Inside Cuba’s Worsening National Crisis

“Since the start of 2026, Cuba’s crisis has become harder to ignore. Repeated major blackouts, severe fuel shortages and visible strains on transport, hospitals, and schools have pushed the island back into international view. In March, the electrical grid failed multiple times, including another nationwide collapse. Russian fuel shipments later in the month offered short-term relief, but only after Cuba had gone months without a major oil delivery. By then, Venezuelan oil flows had been cut, and Mexican shipments had fallen away under U.S. pressure, leaving the island exposed at precisely the point where its ageing power system could least withstand another shock. What is taking shape in Cuba is no longer a sequence of separate problems but a crisis whose parts now reinforce one another. Fuel shortages weaken electricity generation and transport. Blackouts then spread into hospitals, schools, water systems and food distribution. Inflation erodes wages, while sanctions complicate trade and payments, and continued emigration removes workers and working-age adults from an economy already under strain. International agencies have described the result in increasingly stark terms: the United Nations has warned of a worsening humanitarian situation, while the European Commission has referred to worsening humanitarian conditions as blackouts and fuel shortages spread through essential services. Each pressure leaves the next one harder to contain. It is tempting to force that into a single explanation. Cuba, depending on who is speaking, is either being strangled from abroad or suffocating on its own system. The first version is too clean. The second is too smug. The reality is less tidy. U.S. pressure is real enough to deform daily economic life: fuel access, banking, travel, payments, and tourism. Cuba’s own political and economic system is rigid enough to turn each new shock into something harsher than it needed to be. The damage accumulates where those two realities meet. I spent some time in discussion with Andrew Ryan, a Dublin businessman on his twenty-ninth trip to Cuba, writing from an apartment in Vedado overlooking the Hotel Nacional. He has been travelling regularly to the island since 2010 and now spends part of each year there through his coffee business. What he described is not a country falling apart all at once, but one being asked to function after too many of the ordinary things needed for ordinary life have been stripped away. The block he is on keeps power more often than most because a national radio station sits nearby. A few streets away, outages stretch to eighteen hours. A friend with three children tells him her ten-year-old no longer wants to go to school because she is too tired to think properly after another hot night without sleep. Taxi drivers receive a monthly fuel allowance so small it barely seems workable. Outside the Spanish consulate, he describes the consistent queues of people waiting for documents that might give them a chance to build a more stable life elsewhere. Ryan traces part of the current crisis back to the years when Havana briefly seemed to be loosening. There were more visitors, more private restaurants, more bars, more guesthouses, and more willingness to risk his savings on the idea that this time the opening might last. He is right to insist that this was real. Money came in. Expectations changed. A layer of urban private life did expand. Then the conditions changed. The earlier sense of opening gave way to tighter U.S. restrictions, more complicated travel rules for people who had visited Cuba, and a broader cooling in tourism and business confidence. He described it further to me through money itself. The end of the dual-currency system in 2021 was supposed to rationalise the economy. Instead, in lived terms, it landed as another blow to a country already off balance. Ryan remembers the old arithmetic as awkward but workable. Then the convertible peso disappeared, inflation jumped, and the unofficial exchange rate moved far beyond wages. In his estimation, the rate jumped from twenty-five pesos to the dollar in 2021 to around five hundred now. Whether one accepts every edge of that estimate or not, the point is plain enough. Once wages and prices stop recognising one another, life gets shorter and meaner in practical ways. Ryan describes getting around Havana now means renting a car because the usual arrangements have broken down. Diesel has almost disappeared. Schools shorten the day, hospitals scale back, and farming becomes harder because tractors need fuel and produce does not move by itself. Even a bank transfer for coffee becomes a long argument with underwriters and then a refusal anyway. Mentioning Cuba, he says, can be enough to make a payment platform nervous. That is how the wider politics register in daily life: not first as ideology or declaration, but as friction, delay and the steady accumulation of obstacles where ordinary transactions ought to be simple. He speaks about emigration in terms that make immediate sense to an Irish reader. The phrase he reaches for is the “American Wake”, with all the old weight of departure, grief and resignation carried inside it. In Cuba, he says, people understand it straight away. The destinations may now be Spain or Brazil rather than New York or Boston, but the underlying fact is the same: the country is losing people it can least afford to lose. When he looks at the queues outside the Spanish consulate in Havana, he sees something familiar from rural Ireland in the 1980s: small places thinned out until what remains is the very old, the very young, and the knowledge that the active middle has gone elsewhere. Importantly, in communicating with Andrew, he never comes close to flattening Cuba into deprivation. He talks about artists making lives in painting, sculpture, ceramics, music and dance; about schools treating art seriously; about established artists helping younger ones; about a charity auction that raised money for solar panels for rural schools. He mentions salsa music coming up from La Brújula across the road, and friends arriving from Dublin with the usual compressed idea of Cuba, only to leave with something much fuller in mind. None of this erases the shortages or the strain. It simply prevents the country from being reduced to them. Cuba, as it comes through in his telling, is under pressure but not emptied out. It is a living society under sustained pressure, which is exactly why the present crisis deserves to be taken seriously.

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