For decades, Cuba’s official narrative has been anchored in a story of resistance: a small island standing firm against the most powerful nation on Earth. This January 8, however, that story was punctured by the raw reality of a nation running out of time. In the capital, the ritualized parade of olive-green trucks and red flags still follows the same route as in 1959, but the mood has shifted. The celebration is now performed against the backdrop of economic collapse, social decay, and a renewed U.S. threat that feels, to many, more real than ever. The country’s leadership insists it will defend itself “against Trump and all the gringos,” but the rest of Havana feels less like a fortress than a ship drifting without a rudder.
The atmosphere is one of contradictory emotions: militant pride alongside deep weariness, hope alongside fear, and the persistent anxiety of a population that has spent decades preparing for a foreign attack while watching its own system crumble from within. In the days following the U.S. attack on Venezuela—Cuba’s principal economic lifeline—residents spoke with a mix of cynicism and dread, as if the threat of regime change had become a new constant, even more imminent than during the Cold War. The reality is stark: Cuba is now enduring some of the most severe crises in its modern history, and many Cubans are not sure how much longer they can endure them.
The crisis is not abstract. It is lived daily by ordinary people whose stories form a mosaic of the island’s suffering. A retired military engineer survives on a pension that barely buys eggs. A mother of a young man imprisoned for sedition waits for news through guarded phone calls. Families on Havana’s outskirts endure ten-hour blackouts. A taxi driver with a pink 1950s Cadillac sits idle, lacking gasoline and tourists. A grandmother lives amid garbage and rubble in Old Havana, while young people fall prey to new synthetic drugs that ravage the most vulnerable. Each narrative reflects a nation in which scarcity and uncertainty have become the norm, and where the future is no longer imagined, only endured.
The Cuban state’s own rhetoric has become more anxious and contradictory. The anniversary parade began with a minute of silence for the 32 Cuban military personnel killed in Venezuela, and President Miguel Díaz-Canel pledged to defend the “Bolivarian and Chavista Revolution.” Yet he also issued a rare admission of responsibility for the country’s failures, acknowledging the profound suffering of citizens who can no longer rely on the state to provide basic necessities. In the state newspaper Granma, the official response was a return to the familiar language of heroism: “Faithful, Worthy, Heroic!” But the image of a heroic nation clashes with the reality of collapsing infrastructure, rising poverty, and mass migration that has seen more than one million people leave the island in the last five years.
The economic collapse is not merely a consequence of political isolation or the U.S. embargo, though the regime insists on blaming Washington for everything. It is also the result of a system that has failed to modernize, and a state apparatus that has proved incapable of meeting the basic needs of its people. Blackouts are now common and prolonged, caused by the failure of aging Soviet-era thermoelectric plants and the lack of oil needed to run them. Medicine shortages have become widespread, even as the country battles outbreaks of dengue, chikungunya, and respiratory viruses. Meanwhile, inequality has emerged in a country that once boasted of eliminating it, and infant mortality has begun to rise—an indicator that many had believed the revolution had permanently secured.
The story of the Cuban state’s fragility is also a story of the collapse of its alliances. The oil-for-doctors agreement with Venezuela was once the regime’s economic lifeline. It provided fuel and support for an aging infrastructure and helped keep the government afloat. With Venezuela destabilized and its leadership under attack, that lifeline is now being severed, and the regime’s supporters are left scrambling for explanations. Cuban officials have long insisted that they are capable of withstanding any American assault, citing the mythos of the revolution’s survival against decades of assassination attempts and covert operations. Yet the current crisis has exposed how deeply dependent Cuba has become on external support, and how vulnerable it is to geopolitical shifts.
The human cost of this dependence is painfully visible in the story of Yunio Estévez Samón, one of the 32 Cuban bodyguards killed in Venezuela. He was a young man from a poor rural province who became the first in his family to attend university. He dreamed of buying a house and providing a better life for his children. Instead, he died in hand-to-hand combat, and his death has become a new battleground for propaganda and accusations. His friend Claudia Rafaela Ortíz describes the dehumanization of the dead soldiers as a tactic used to attack the government, but she also voices a longing for change: “I want it to move toward freedom and justice, not toward inequality.”
In Havana’s Old Town, the decay is visible in the streets, in the piles of garbage that go uncollected because there is no fuel for trucks, and in the crumbling buildings that once symbolized the island’s grandeur. Marina, a longtime resident, paints a handmade sign asking people not to litter, a gesture that captures the desperation and helplessness of a society that feels abandoned. “This is a ship adrift,” she says, summing up the mood of a city that has lost its bearings.
The threat of U.S. intervention looms large, but for many Cubans the real crisis is not foreign invasion—it is the collapse of the state itself. The island is filled with people who have been pushed to the brink, and who now watch the international order with a mixture of fear and hope. Some, like the private business owner who has found success amid the small economic openings of recent years, fear that any change will bring repression and instability. Others, like the mother of a political prisoner, believe the only solution is outside help. The island’s future seems to hang on a knife-edge: a nation that once believed it could survive any external threat is now confronting the possibility that its own internal failures may be its undoing.
This report, based on the coverage by El País, captures the complex emotional landscape of a country that has long been defined by its ability to endure. Now, as the United States intensifies its pressure and Cuba’s internal crises deepen, that endurance is being tested like never before. The revolution’s anniversary has become less a celebration and more a stark reminder of a nation at the edge of collapse, drifting toward an uncertain future.
