Cuba Under Siege

We were in eastern Cuba in the latter half of January. This was a long-planned trip to a coastal tourist area in a largely agricultural region, far from Havana and other major cities. Nonetheless, we were able to have discussions with Cubans, including some we had met before, compare the situation to previous visits and follow the Cuban media. This report largely deals with developments on the island itself over the past few years, including after the U.S. attack on Venezuela and the greatly heightened threats against Cuba that have followed. It should be read in conjunction with our material emphasizing the need for an international anti-imperialist alliance to defend Cuba and Latin America more broadly. The punchline is that the country faces its gravest threat since the collapse of the Soviet Union, even worse than the “Special Period” of the early 1990s.

The day we arrived there were government-organized rallies all over the country against U.S. imperialism and to honour the Cuban security personnel killed in the U.S. attack in Caracas. Communist Party of Cuba (PCC) leader Díaz-Canel addressed tens of thousands of protesters in Havana, who chanted “Down with imperialism! Cuba will prevail!” By the end of January, Trump was threatening to asphyxiate the island through a complete blockade of oil imports. If these are indeed cut off, Cuba would reportedly have only have enough fuel supplies to power the country for about three weeks.

The BRICS and various “progressive” Latin American governments issued toothless protests while doing nothing beyond pledging a bit of “humanitarian” aid. What is urgently needed is international working-class action to defend Cuba, including demands for Mexico and Russia to defy the U.S. and ship oil to the country, and for China to provide massive aid to rebuild the country’s shattered infrastructure. Without this, Cuba is in a very weak position, despite evident anti-imperialist sentiments among large sections of the population.

The Economy

The main cause of the economic and social crisis is of course the decades-long U.S. embargo under both Democratic and Republican regimes, which Trump has greatly ratcheted up. But the situation is exacerbated by the PCC bureaucracy, which has plowed huge amounts of the country’s scarce resources into the tourist industry, hoping the U.S. would change course and allow an influx of American tourists. The result has been gross underfunding of agriculture and infrastructure, leading to worsening life conditions for ordinary Cubans.

Social differentiation has greatly increased: those with access to dollars via the black market or relatives in the U.S. are in a much better position than most Cubans, who barely scrape by. Numerous people we talked to commented bitterly about this. Meanwhile, the tourist industry itself has greatly contracted since the pandemic. Where we were staying the only foreign tourists were from Canada/Quebec plus smatterings from Russia and Czechia. West Europeans are largely not coming due to U.S. policies denying relatively easy visa entry to anyone who has travelled to Cuba.

On top of this, the PCC regime systematically suppresses social protests and critical voices, fueling anger and cynicism about “socialism” especially among younger Cubans. Over the past five years, the population has shrunk by close to 25 percent, partly due to low birthrates but chiefly because close to two million people have fled the island in the hope of a better life. These are disproportionally younger working-age people, with the knock-on effect that pensions, health care, etc. for the elderly are ever more threadbare. According to official statistics, GDP has plummeted by 11 percent since 2019. And the 2019 base line was already very low.

During the ride from the airport, we asked the bus driver about the main problems facing Cubans today. His response: food, transportation and medicine, all of which are increasingly hard to get. The energy situation has been bad for many years, due to decayed Soviet-era infrastructure and sharp decreases in oil imports from two of the main suppliers, Venezuela and Russia (Mexico being the third). Now imports from Venezuela are gone altogether while Russia and Mexico show no signs of stepping in to break the U.S. blockade. A year ago, four-hour daily blackouts were already common in eastern Cuba, but Havana was largely spared. Now the entire island gets them for about 12 hours a day or even more.

The rationing system that used to provide a bare minimum of food to citizens is all but gone. Rice, beans, milk, etc., are increasingly only available at hard-currency stores for prices that are unaffordable for most. The same applies to gasoline: the old system that gave a monthly voucher for a time slot to buy gas is totally eroded and you have to pay for it with hard currency or look for it on the black market. Prices in what is left of the public transport system have soared and people have to rely on hitchhiking or rides with friends, sometimes in horse-drawn carts. Some staff in the hotel where we were staying worked 24-hour shifts, simply because it was so difficult to get to and from home.

As for the health and education systems, where Cuba made huge advances in the decades after the revolution, these too are in dire straits. Even basic medicines like aspirin are very hard to come by. Tourists from Canada and Quebec commonly bring extra suitcases full of medicines, surgical gloves, diapers and the like to give to friends or health facilities.

We compared notes with one hotel worker about the health systems in Cuba and Canada, noting that where we come from you can wait 6-8 hours to see a doctor at an emergency facility due to underfunding and staff shortages. He said in Cuba you get to see medical personnel right away (the doctor to patient ratio remains very high), but there are no medicines, the machines for tests are all broken, etc. Health indicators are worsening and as garbage collection in the cities has collapsed there is a greater infestation of mosquitoes, leading to the spread of dangerous diseases like dengue fever and chikungunya. Education remains free, including at university level, but students must now scrounge for some kind of job in order to survive. This was one of the factors behind the summer 2025 protests over soaring internet charges (see below).

