For some time now, much of Cuba has found itself increasingly in the dark. Across cities and towns on the island, power outages last for hours or even days. When electricity returns, families rush to cook what they can and preserve what little remains before the next disruption.
Public transportation is practically nonexistent. Many hospitals lack essential medicines; many schools do not have enough staff to teach their students. For most people, obtaining food means waiting in long queues and paying steep prices.
The Cuban government has repeatedly portrayed the island’s emergency as a crisis imposed from the outside. It is true that recent measures by the administration of Donald Trump restricting oil shipments to Cuba have added pressure on the economy. But the country was already close to collapse. What is unfolding today is largely the result of decades of structural economic failure under a rigid political system that has consistently resisted reform.
Since the regime came to power in 1959, Cuba’s economic model — centred on centralised administration, nationalisation of key means of production and severe restrictions on markets — has proved incapable of generating sustained growth or social well-being. The implicit social contract that once sustained the regime is now fraying. The rigidity of the political system has become the main obstacle to the reforms the economy urgently needs. Without political change, economic recovery will remain elusive.
The system is driven by an overriding concern with state control as the guarantor of political survival. By centralising production and limiting private enterprise, the Communist Party has sought to prevent the emergence of independent centres of power, leaving citizens highly dependent on the state. Even modest reforms are often seen as ideological threats to the party’s monopoly. The current crisis deepened in 2021 after a flawed currency overhaul triggered a surge in inflation, compounded by the collapse of tourism during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Cuba is governed by a closed and bureaucratic elite within the Communist Party — the island’s only legal political organisation — which has effectively become a rentier class. Power is concentrated among long-serving leaders and their successors, including President Miguel Díaz-Canel, alongside business conglomerates controlled by the armed forces that dominate lucrative sectors such as tourism. Over six decades, this system has produced a web of interests in which political control takes precedence over the needs of the population.
The consequences are stark. Cuba can no longer produce many of the basic goods it requires. Despite fertile land and a long agricultural tradition, the country now imports much of its food. Its industrial base has deteriorated, constrained by outdated technology, limited access to capital and an investment policy that has prioritised hotel construction over strengthening the fragile energy grid.
For centuries, sugar defined Cuba’s economic identity. In 1989, before the collapse of the Soviet Union, the country produced around 8 million tonnes. By 2025, production had fallen below an estimated 200,000 tonnes. Fidel Castro’s decision in 2002 to dismantle much of the industry, rather than modernise it, left factories shut and fields abandoned.
In recent decades, the government sought to pivot toward tourism and the export of professional services, particularly medical missions abroad. But that boom has faded amid deteriorating infrastructure, declining service quality, regional competition and tighter restrictions on travel from the US.
Professional services, especially those linked to Venezuela, also became vital. Yet the instability of that arrangement — tied more to political alliances than competitiveness — exposed its fragility. Fuel shortages, worsened by recent US measures, have further underscored the risks of relying on external subsidies.
Despite this downward spiral, the government has shown little readiness to undertake reforms. Concerned that economic opening could trigger political change, the state has tightened control even as conditions worsen.
Scarcity and repression now define daily life for many Cubans. They reflect the exhaustion of an economic and political model that has lost the capacity to sustain itself.
For decades, the leadership has acted as if the system were immune to historical change, assuming that external supporters would continue to sustain it indefinitely. The 2019 Constitution declares socialism irreversible, as though a political order could shield itself from time. Yet no system is permanent. For years, the Cuban regime conflated survival with permanence. That illusion is beginning to fade.
The New York Times