When I lived in Cuba in 2010, more than 80 per cent of the population was employed by the state. The average monthly salary was 480 Cuban pesos (around $20); the basic-rate pension was less than half that. It wasn’t much, but most Cubans own their home and until recently hardly anyone paid rent. Education and healthcare have been free since the revolution; utilities have always been heavily subsidised (though costs have risen steeply in the last few years). And for decades the prices of certain goods and services were depressed by subsidies and controls.
The household ration booklet known as the libreta de abastecimiento has been central to everyday life in Cuba since it was introduced as a temporary measure in 1962, when food shortages became widespread following the revolution. It provides staple goods at extremely low prices – usually a couple of pesos. Even in 2010, ration quotas guaranteed a certain level of calorific and nutritional intake each month. Every citizen could expect to receive a pound of refined sugar, four pounds of raw sugar, a pound of dry legumes, half a pound of black beans, four pounds of rice, four ounces of coffee, 250 ml of cooking oil, three loaves of bread and a carton of eggs. In addition, they got a kilo of salt every three months and occasionally other items, including a new pair of trousers each year. Six-ounce portions of chicken were available from time to time and a six-ounce fillet of oily fish could often be found at bodegas, the state-run neighbourhood dispensaries. Every child under the age of seven received a litre of powdered milk and a few cups of yoghurt.
At no point during the two and a half decades I’ve been visiting Cuba has the libreta alone covered basic needs. In 2010, the monthly rations could be eked out for perhaps twelve days. The same products might be available at bodegas, off-ration but still heavily subsidised (typically three times what they cost with the libreta). Or one could go to a state-run market, though these were too expensive for most people. Most imports – including nappies, razor blades, shampoo, toilet paper and tampons – had to be purchased with dollars at shoppings, which no longer exist.
This is the reason Cubans spend so much time and energy engaged in la lucha, the daily struggle to make ends meet. They source staples on the black market or trade items that have been obtained por la izquierda, under the counter (often pilfered from state enterprises). In 2010, figures showed that a quarter of all imports were skimmed off for redistribution on the black market. While I was living in Havana I met government employees who would turn up at midday to claim their free lunch in the workplace cantina before returning home. As the joke went, ‘they pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work.’ In 2011, Raúl Castro revived the tentative economic liberalisation of 2006-7, laying off state employees and moving the country towards a mixed economy. The deterioration of public transport in the preceding years was such that from late 2010, taxi drivers were permitted to work privately. It became common to encounter, say, a former paediatric surgeon or civil engineer who until recently had earned $17 a month, now making as much as $200 driving a cab.
The government has been talking about withdrawing the libreta for ten years or more, but knows that this would be devastating for the poorest Cubans: pensioners, state workers lacking the luck, contacts or ingenuity to supplement their income, and those who don’t receive cash remittances from friends or relatives abroad. Over the years I noted the incremental depletion of ration supplies and the mounting desperation of those who depended on them. By 2015, fish had disappeared from the libreta and meat deliveries were increasingly rare. Long queues outside the bodega might signal the arrival of Indonesian soap, but more often meant a run on chicken imports from Brazil or the US (America’s trade embargo, in force since 1962, has since 2000 exempted food and medicine). Animal proteins were often restricted to trace elements in ground picadillo or pollo con sorpresa, ‘chicken surprise’, bulked out with a mystery filler the government calls objeto comestible no identificado (often textured soy paste). Bodega coffee started to be cut with powdered split pea, and rice was padded with cornflour.
Cuba now imports most of its food. State production has plummeted since the 1990s, owing to a combination of deindustrialisation, inefficiencies of central planning and collective farming, and the country’s inability to pay for crucial imports such as fertiliser and birdfeed. The US embargo – the longest of its kind in modern times – limits Cuba’s ability to trade, to access global financial markets and to secure loans. It was relaxed under Obama then tightened during Trump’s first term, leading to a reduction in aid and caps on cash remittances from the US. In the early 2020s, with tourism frozen by Covid, Cuba used up much of its vital foreign currency reserves. A poorly timed monetary reform at the start of 2021, which scrapped the dual-currency system, led to spiralling inflation (the exchange rate was fixed at 24 pesos to the dollar; in reality, it’s now closer to 630 pesos). In July 2021, protests broke out across the country, in the most significant civil unrest since the revolution. The government brought forward plans to loosen controls on the economy and within months the establishment of private MIPYMEs (micro, small and medium-sized enterprises) was approved. These enterprises are allowed to employ as many as a hundred people. Most are import ventures, and their products are found in stalls on almost every street. In all the years I’ve been going to Cuba, I have never seen such quantities of food and goods on sale as when I visited in 2024 and earlier this year. The problem is not availability, but cost: very few Cubans can afford them.
