seven decades of living under a system devised around socialist ideals but tainted by authoritarianism, Cubans face a multitude of crises: hyperinflation, crumbling homes and social services, and now large-scale fuel shortages triggered by a US administration with an aggressive focus on regime change in Cuba.
READ MORE
Up to a fifth of Cuba’s historic population of 11 million people are estimated to have emigrated since the Covid-19 pandemic began in 2020, with young Cubans often leaving behind elderly relatives and a shortage of professionals in the healthcare and education systems that the government has long taken pride in offering its citizens for free.
“Back in the 90s and 2000s, education was wonderful,” says Lauren Marti, a 35-year-old single mother. Marti used to work as a school art teacher but left disillusioned with the system in which her six-year-old daughter is now being educated. “There weren’t any books,” she says. “The teachers were absent; they were going abroad or working in private businesses.” At school meetings, Marti and her colleagues would say “everything’s fine,” she says, “but it was a lie”.
“Sometimes I have to choose between food and medicine,” says Teresa (55), who works in a contemporary gallery in Havana and has a brain condition. “I have to work, even though I have a medical condition.” Teresa says she receives little attention at the hospital she attends in Havana unless she brings “a little gift, like two soaps” for the doctors.
“We have to start from the premise that we’re in a country in crisis and in total decline, and that obviously affects everything in society,” says Isaul Ortega (45), a film-maker.
“Like everyone else, I have many friends whose lives have led them to the point where they’ve had to leave. Right now, I wouldn’t want to leave because I want to see the final chapter of this.”
He says “the least violent solution” would be for those in power to leave the island.
[ Inside Cuba's tourism collapse as fuel runs dryOpens in new window ]
After centuries of Spanish colonialism, slavery, and US imperialism, a revolutionary government came to power in Cuba in 1959 under Fidel Castro. After ousting the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, the Castro government attempted “to build a welfare-focused development model”, but the US implemented an economic blockade almost straight away, says Helen Yaffe, a professor of Latin American political economy at the University of Glasgow.
Washington has sought to topple the Havana government and Castroism since its inception, through military operations, espionage and economic isolation, leaving the island to forge alliances with the USSR and then Russia, Venezuela, Iran and China. Yaffe says Cuba “is an astonishing story of how a global south country is impoverished by history but also impoverished by external aggression.”
Predictions of the Cuban government’s demise have been made before. The fall of the USSR and an end to its aid and cheap exports to Cuba led to an economic crisis in the 1990s known as “the special period”. “In the 90s there was a crisis, but people always saw hope,” says Yasmani Castro (34), an academic, podcaster and film-maker (who is no relation to Fidel Castro). “People believed in Fidel.
“But after living through that moment, what’s left? Promises? Resistance? People no longer believe in any of that – they don’t want to resist. What people want is to be happy.” He adds: “Happiness isn’t about what the revolution says any more.”
Cuban officials have long blamed the island’s economic woes on the US and its far-reaching sanctions regime. But Cubans and analysts also point to mismanagement of the country by an ageing cohort of dogmatic leaders including 94-year-old Raúl Castro, the brother of Fidel, who despite retiring as president in 2018 is still believed to be a powerbroker.
On the streets, Cubans no longer seem to care who is responsible for their hardship; they just want to see change. “I want to be able to walk into a cafe and buy a cappuccino like people in France and Germany,” says Eusebio. “The cafes here are all for tourists”.
Michel Gonzalez (21), says he does not want to leave Cuba – “it’s my homeland” – and would like to start a phone repair shop in Havana. He has an investor lined up, but US sanctions and export controls prevent him from buying many of the digital applications he needs to repair mobile phones. “Those involve licences and payments that can’t be made here; they have to be made externally,” says Gonzalez. “If you could pay from here, there wouldn’t be a problem, and I’d open up right away.”
Art teacher Jairo Cabrera (31) meets me in a small, newly renovated park. Cabrera started working on the community green space to escape from the daily challenges of his life in Havana. “I was staying home most of the time,” he says. “And then the stress started – from overthinking about running out of water; running out of this; having to go out and find food ... I kept running into one obstacle after another.”
