Will Cuba Survive?

Born in crisis, strengthened by rejection, Cuba once again faces economic asphyxiation by Washington, which is moving in for the kill after sixty-seven years of attacking the island.*

Since the triumph of their revolution in 1959, Cubans have infuriated U.S. leaders with their specialized genius in overcoming catastrophe, whether it take the form of a hurricane, flood, invasion, hijacking, chemical attack, biological attack, or economic warfare.

Between disasters, they eat, drink, dance, and make merry.

Today with the second coming of Trump, the abduction of Nicolas Maduro, and the cutting off of Venezuelan oil to Havana, they face a very familiar ratcheting up of imperial sadism to make them beg for relief.

Bus stops stand empty and fewer cars and pedestrians circulate in the street. Lack of fuel is palpable, and many gas stations have shut down. Air Canada is suspending service to the island.

Families turn to wood and coal for cooking amidst the constant power outages. Emergency restrictions mandate a four-day work week, reduced transport between provinces, the closing of main tourist facilities, shorter school days, and reduced in-person attendance requirements at universities.

But somehow life flows on in Havana, and there’s plenty to do. Near the train station on the boardwalk, people fish. When night falls, neighborhoods fill with young people engaged in cultural projects, or playing soccer or basketball.

A 32-year-old Cuban woman named Yadira expressed a key part of the national psychology well to journalist Louis Hernandez Navarro recently in the Mexican daily La Jornada. Two years ago, she left the island hoping to reach the United States, leaving her nine-year-old daughter and seven-year-old son with their grandparents. She never made it to the U.S. and had to stay in Mexico City, working in a fish shop in the Nonoalco market. Now she’s back in Havana. 

“However far from home I may be,” she says, there’s a little piece of me still in Cuba, and I don’t just mean my children . . ..  I wouldn’t want anything bad to happen to my country. I don’t like politics, but what we are experiencing with Trump goes beyond politics. How come someone who isn’t even Cuban has to come and decide how we have to live?”

Navarro observes that those now counting on precipitating a “regime change” by strangling the life of Cuba, forget how intimate the bonds with one’s native country are, how quickly even the apolitical like Yadira can be provoked into fierce resistance. It is a foolish but frequent forgetting.

He goes on to note that now is not the first time that the end of the Cuban revolution was said to be at hand. In 1991, Argentine journalist Andres Oppenheimer published the book, “Castro’s Final Hour,” the product of a six-month stay in Cuba and five-hundred interviews with high officials and government opponents.

A contributor to the Miami Herald and CNN, Oppenheimer lives in the United States and enjoys close ties to the Cuban exile community in Miami. According to Navarro, the book describes what the author took to be the imminent collapse of Fidel Castro and the Cuban revolution after three decades in power.

But the much yearned-for outcome quickly evaporated. Confident forecasts of the prompt and inevitable disintegration of the Cuban government, written as the “Iron Curtain” was falling and the USSR vanishing, turned out to be a mirage. Promiscuously spread as a kind of Gospel in newspapers and on TV, the predictions remained unfulfilled. Fidel Castro stubbornly lived another 25 years, was succeeded in power by his brother Raul, who, in turn, was succeeded by Miguel Diaz-Canel.

Thirty-five years later, U.S. military aggression against Venezuela and the kidnapping of President Maduro have revived the prophecy of impending doom for the Cuban revolution. The fantasy feeds on extrapolations from the importance that “Chavismo” had for the survival of revolutionary politics on the island, leaping to easy conclusions that Communist rule will abruptly collapse.

It is certainly true that in Hugo Chavez’s time, up to a hundred thousand barrels of Venezuelan oil a day were distributed to Cuba, and after the economic siege against the Maduro government was imposed (2021-2025), the figure plummeted to thirty thousand barrels a day, a severe blow to the island’s economy. Today, Havana only has about 40,000 of the 100,000 daily barrels it needs, while implementation of its plan to promote renewable forms of energy so as to rely less on fossil fuels advances at a slower pace than the country’s growing needs.