China and Russia

In addition to Venezuelan oil, China has been the main economic lifeline for Cuba in recent years—with many strings attached. Earlier this decade, Russia pledged $1 billion in investment, but little of this has transpired. China stepped in via the Belt-Road program, notably by financing the building of about 55 large solar farms around the country last year, with the stated aim of modernizing the energy infrastructure and greatly lessening dependence on oil imports. On our way from the airport, our guide pointed out one of these huge solar farms.

The problem is that the Chinese company involved has not supplied the batteries needed for the technology to function, pending payment from the Cuban authorities, who simply don’t have the money. Our guide commented on this bitterly, saying “the Chinese are the biggest capitalists.” Beijing has also pushed for Cuba to lessen subsidies for unprofitable state companies and reduce restrictions on foreign investment and the private sector, which the PCC regime has done to a limited extent.

As a concrete example of how China needs to assist Cuba in rebuilding infrastructure, we should demand the immediate and urgent supply of the needed solar farm batteries, along with the technical personnel to install and maintain them. We should also demand the provision of batteries and spare parts for the Yutong buses and other vehicles, electrical and otherwise, which are common throughout Cuba but in increasing disrepair. Our hotel had four small electric vehicles to transport tourists and their luggage around, but only one was working and its battery was quickly dying. The situation is much worse outside the tourist sector.

Formal protests against the U.S. and the provision of humanitarian aid like the 30,000 tonnes of rice shipped to Cuba by China last month are nowhere near enough. China has the leverage to oppose Washington’s global offensive: it is a total indictment of the Communist Party of China regime that it has not, thus far, poured massive resources into protecting Cuba against the U.S.’s counterrevolutionary drive.

Protests and Social Discontent

The PCC obviously still retains a base of support, but the preoccupation of most Cubans today is simply survival. A sympathizer of Latin American origin who regularly travels to Cuba reports that friends who used to be active members of the party or its UJC youth group are increasingly disillusioned and just try to get by. All this is exacerbated by the generational change in the PCC leadership.

Raúl Castro is still alive (he attended the January 16 protest in Havana) but is 94 years old. Younger leaders like Díaz-Canel lack the authority of the veterans of the revolution who have overwhelmingly passed from the scene. The bureaucracy’s policies have been increasingly erratic—encouraging privatizations (the “Vietnam model”) then reeling them in, repeated disastrous “currency reforms” that have led to a de facto re-dollarization of much of the economy and more.

This is what lies behind the wave of social protests over the past 4-5 years. The first round came amid the pandemic in July 2021, when protesters around the country took to the streets against the Covid lockdowns and shortages of food and medicine. While some were clearly animated by anti-communism (the U.S. media played up “Down with Communism!” slogans), the sheer breadth of the protests in some 30 cities showed that this was not fundamentally a right-wing, U.S.-orchestrated revolt as claimed by the Díaz-Canel government and some Marxist groups (e.g., the League for the Fourth International).

This is even clearer in subsequent rounds of protests in the eastern cities of Bayamo and Santiago over food shortages and blackouts in 2024 and among students last summer. The student protests were sparked by a huge increase in internet data charges by the state-run telecom provider. The FEU student associations denounced this, starting in Havana, and protests quickly spread throughout the country. At least one UJC local committee officially joined the protest.

Beyond the specifics of the internet rate hikes, protesters pointed to the increasing inequalities following the 2020 currency reform and demanded “a society including everyone and for the good of everyone,” a slogan of national hero José Martí long used by the Cuban government. Importantly, they also denounced attempts by counterrevolutionary pro-U.S. elements to hijack the protests. An informative report on the Revolutionary Communist International website has more details (see marxist.com, 13 June 2025).

The U.S. is clearly attempting to whip an anti-communist revolt on the island as part of its drive to destroy the revolution. The top American diplomat in Havana is travelling the country to meet with “church representatives” and other dissidents, and the Díaz-Canel government has rightly denounced this attempt to foment counterrevolution. Cuba today needs urgent international aid and solidarity, and we stand on the same side as the Cuban regime and its armed forces against U.S. imperialism. But defense of Cuba must be linked to a fight against bureaucratic abuses, repression and gross mismanagement of the economy that only fuel the counterrevolutionary drive.

The Marxist Left

It is obviously difficult for dissident leftists to function openly in Cuba today. One group that attempts to do so is Comunistas Cuba, which claims to stand for Trotskyism.

Their blog (comunistascuba.org), whose main slogan is “Against capitalist restoration in Cuba and for world revolution,” is informative and worth reading.

At the same time, we have significant differences with these comrades; for one, they believe Cuba now has a capitalist state and have a similar position regarding China. It is crucial to struggle for political clarity with these and other Marxists, in Cuba and abroad. One way or another, the country is headed toward explosive events as U.S. imperialism steps up its barbaric attacks and the political bankruptcy of the PCC leadership becomes ever more evident.