How Cubans keep going, despite U.S. pressure and fuel blockade

A man crosses a street in Havana, Monday, May 25, 2026. (AP Photo/Jorge Luis Banos)

HAVANA -- Felicia de la Caridad Alvarez, a resident of Old Havana, knows a thing or two about survival.

The 64-year-old former hospital custodian, blind in one eye, suffers from hypertension and diabetes. She rarely enjoys running water or electricity. The food in her refrigerator has spoiled. Even her TV is broken, leaving her unable to discern who, exactly, is to blame for her woes.

Millions of Cubans face a similar plight. Cuba’s already inefficient state-run economy - long plagued by shortages - has descended in recent months into a full-blown crisis in the wake of hardened sanctions and a fuel blockade by the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump.

But - despite Trump’s prediction in early January that Cuba was “ready to fall” and despite severely rationed power, a crumbling health service and the decimation of its crucial tourism industry - Cubans keep on going and the government is still in charge.

In part, that rests on years of practice. Cuba’s government has long taught people like Alvarez to “resistir,” a central tenet of its nearly seven-decade-old communist revolution. “Resistir” is shorthand for overcoming hardship in the face of seemingly insurmountable adversity.

“In order to survive, I have to keep fighting,” Alvarez said. “What choice do I have?”

So she lugs assorted plastic containers and pots of water every day from several blocks away, she scrounges food from a nearby church soup kitchen and she goes without refrigeration in the 21st century.

But the continued existence of the Cuban model also rests on citizens’ worries about the consequences of public dissent.

Protesting, Alvarez said, is out of the question, for fear of government reprisal. That was a view shared by some two dozen Cubans interviewed by Reuters in recent weeks.

“They could take revenge on my kids,” said Alvarez.

Rights groups and the U.S. have long critiqued Cuba’s response to dissent as heavy-handed and repressive, while Cuba justifies its hard line by alleging that rare protests on the island are often fomented or financed by the United States. The arguments have changed little over the years.

And years of scraping by mean many Cubans are resourceful. Fresh solutions to growing problems are everywhere.

Farmers have kept agricultural markets well-stocked throughout Havana, scrounging diesel on the black market or training oxen to replace tractors. The streets are swarming with electric tricycles that double as taxis and have replaced gasoline-powered ones. Solar panels and power banks now light homes and businesses.

Cuba’s capacity to “resist” appears to be trying the patience of Washington. That is creating a test of wills, said Bert Hoffmann, a German academic who has studied Cuban politics for 30 years.

“Living conditions have sharply deteriorated but the political impact is far less clear,” said Hoffmann, who visited Cuba earlier this year shortly after the Trump administration threatened tariffs on any country that provided oil to the island.

“Whatever the failures of Cuba’s socialist system, five months cut off from almost any fuel supply would have sent even Switzerland into a state of emergency.”

Ready to fall?

In January, within 48 hours of a U.S. military raid that captured Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro, a key Havana ally, Trump began predicting Cuba’s collapse.

His administration has since cut off the nation’s oil supply, hampered the flow of remittances, prevented U.S. tourists from visiting the island and ramped up sanctions that have forced many investors and businesses to run for the door.

All this has had little effect on Omayra Blanca, a 65-year-old housewife who lives on the seventh floor of a building near the Malecon in Havana. Since the elevator quit working two years ago, she only goes downstairs once or twice a week, for groceries or other urgent needs.

Wiry with a broad smile, she told Reuters she already lived through the so-called Special Period in the 1990s - years of hardship and international isolation after Cuba’s former patron the Soviet Union collapsed - and she knows what it means to resist.

“We are fighters. With the little that we have, we survive,” Blanca said. “Everyone is just adapting to the times.”

Not everyone shares her optimism.

Doctors are fleeing their profession as hospital supplies dry up, leaving wards understaffed. Medicine is scarce and a plunge in the peso has left many struggling to put food on the table. Most of the country - including the capital Havana - has just a few hours of electricity a day. Schools have been forced to cut hours and rations. Trash lingers on street corners, where those lacking working toilets routinely relieve themselves.

The United Nations said last month that Trump’s move to block fuel from reaching Cuba had “dramatically intensified the already severe effects” of a Cold War-era trade embargo, calling the measure “unlawful” and a violation of human rights.

“Energy starvation as a coercive tool is incompatible with international human rights norms,” a team of UN experts said.

The Trump administration has argued that Cuba’s communist leaders routinely violate human rights by imprisoning dissenters, suppressing free speech and elections, and imposing an economic system that condemns millions to poverty.

Flicker of protest

Despite the government’s general intolerance for uprisings, protests have broken out across Havana in recent weeks as blackouts have grown to span as much as 18 hours a day, threatening to spoil frozen food and leading to sleepless nights in the sultry Caribbean heat.

Havana resident Rodolfo Alonso said he decided to protest after his neighborhood went for more than 40 hours without electricity.

“This isn’t a political problem,” he said. “We started banging pots (in protest) to see if they’d give us just three hours of electricity. That’s all we want.”

The government has selectively flipped the “on” switch in certain neighborhoods, occasionally helping to defuse protests, but both blackouts and protests have increased in recent weeks, suggesting “resistance” has limits, said Cuba-based sociologist Luis Emilio Aybar.

“It’s a resilient society because it hasn’t had any other choice,” Aybar said.

“But a country without fuel can’t survive forever.”

(Reporting by Dave Sherwood; Additional reporting by Ayose Naranjo; Editing by Christian Plumb and Rosalba O’Brien)