Cuba Today: the Darkest Summer and the Big Economic Changes
In March, we wrote about the crisis unfolding in Cuba. Today the humanitarian catastrophe is increasingly severe Today,. while the world's attention is on Iran, Gaza, and Ukraine, nine million people ninety miles from Florida are living through the most severe humanitarian emergency in the island's modern history — and almost none of it has made the front pages here at home.
For twenty years, Cuba has been at the heart of what we do. Many of you better understand the island and its people because you went there with us in person. This is your next update — a tragic one, but as honest and complete as we can make it.
First, the History That Explains the Present
None of this can be understood without going back sixty-six years. U.S. unilateral sanctions on Cuba began in 1960, and their purpose was never a secret. The now-infamous Mallory memo, written inside the State Department that year, proposed denying money and supplies to Cuba in order to bring about "hunger, desperation and overthrow of government."
That is the policy framework still in force today — now enforced at a level one could not have imagined. Whatever one thinks of Cuba's government (and Cubans themselves think many different things), today's crisis is the extreme collision of six decades of external pressure with the island's own internal contradictions.
Life at Two Hours of Power a Day
Cuban homes now average two to four hours of electricity per day enduring blackouts of 18 to 22 hours. The entire national grid has collapsed seven times in the past 18 months, leaving the whole island dark for days.
Since the January 29 US executive order effectively blockaded fuel deliveries by threatening any third country that supplies Cuba, only a single oil tanker has reached the island in nearly half a year. Energy Minister Vicente de la O Levy has been blunt: "These have not been operational errors." There is, he says, a total absence of fuel and no access to parts. In Havana alone, an estimated 13,000 transformers are running beyond capacity.
And when the power goes each day, everything goes. Water pumps stop — families now count every litre. Refrigerators die, so perishable foods spoil. Without gasoline, food rots in the countryside while cities go hungry. Without gas, families burn scrap wood — even plastic — to cook dinner. Trash collection has stalled; garbage piles breed rats, cockroaches, and mosquitoes, and dengue and chikungunya are spreading through the sweltering summer heat, and neighborhoods burn the piles just to shrink them, filling the air with toxic smoke. Hospitals are triaging surgeries. Telecommunications falter too: cell towers run on the same failing grid, disconnecting people for days. Schools, offices, and shops are shuttered. The island is at a standstill.
Nighttime cacerolazos (pot-banging protests), marches, and, increasingly, daylight street barricades are built from the very garbage the state can no longer collect. The government has answered with police operations and arrests.
The Corporate Exodus
A second US executive order on May 1 escalated sanctions against foreign companies and individuals doing business with Cuba — and the exodus was swift. Meliá and Iberostar, the two largest hotel operators on the island, are leaving. Visa and Mastercard no longer work in Cuba for anyone. Banks, shipping lines, and foreign investors have followed.
Tourism — one of Cuba's last lifelines — has cratered: 359,500 international visitors from January through May, down 58% from last year. At least eleven airlines, including Air Canada, Air France, and Turkish Airlines, have suspended service, cancelling more than 1,700 flights. A few counter-currents exist — Air Europa added a fourth weekly Madrid–Havana flight, and Italy's Neos opened a Rome–Holguín route — but they are drops against the tide.
Warships and War of Words
The USS Nimitz, the second largest aircraft carrier in the world, is stationed off Cuba's coast. Raúl Castro, 95, has been indicted in U.S. courts for a 1996 military shootdown of a Miami-based exile group distributing propanda. Trump speaks openly, and often, about taking the island.
Cuba, for its part, has mobilized. The government has distributed civil-defense instructions to every household and activated a reserve system of millions. Reports indicate defensive drones have arrived from Iran and Russia. Meanwhile, a 100-page State Department report alleging ties between Cuba and the American left, mentioning Mamdani, anti-ICE protestors, and Black Lives Matter, raising alarm among analysts about where this escalation leads next.
The battle has reached the courts and the UN as well. The Supreme Court ruled 6–3 that ExxonMobil may sue Cuban state companies over assets seized in 1959 — claims that could exceed $3 billion. Cuba's government, which calls the U.S. blockade a genocide against its people, formally brought the crisis before the United Nations, where the General Assembly opened debate in July and UN human rights officials called for the sanctions to be lifted.