On my earlier visits to Cuba I often saw people cradling trays of ration eggs – known as salvavidas, or life-savers. They were dispensed at a rate of one per day, then one every three days and, eventually, just five per month, before effectively vanishing from the libreta last year. Eggs from the Dominican Republic are occasionally available at bodegas, but at prices only fractionally below open market rates (40 cents each). By comparison, the basic pension is currently worth $6.50 at the unofficial exchange rate. The average wage for state employees is around $10. A MIPYME owner I spoke to recently estimated that the average salary in the private sector is between $24 and $45. Reliable figures are hard to come by but it seems that the proportion of workers in private employment – both formal and informal – now far exceeds 50 per cent. Some independent businesses are doing well; the main advantages of working for the state are having access to hard currency and being able to profit from filched supplies.
On 17 March 2024, protests against food shortages and power cuts spread through Cuba’s eastern provinces. I arrived in Santiago de Cuba, the second largest city on the island, a few days later. In the neighbourhoods of Mariana de la Torre and Veguita de Galo, some of those involved in the protests explained to me how they began. Electricity had been down for two days, and was restored for just two hours before cutting out again. Rations were meant to be dispersed at the bodega at the start of the month, but by 17 March they still hadn’t arrived. That day a group of twenty women gathered outside the home of the local party delegate, demanding the right to feed their children. They were soon joined by hundreds of neighbours chanting ‘Comida y corriente’ (‘Food and electricity’). The protesters were only pacified when, within three hours, free food stalls were set up in a nearby plaza and all the local bodegas restocked. (Throughout the blackouts the government, fearful of inflaming the situation, tried to ensure that power outages never coincided with evening broadcasts of Segundo Sol, a wildly popular Brazilian telenovela.)
This conciliatory response marked a departure from the government’s approach in July 2021, when 1400 protesters were detained and several hundred were jailed, some for as long as 25 years. Even so, the rapid appearance of food only made people angrier: it confirmed that resources could be made available when it suited officials. A local resident told me he had seen plainclothes state security agents – distinguishable by their studied dishevelment and standard-issue black leather shoes – in the crowd on 17 March, taking photographs on their phones. The man worked as a university lecturer, earning $22 a month – less than he made repairing rice cookers on the side.
On that visit, monthly rations in Santiago de Cuba, when they arrived, were limited to three pounds of raw sugar, half a litre of cooking oil, four pounds of rice and ten ounces of black beans as well as a daily bread bun. When I returned to the city in February this year, they had been reduced to two pounds of rice and a tiny bread roll each day. One pound of crude sugar was scheduled for delivery, but not every month; cooking oil, split peas and salt were meant to arrive every two or three months. Four packets of cigarettes were still available per person, regardless of whether they smoked (most people try to resell or trade them). Two years earlier a state-run market in the town centre was bursting with fruit and vegetables, if not customers (local pineapples were going for 500 pesos each); now, only bell peppers were available. Friends in Santiago de Las Vegas, a town on the outskirts of Havana, told me they hadn’t eaten meat in a year (chicken costs at least 500 pesos per pound and pork 1300 pesos). Other people I met showed signs of malnutrition. On street corners across the country, buzos (or ‘divers’) made their way through huge mounds of uncollected rubbish, searching for scraps of food. Since returning from Cuba, I’ve heard from contacts in Guantánamo city that their local bodegas didn’t stock a single item throughout April and May.
