Even before U.S. President Donald Trump secured a second term, Cuba was enduring its worst economic crisis since the early 1990s. Tourism has failed to recover fully from the COVID-19 pandemic; inflation remains extremely high; and since 2021, roughly a million Cubans—nearly a tenth of the country’s population—have left the island, most heading for the United States.
“History will absolve me,” declared Fidel Castro after the failed 1953 assault on the Moncada Barracks. A wry Cuban joke later offered a supplement: “but geography condemns you.” Today, history hasn’t so much absolved the Cuban Revolution as left it behind. The island’s proximity to the United States has shaped both the embargo that constrains it and the migration that functions as the government’s safety valve. The regime’s experience with managing decline means that it will likely survive even as the state—and society—hollow out.
Even before U.S. President Donald Trump secured a second term, Cuba was enduring its worst economic crisis since the early 1990s. Tourism has failed to recover fully from the COVID-19 pandemic; inflation remains extremely high; and since 2021, roughly a million Cubans—nearly a tenth of the country’s population—have left the island, most heading for the United States.
“History will absolve me,” declared Fidel Castro after the failed 1953 assault on the Moncada Barracks. A wry Cuban joke later offered a supplement: “but geography condemns you.” Today, history hasn’t so much absolved the Cuban Revolution as left it behind. The island’s proximity to the United States has shaped both the embargo that constrains it and the migration that functions as the government’s safety valve. The regime’s experience with managing decline means that it will likely survive even as the state—and society—hollow out.
The capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro by U.S. special forces earlier this year and subsequent U.S. pressure on Caracas, which effectively ended Venezuela’s ability to subsidize Cuba with discounted oil, ruptured what had been Havana’s principal external economic lifeline since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Extreme hardship is now widespread across the island. Shortages are rife and blackouts prolonged. Last week, the Cuban government warned that jet fuel would not be available at the country’s international airports for at least a month. Foreign embassies and companies are reportedly drawing up emergency evacuation and contingency plans. Several countries, including the United Kingdom, Canada, and Ireland, have told their citizens to avoid nonessential travel to Cuba.
Successive rounds of tightened U.S. sanctions, combined with the collapse of Venezuelan oil support, have produced a steady drumbeat of headlines declaring Cuba to be “on the brink.” The question is: on the brink of what, exactly?
Washington’s long-standing objective has been to induce sufficient hardship to provoke internal pressure for political change. After more than six decades, it is difficult to argue that this strategy has been successful. Although the embargo has unquestionably damaged Cuba’s economy—costing billions annually, by Havana’s estimates—it has also provided the government with political cover for its own failures.
Cuba presents itself as a small country under economic siege by a far more powerful neighbor; a socialist David squaring off against the capitalist Goliath. Deprivation is framed as fundamental to this patriotic sacrifice rather than a product of the bureaucratic command economy. Over the years, Castro repeatedly urged Cubans to accept whatever sacrifices may be necessary in the face of the U.S. “blockade.”
The leadership exploits this siege mentality—but it’s also somewhat justified. Washington’s latest restrictions on Cuban oil imports have been described by United Nations human rights experts as an “extreme form of unilateral economic coercion.”
The latest round of sanctions is an escalation, but one that the regime has a well-developed strategy for dealing with. Since Soviet subsidies disappeared in the early 1990s, Cuban policy has oscillated between cautious reform and authoritarian retrenchment. Each limited opening has been followed by a reassertion of state control, producing chronic stagnation rather than transformation. This cycle of cautious opening and rapid consolidation ensures that the system adapts just enough to survive without loosening the ruling elite’s grip on power.
In 2010, then-President Raúl Castro warned that the country must “rectify” or else “sink,” signaling the urgency of economic reform. During the brief thaw in U.S.-Cuban relations under President Barack Obama, Havana introduced modest economic changes, including expanded private enterprise and property transactions, raising hopes among foreign investors that Cuba might follow a Chinese or Vietnamese path of market economics under one-party rule.
Yet these reforms stalled while power remained firmly concentrated in the military and security apparatus. Today, Cuba resembles not so much a state with an army as a military-dominated system with a state attached.
The military-run economic conglomerate (GAESA) controls Cuba’s once-lucrative tourist industry. As a result, while ordinary people face severe shortages, enormous luxury hotels have been constructed for foreigners and the country’s party elite. Looming over the Vedado district of Havana is a 5-star, 42-floor hotel—the tallest building in the city—inaugurated in 2025.
The latest ratcheting up of economic pressure reflects a long-standing assumption in Washington that severe economic distress will trigger regime collapse. Trump signed an executive order on Jan. 29 declaring the government of Cuba an “extraordinary threat” to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.
“It looks like it’s ready to fall,” Trump told reporters last month.
Yet no long-standing Cuba-watcher would put money on it. Indeed, the crisis now confronting the regime looks less like a prelude to collapse than the continuation of a prolonged, managed decline. Even before the new sanctions, life has been focused on the daily struggle to secure food. According to a survey by the Cuban Observatory of Human Rights (OCDH), 89 percent of families live in extreme poverty, with many reporting that they skip meals.
Such material conditions are not necessarily conducive to revolt. Instead, they produce exhaustion and a population preoccupied with day-to-day survival.
Cubans are experiencing the unraveling of the post-revolutionary social contract. The country’s once-celebrated achievements in health care and education—together with revolutionary enthusiasm—are relics of an earlier era. Public spending on both sectors has declined sharply, while shortages of medicines, personnel, and infrastructure have become routine. Only about 3 percent of Cubans report obtaining medicines through pharmacies, according to the OCDH survey.
Yet while the state’s capacity to provide food, medicine, and services has withered, its coercive apparatus remains intact. Following the nationwide protests of July 2021, thousands were detained, many received lengthy prison sentences, and a new wave of emigration followed.
If Cuba is not yet collapsing, it is because in the country—cohesive security services, mass exit, remittances, and social exhaustion—currently outweigh those that typically produce revolutionary upheaval. The country is shrinking and aging rapidly. Its population has fallen by more than a million since 2020, and more than a quarter of Cubans are now older than 60.
As the Cuban economist Ricardo Torres has noted, any recovery effort must contend with a smaller and significantly older society. An aging population is also less likely to sustain large-scale protest movements, particularly when younger, more mobile citizens have emigrated. The result, paradoxically, is a society that is simultaneously more fragile economically and more stable politically.
For Washington, this presents an uncomfortable paradox. If Cuba is sliding into long-term decline rather than imminent collapse, then policies meant to break the regime may only impoverish the population even further. Sanctions can deepen hardship without loosening the government’s grip while strengthening the siege narrative and driving those who have the means to leave out of the country. Pressure intended to bring change may instead lock in a poorer, emptier, and more repressive Cuba—one that exports its human consequences across the Florida Straits.
None of this means that collapse is impossible. A severe shock—for example, the sudden loss of remittance flows or a prolonged nationwide infrastructure failure—could still push the system past a tipping point. But for now, despite a glut of feverish headlines, the more plausible trajectory is not sudden regime change but prolonged decline. Cuba may be too poor to prosper, but that doesn’t mean that its dictatorship will not endure.