To make matters worse, Trump has tightened the energy blockade, threatening to charge tariffs on countries daring to supply Cuba with fuel. This has profoundly negative consequences for public health, food, and, of course, daily life. Cubans were already suffering frequent power outages, as well as scarcity and deprivation on a scale not seen since the “special period” of economic crisis after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, but now must withstand almost constant shut-downs. On many parts of the island outages last more than half the day.

But does that mean that the collapse of the Cuban government is imminent or that “regime change” is about to occur?  Cuba’s Deputy Prime Minister Oscar Perez-Oliva Fraga says absolutely not: “This is an opportunity and a challenge that we have no doubt we will overcome. We are not going to collapse.”

Pointing to the determination of so many resisting Cubans and the social cohesion born of rejecting Trump’s crude interventionism, Navarro claims announcements of the end of the Cuban revolution are no more than a phantom born of the yearnings of Cuba-haters for redemption and of Trump to win votes for the upcoming mid-term elections.

In order to breathe life into the idea that regime change has legs, various news platforms in the Washington orbit have recently spread the message that Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel called the United States to request a serious dialogue, which, so it was said, represented a change of stance by the Cuban government towards the United States, provoked by Trump’s absurd January 29 declaration** proclaiming tiny Cuba a threat to the national security of the United States, and warning of retaliation

But in reality there was no change of stance, just the umpteenth invitation for dialogue and understanding to prevail between the two countries, on a base of equality and mutual respect, which Cuba has always insisted on.

From Cuba’s point of view, the latest phase of U.S. attacks on the island started with the extermination campaign in Gaza and the world paralysis that let it proceed, which encouraged delusions of omnipotence in Washington.

Now Donald Trump wants to impose hunger on Cubans to make them renounce socialism, which is not at all a new idea. Like his predecessors in the Oval Office, he doesn’t want there to be a base for anti-imperial politics anywhere in the world, much less just ninety miles away from the U.S.

Cuba, after all, once sent hundreds of thousands of its troops thousands of miles from home to humiliate white South Africa on the battlefield. Its withering advance in southwestern Angola and electrifying defeat of apartheid forces at Cuito Cuanavale featuring Cuban mastery of the skies were key events in bringing down the loathesome regime. Nelson Mandela said the Cuban victory at Cuito Cuanavale “destroyed the myth of the invincibility of the white oppressor [and] inspired the fighting masses of South Africa . . . Cuito Cuanavale was the turning point for the liberation of our continent – and of my people – from the scourge of apartheid.” 

On his first trip outside Africa Mandela made a point of visiting Havana in July, 1991 to deliver a message of gratitude in person to the Cuban people: “We come here with a sense of the great debt that is owed the Cuban people. What other country can point to a record of greater selflessness than Cuba has displayed in its relations to Africa?”

The U.S. defined Mandela as a terrorist until 2008, and regards Havana as a terrorist regime right now.

Madness. Meanwhile, on the ground in Cuba, against the wind and a rising reactionary tide, a proud and resilient people, survivors of a thousand betrayals and besieged by a vile blockade, defiantly survives.

Notes.

*This imperial arrogance dates as far back as Thomas Jefferson, who wanted to annex Cuba.

 ** “Addressing Threats To The United States By The Government Of Cuba” www.whitehouse.gov

Sources

Luis Hernandez Navarro, “Cuba: a society forged in crises: we have endured them all” La Jornada, February 7, 2026 (Spanish)

Gabriela Vera Lopes, “A Solidarity That Takes Risks and Puts Our Bodies On The Line is Indispensable,” February 6, 2026, www.rebelion.org (Spanish) 

“From blackouts to food shortages: How U.S. blockade is crippling life in Cuba,” Al Jazeera, February 8, 2026

Ignacio Ramonet & Fidel Castro, Fidel Castro – My Life (Scribner, 2006) pps. 316-25

Piero Gleijeses, Visions of Freedom – Havana, Washington, Pretoria, and the Struggle for Southern Africa 1976-1991, (University of North Carolina, 2013, pps. 519, 526

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