My visit in February came a few weeks after the start of the US oil blockade. Most of the country’s oil had previously come from Venezuela and Mexico, but following the capture of Nicolás Maduro on 3 January and Trump’s subsequent threat to impose sanctions on countries supplying Cuba, these deliveries had stopped. As I travelled the length of the island over the next two months, I saw the punishing effects of the blockade, which UN human rights experts have described as a violation of international law. Public transport had ground to a halt and petrol was effectively unavailable for the general population. Only twenty litres could be purchased at a time, with lines forming overnight at the few petrol stations with supplies. A colero I spoke to was charging $50 to hold places in the queue until dawn. Fuel shortages were alleviated to a degree in late February, when the US agreed to permit private fuel imports so that MIPYMEs could continue operating, under the proviso that supplies didn’t end up in the hands of the government (never mind that many of the larger MIPYMEs are thought to be controlled by government frontmen). Employees at the state service stations sublet to MIPYMEs told me of a ‘golden hour’ before 7 a.m. (when the inspectors arrived), during which petrol was surreptitiously sold without restrictions. Other private ventures have been coerced into diverting their fuel to government entities via a network of shell companies. In Havana, black market prices peaked at $12 per litre in late February and have now stabilised at around $9. In early January, they were as low as $1.30.
The lack of transportation was especially pronounced in Havana. The situation in other cities was also dire, but not markedly worse than when I visited in 2024, a month after the government had hiked petrol prices by 500 per cent overnight. After that crisis, many taxi drivers converted their cars to diesel engines. A few months ago, however, the government abruptly withdrew diesel fuel from circulation, reserving supplies for military and official use. But in Cuba there are always workarounds. I met taxi drivers surviving on diesel siphoned off from rubbish-collection lorries and even police patrol vans. And in a country with relatively low rates of car ownership, there are greater concerns than how to get around. Cuba’s thermoelectric plants run on oil, meaning a sharp increase in the frequency and duration of blackouts, which now regularly exceed 24 hours, even in Havana. Pumping stations lack the power to move water into homes.
Constant insecurity, made worse by American sanctions on Venezuela, and ongoing cuts to welfare and entitlements have alienated many Cubans from the state. Apathy and cynicism are widespread and the behaviour of those in charge hasn’t helped. Since Raúl Castro took over as president in 2008, having led Cuba’s armed forces for half a century, many of the state’s most profitable enterprises – foreign exchange facilities, supermarkets, petrol stations, the leading state hotel chain, telecommunications, some port operations – have been brought under the control of the Grupo de Administración Empresarial SA, an opaque military-owned conglomerate established in 1995. Before his death in 2022, GAESA was run for years by Raúl’s son-in-law, Luis Alberto Rodríguez López-Calleja, and loyal generals were put in charge of several of its businesses. (Miguel Díaz-Canel has been president since 2018 but every Cuban knows that, even at the age of 95, Raúl is still el que corta el bacalao – the one who calls the shots.) GAESA seems not to be subject to government oversight or to pay tax. Leaked documents suggest that its gross profits amount to almost 40 per cent of Cuba’s GDP and its revenue is more than three times the size of the state budget.
It is believed that Gaviota, GAESA’s flagship tourism enterprise, holds hundreds of millions in dollar reserves. People with connections to the company have told me they are angry that ‘military kids’ (including grandchildren of the revolution’s original comandantes) are buying up choice plots of military-owned land in places such as the mountains of Topes de Collantes, a vast nature reserve, where they plan to open Instagram-friendly ‘eco lodges’. Others with close ties to the Castros have been awarded personal control of lucrative bar and restaurant franchises within state-run hotels.
Predictions of regime change, or regime collapse, presuppose the existence of a single power base. They also assume that members of the establishment are as badly affected by sanctions and gradual economic collapse as the rest of the population. The foreign ministry has responded to Washington’s gunboat diplomacy by signalling that it would welcome US participation in Cuba’s ‘economic transformation’, but has ruled out political change. Should Trump’s ‘new dawn’ take the form of a commercial opening-up, as in Venezuela, it will only consolidate the power and wealth of the generals. Even military intervention – the capture of leading individuals, along the lines of the operation in Caracas – would probably result in little more than a leadership shuffle, given the lack of an organised opposition.
In the 1950s, Fulgencio Batista welcomed foreign investment with open arms, enriching himself and his ministers in the process. An urban ‘master plan’ of 1958 – unrealised before Batista was overthrown the following year – promised to expand ‘Havana’s touristic and recreational function’ through the demolition of low-rise buildings along the capital’s seafront and the construction of an offshore ‘casino island’. Half a century later, the Trump Organisation applied to register its trademark in Cuba, intending to invest in hotels, property, golf courses and casinos. To the extent that he has one, Trump’s vision for the island – which lacks Venezuela’s mineral and oil reserves – would see Cuba return to being a client state, an investment opportunity and a playground for American tourists.