Cabrera says older Cubans like his father have started to criticise the current government presided over by Miguel Díaz-Canel, but “they continue with this idea that this didn’t happen under [Fidel Castro], and it’s the same thing over and over and over again.
“The word ‘resist‘, the verb ‘to resist’ – I can’t stand it any more.”
But despite the widespread discontent, few people speak of taking to the streets – although, occasionally, frustrated Cubans bang their pots and pans inside their apartments as a small act of protest.
The Miami Cuban community will want to immediately run things in Cuba. There will be resistance on the island from that happening. The Cuban people desperately want a change in government but I’m not sure they want to be managed from the US
— Lawrence Gumbiner
“Cubans don’t have the time to think about protesting because they are surviving with hunger,” says Caram, who organised the soup kitchen. “You cannot protest if you have to think about what you have to eat. The people are tired of this government but they don’t know how to make a change. If you protest you are going to be jailed.”
A mass crackdown on antigovernment protesters in 2021 – hundreds of whom remain in jail – has discouraged Cubans from taking to the streets.
“The reaction to the July 11th protests, not only in the days but in the months after, and the fairly widespread repression that that elicited is fresh in people’s minds,” says Christopher Hernandez-Roy, a senior fellow and deputy director of the Americas Program at the Washington, DC-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“So there may be some protests, but I’m not sure that a spontaneous protest across the island that brings the government down is something that is really on the cards.”
Many Cubans have voiced a desire for the US to take action against the Cuban government, with varying views of what that would entail. “We see what happened in Venezuela and that it’s a possibility that the United States invades us,” says Caram, who is opposed to US military involvement in Cuba.
“We don’t need another dictator in government,” she says. “We need democracy and to find the solution in our own way. If the United States invades Cuba, it will change one dictator for another one.”
The Cuban government has largely sidelined official figures with political aspirations or pressured opposition figures into exile, with many now living in Florida or Spain. Cuban dissidents are often accused of being financed by the US, delegitimising them in the eyes of the Cuban public.
“The opposition is very fractured, unlike in Venezuela,” says Hernandez-Roy. “There’s no obvious [opposition] leader in Cuba,” he says. “I don’t see how Cuba becomes a democracy, frankly, in the short or even the medium term. I see regime management.”
Lawrence Gumbiner, who served as acting US ambassador in Havana during the first Trump administration, says it is unlikely that the US would conduct a special-forces operation in Cuba similar to that which brought about the unprecedented capture of Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro from Caracas in January. Cuba’s president Díaz-Canel is “a bland technocrat who is at the top of a technocratic-centric government”, he says.
“He doesn’t command loyalty or exhibit the leadership qualities of the Castros before him.” In Gumbiner’s view, Trump is likely to “continue to squeeze the island and hope for an organic or negotiated change in government”.
The US secretary of state, Marcio Rubio, has previously said sanctions on Cuba will not be lifted without regime change in Havana, but his recently reported dialogue with Raúl Castro’s 41-year-old grandson, Raúl Guillermo Rodriguez Castro, suggests that the Trump administration is open to a slower transition in Cuba. This could mean retaining some Castro officials while economic and political reforms are put in place to push Cuba towards a market-oriented economy.
Erik Quesada (35), owns a small construction firm in Havana and would like to see reforms that would allow more private investment for companies like his, as well as the scrapping of a law that requires companies to partner with the state once they hire more than 100 employees. But given the challenges facing Cuba, Quesada expects any reform to be slow: “If there’s going to be economic change, there has to be oil, there has to be transportation, there has to be electricity available at all times. Then, at that point, we can say, yes, there can be a radical economic change that we can cope with.”
If Cuba introduces pro-market economic reforms as part of a deal with Washington, the Trump administration would likely rely on the US Cuban community to provide investment. “The Miami Cuban community will want to immediately run things in Cuba,” says former acting ambassador Gumbiner.
“There will be resistance on the island from that happening. The Cuban people desperately want a change in government, but I’m not sure they want to be managed from the US.”
Any change in Cuba will take a long time as Cubans are “not ready” for capitalism, says Marco Alonso (28). “We’re probably going to spend 10-15 years recovering and trying to reconstruct. After that, we have some hope of working on the society we want to build.”