Goodbye to Lenin?
On June 18, something extraordinary happened. Cuba's National Assembly approved the largest economic reform package in the country's history: 176 measures across 23 strategic areas. State enterprises may convert to joint-stock companies with private and foreign shareholders. Private business is legal in agriculture for the first time. The 100-employee cap on private firms is gone. Foreign investors can operate even in Old Havana, with land rights up to 99 years. The universal ration book gives way to targeted aid for the vulnerable. A VAT is coming. Foreign franchises — reportedly including McDonald's and Starbucks — may open on the island.
Cubans are fiercely debating what it all means. Is this the China/Vietnam path — market opening under continued one-party rule, the road that lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty? Or is it perestroika — a rushed liberalization that ends in collapse, as one widely shared Cuban analysis asks? Some see capitulation to Washington. Others see long-overdue liberation of Cuban enterprise. President Díaz-Canel called these the most difficult hours Cuba has faced this century, and insisted the reforms come from necessity, not surrender. Economists note the answer will lie not in the 176 measures themselves but in how they're implemented.
Leaving
Guyana's oil boom, and easy visa policy has made it a major destination for Cubans fleeing the collapse. Brazil received a record 44,381 asylum applications from Cubans last year — double the year before — with many then paying smugglers for a brutal journey through the Amazon. Every departure is a musician, a teacher, a neighbor the island can't afford to lose.
And Yet: Light
As the U.S. starves Cuba of oil, the island is pulling off one of the fastest solar revolutions on the planet, with China's help. Solar parks are rising at record speed. Families run their homes on rechargeable batteries. Electric vehicles topped with solar panels roll through Havana. The New York Times has documented how Cubans are improvising their way through each dark day.
We have said it before and it remains truer than ever: Cuban resilience is a daily, practiced, hard-won art.
[insert 1–2 current messages from friends in Cuba]
Where This Goes
Nobody knows how this ends, but scholars are gaming it out. Scholars Brian Fonseca and Liany Diaz Gonzalez sketch five near-term scenarios:
1. Humanitarian intervention — the crisis grows severe enough that Washington steps in under a humanitarian banner rather than a regime-change one. The first cargo plane of aid from Miami just landed last week.
2. Targeted coercive action — limited strikes or operations against indicted officials, on the model of the Maduro seizure, designed to shake elite confidence.
3. Internal fracture — sustained pressure eventually splits the leadership between defenders of the status quo and those who see reform as the price of survival, especially at any succession moment.
4. Negotiated concessions — trading prisoner releases, humanitarian access, and economic opening for sanctions relief, though Helms-Burton ties the biggest relief to Congress.
5. Continued endurance — none of the above. Cuba has survived the unsurvivable before, and could instead settle into long, managed deterioration — decline, emigration, endurance — with no dramatic resolution at all.
The Day After: A National Pact
Amid the scenario-gaming, Cuban-American publisher Hugo Cancio asks a different question: is anyone preparing for what he calls "the day after"? Whenever change comes, he argues, the real challenge won't be who holds power — it will be who keeps the hospitals open, the water flowing, and the food moving, and who prevents decades of accumulated pain from turning Cubans against each other. His proposal: a national pact, agreed now across all ideologies, committing Cubans on the island and in the diaspora to protect essential services and the peace through whatever comes. No witch hunts. No victors and vanquished. A diaspora that returns as builders, not conquerors. Countries don't fail when they change, he writes — they fail when they destroy themselves while changing.
That is the one outcome we root for.
Our Commitment
Project Por Amor will return to building cultural exchanges of friendship and understanding between the U.S. and Cuba the moment it is safe to do so. Until then, we'll keep doing what we can from here. We wish it were easier to make a difference, but the following are the only ways we know of to help:
Support solar for Cuban hospitals through the Let Cuba Live! campaign — every panel is a piece of permanent energy independence. Tax-deductible at letcubalive.info/donate.
Call your Member of Congress and ask for a Cuba policy that puts people over politics — house.gov / senate.gov.
Share this post. The Cuban story shouldn't be buried under the world's other emergencies during its most vulnerable moment.
With deep love for Cuba and gratitude for your solidarity,
Sage, Gretell & Adolfo
P.S. Stay tuned for an exciting update on our beloved friend and Cuban guide, Gretell.
