Yuniel’s days are covered in darkness. The 31-year-old Havana resident lives in Centro Habana. It’s one of the Cuban capital’s most populated municipalities, but recently, 22-hour blackouts have become a near-daily occurrence.
“My days look very numb,” says Yuniel, who requested a pseudonym out of fear of surveillance, harassment, or detention by his government for speaking freely. “Just trying to survive, finding enough food, and trying to cook it before it gets spoiled.”
He’s not alone. For Cubans, survival has become a full-time occupation.
June marks five months since the Trump administration captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and cut off the oil Cuba received from Caracas, a key ally. The oil blockade marks the latest chapter in Washington’s long-running campaign of economic pressure on Cuba, helping push the island into its deepest crisis in decades.
William LeoGrande, a government professor and Latin America expert at American University, says the Trump administration’s approach to Cuba is fundamentally different from past governments, who often used secret negotiations and incentives to pursue specific goals. LeoGrande says the current strategy relies almost entirely on pressure, sanctions, and threats designed to force political change.
“The fuel thing is the worst, because with fuel people can produce food, they can transport the food from the fields to the cities,” says Anley Benitez, a 42-year-old tour guide on the island.
As a result, food and medicine have become exceedingly rare commodities. A carton of eggs costs the equivalent of hundreds of US dollars (more than many workers make in a month), and even when Cubans are able to locate and purchase food, they find themselves in a mad dash to cook it before the power goes out again. What’s more, hospitals are postponing any treatments they can while struggling to keep patients alive.
Trump has long claimed that Cuba poses a security threat to the US, and in addition to the oil blockade, he’s used sanctions to scare off countries from doing business with Havana. Following Maduro’s capture, he warned that Cuba must make some kind of deal “before it is too late.” He later floated the idea of a “takeover” and said he can do anything he wants with the island.
“It’s not so much a negotiation, from what I can see, as it is a kind of constant threatening,” LeoGrande says. “The Trump administration’s approach is to essentially beat the Cubans over the head with a stick until they agree to do what we want.”
What the Trump administration actually wants from Cuba has long remained unclear. Most recently, CIA Director John Ratcliffe visited Havana, meeting with Raúl Castro’s grandson and other officials to convey that Cuba can no longer remain a “safe haven” for adversaries in the Western Hemisphere.” The US also dangled the prospect of $100 million in aid for the island, then indicted Raúl Castro for murder over the downing of two planes piloted by Cuban-Americans in 1996.
LeoGrande says the indictment may actually strengthen the Cuban leadership’s incentive to cling to power rather than negotiate. State leadership isn’t feeling anywhere near the same hurt as everyday Cubans, LeoGrande points out, despite claims from US Secretary of State Marco Rubio that Cuba is a “failed state.”
“It’s not a failed state,” LeoGrande says. “The state has social control and the state is not collapsing. The economy is collapsing.”
The Latin American expert also points out that the rest of the world seems to be abandoning a small island country that’s being “strangled” by the US. That includes the overwhelming number of countries who vote against the US embargo at the UN General Assembly each year.
“They’re scared of the United States,” LeoGrande says of these nations. “They don’t want to pick a fight with Trump because he’s so unpredictable, and plus, they’ve got other fights with Trump.”
For Cubans like Yuniel, the chaotic geopolitics feel distant from daily reality. “People outside argue about Cuba based on theories,” he says. “But our daily reality is just a numb fight for survival.”
For more than a decade, Yuniel believes, he has suffered from a condition called chondromalacia, commonly referred to as “runner’s knee.” There’s a dull ache beneath his kneecap when he sits, and when he’s on the move throughout the city, searching for food or checking on friends, he feels a grinding pain in that same spot.
His diagnosis isn’t official; he’s been unable to get an MRI in the 11 years since the pain started. And while plasma injections in December gave him some relief, with hospitals and clinics now operating without electricity, he’s been unable to get surgery or access physical therapy. He also has glaucoma, a type of eye disease that damages the optic nerve and is usually passed down by one’s parents. No one else in Yuniel’s family has glaucoma.
According to a recent study by the National Medical Association, Yuniel is one of an estimated 96,000 Cubans currently awaiting some kind of surgery, including thousands of children. The backlog comes on top of health challenges that many Cubans trace back to the “Special Period” of the 1990s.
