Reinaldo Hernández just celebrated his 86th birthday in the dark.
The lack of fuel and incessant power outages affecting the island of Cuba since the United States imposed an oil blockade in late January have made everyday tasks such as traveling on public transportation, accessing medical care or even keeping food refrigerated extremely difficult.
“It’s very sad to get to this point in life where you might expect, let’s say, some comfort… some attention,” he says. “And let all that disappear.”
Why do we write this?
The United States is blocking oil shipments to Cuba, where people struggle to make ends meet. Ordinary Cubans are also braving the risks that come with criticizing their government and calling for political change.
Mr. Hernández has lived through a dictatorship, a revolution and the various stages of the evolution of communist Cuba. That includes the terrible economic difficulties that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, a vital benefactor of the Cuban government. But today people are reaching their limits, he says. The octogenarian’s relatives who now live abroad pooled their money this year to give Hernández a small generator.
“Everyone is starting to agree,” he says, sitting in what was once a grand, high-ceilinged Havana apartment in need of a new coat of paint. He shares the place with his daughter and adult grandson. “The people of Cuba – I almost shouted it – need a change.”
To be sure, Cubans still have a variety of opinions about their government. But one important change in recent months is a new willingness to talk openly about the need for political change, says Michael Bustamante, a Cuba expert at the University of Miami. This is something that has been building up over the last six years: “a slow trickle,” he says.
“There is a nihilism that has taken root,” says Dr. Bustamante. “People are prepared for something that is dramatic and that can change the equation, even if it carries great risks.”
Be careful with complaints in public
Those who spoke out against Cuba’s communist government risked execution in its early days, and today they still face imprisonment or torture.
The social contract between the Cuban government and its people in Cuba was based on a “cradle to grave” system that meant government-subsidized education, healthcare, and culture.
“They took care of you. And the price was political loyalty,” says Katrin Hansing, an anthropologist at the City University of New York who studies migration, inequality and memory in Cuba.
This agreement between the party and the people has frayed over time, but remained nominally intact until recently. Now that public services and access to daily necessities are harder to come by due to pressure from the United States, old inhibitions against speaking openly are fading.
The government “has not known how to solve the country’s problems and they have accumulated over time,” says Sergio Almaguer, who is in his 60s and works at a non-governmental organization in Havana. “We are paying the price for this incompetence.”
Cubans began to complain publicly in the 1990s, during the so-called Special Period of economic hardship after the fall of the Soviet Union.
“Standing in line and saying something negative about the wait time was considered quite critical,” says Dr. Hansing. “People had real problems and there was a collective sense of solidarity in complaining carefully.”
But the current economic situation has created a new willingness to openly express their grievances, even if the criticism is about the situation and not directly directed at the communist government. “That’s where the nuance lies,” says Dr. Hansing.
The pressure increased first with the COVID-19 pandemic and then with a failed monetary plan for 2021 that fueled inflation. A failing power grid has led to more and more blackouts. During this period, Cubans have gained broader access to the Internet.
That has allowed ordinary citizens to see their government’s repressive responses, even in July 2021, after widespread public uprisings sparked by hunger and frustration. More than 1,000 people were arrested. Most of them were young and many remain imprisoned.
The “Cuban State has lost its monopoly on information,” says Dr. Bustamante.
And then there is Venezuela.
“People are eager for change”
The United States reoriented its foreign policy after President Donald Trump began his second term.
In January, the United States captured and overthrew Venezuelan Nicolás Maduro. Last month, US and Israeli airstrikes killed Iran’s supreme leader.
Amid geopolitical uncertainty, a speedboat carrying 10 Cuban exiles from the United States – including at least two with US citizenship – exchanged fire with the coast guard off the coast of Cuba, killing four. The six survivors were charged with terrorism for what Cuban officials say was a plot to sow chaos on the island. Loved ones of those captured say they were trying to instigate much-needed change in their home country.
“What I hear most from people inside Cuba is ‘instead of hurting me, why don’t you send the F-16s,’” Dr. Bustamante says.
At the same time, pressure is mounting on Cuba, which lost a key partner with Maduro’s ouster. And Cuba has seen other allies, such as Mexico, suspend critical oil shipments to the island under pressure from the United States. Tourism, a crucial economic driver for Cuba, never recovered after the pandemic. For three years in a row, the island’s economy has contracted. And an estimated 2.5 million Cubans – many of them young and educated – have fled since 2020.
All this is in addition to the US economic embargo that has lasted six decades on the island.
Since late January, state schools and workplaces have opened only sporadically. Several international airlines have canceled flights.
“You have to buy food little by little,” says Estefany Hernández, an industrial design student at the University of Havana, who no longer spends money on meat because she worries it will spoil during a power outage. He started riding his bike to get around the city after public transportation options dwindled, and he says his college classes are frequently canceled.
“We live in fear. Who knows how many days the power will be out?” she says. “People are eager for change, especially young people.”
The government blames the situation on the US embargo. Despite encouragement from allies over the years to open its economy along the lines of Vietnam or China, Cuban officials have stuck to a strict state-controlled model. “They thought that economic reform would weaken them politically and ideologically, and that would present them with a problem, given their proximity to the United States,” says Cuban economist Carmelo Mesa-Lago.
What happens next for Cuba could depend on Washington. Members of Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s team have reportedly met with Cuban officials, including the grandson of former President Raúl Castro. President Trump recently told reporters at the White House that Havana “has no money or anything right now.”
“Maybe we will have a friendly takeover of Cuba,” he added.
Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel said on March 3 that his country’s private sector needs more autonomy and called for an “urgent” change in Cuba’s economic model. The declaration was seen as a direct response to American pressure, although Cuban leaders have promised reforms over the years without delivering.
The Cuban government may be feeling the pressure, but it has also spent more than 60 years feeling like it was under siege, Dr. Hansing says. “You operate differently if a war mentality has always been your reference point.”
Much like the shift in citizens’ willingness to call for change within Cuba today, Rubio has also recently experienced something of a shift in rhetoric.
The secretary and former senator, who emerged among Miami’s conservative Cuban diaspora, has long called for political reform on the island. But at last week’s Caribbean Community conference in St. Kitts, he seemed to nod to the fact that change in Cuba could look different from other examples this administration has drawn attention to this year: “It doesn’t have to change overnight,” Rubio said.
Whitney Eulich reported from Mexico City; Rudy Cabrera Arcia, from Havana.