During that crisis, a food shortage some medical researchers classify as a famine became so severe that average caloric intake dropped dramatically across the island. Medical researchers have since documented the long-term consequences that childhood malnutrition can have on health later in life.
“We can’t say for sure that the Special Period caused these conditions, but my doctor believes the nutritional deficiencies of that time may have affected the health of many people from my generation,” Yuniel says. “It’s something doctors in Cuba have noticed more and more over the years.”
Just as one crisis has compounded the next for Cuba, Yuniel says his home country’s dire situation is the result of years of bad policy and neglect.
“Our government made horrible decisions in the following years until now,” he says, referring to economic decisions that devalued the peso and repressed dissent. He also faults President Joe Biden for not doing enough to support Cubans.
But he knows recent events, especially the oil blockade, have accelerated the country’s decline.
“We’re basically trapped, hopeless, and helpless.”
Luis Martínez-Fernández, a historian at the University of Central Florida, says the crisis Yuniel is experiencing has reached a “level of desperation” not seen in Cuba since at least the 1990s.
“Even in hospitals, which used to be the pride of the Cuban government, there’s basically nothing left besides the goodwill of the professionals who give the care,” he says.
The comparison to the Special Period is significant. That crisis helped trigger a 1994 exodus, when tens of thousands of Cubans attempted to reach the United States on makeshift rafts. Less than 15 years earlier, approximately 125,000 Cubans left the island during the Mariel boatlift.
Today, some experts worry that a deeper collapse — which seems more likely by the week — could produce similar consequences.
“The risk of a full-on collapse of the society, if not the state, risks serious blowback on the United States,” says Michael Bustamante, a historian at the University of Miami.
Such blowback would likely begin with migration, a possibility that creates a paradox for the Trump administration. In other words, the same pressure campaign designed to force ill-defined concessions from Havana could ultimately produce outcomes Washington wants to avoid.
“A Cuba that’s suddenly a source of mass migration again is not going to make anyone in the White House happy,” Bustamante says, adding that he has “a really hard time figuring out what [the Trump administration’s] endgame is” with regards to the island’s future.
“No one in the White House, including the Secretary of State, is holding up anyone from the Cuban exile community or the Cuban opposition movement as: ‘This is the new leadership.'”
Rubio appeared before the House Foreign Affairs Committee in early June, and Republican House Rep. María Elvira Salazar, the daughter of Cuban immigrants, asked if the US could find a friendly opposition figure to replace Cuban president Miguel Díaz-Canel.
“I think there are clearly people within the technocratic realm of the government that could play some role in all of this,” Rubio said, “but ultimately, if you’re asking me, is there a singular individual right now that we would trust and rely on to lead this transition from start to finish? I can’t give you that name right now.”
Andrew Friedman, a human rights expert and director at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, says Cuba has operated as a police state “for a very long time.”
“This is a regime that is vehemently opposed to dissent, vehemently opposed to political rights, vehemently opposed to human rights and has been for quite some time.”
Yet the collapse of such a regime does not immediately lead to better outcomes for people like Yuniel, he cautions.
“A collapsed government, a failed government, a government that vanishes for whatever reason does not signify an automatic improvement to the situation,” Friedman says. “It does not signify an automatic rights-respecting structure. Oftentimes, it reaches into this area of lawlessness, this area of chaos where preexisting social structures that are mostly preexisting power structures become the order of the day.”
Amid this chaos, the Cuban tourism industry — which both Benitez and Yuniel rely on — has become virtually nonexistent. “I also teach English,” Yuniel says, “but there are no interested students.”
When he’s not on the hunt for food, he does his best to find something resembling community or normalcy. Occasionally, he attends polyglot gatherings organized by European embassies in Havana. In a rare moment of levity, Yuniel describes how these “interesting” events are great for people who want to “socialize with other nerds.”
The German embassy in Cuba has helped keep the sessions accessible by offering them free of charge (and providing beer). As he describes these events, it’s clear they’re a rare source of light for Yuniel. Yet he’s not naive; he says he can feel that light dwindling by the day.
“I want the world to know we’re losing our youth, health, and hope,” he says. “We have so much love, culture, and spirit to give. But right now, we’re being slowly suffocated by a crisis we can’t fix.”’
He offers a final plea: “No matter what anyone’s political bias is, no human being should have to live like this.”
