The Brooklyn Rail

After the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, the end of the Chavista regime was described as a “new Berlin Wall for the Latin American left.”¹ This holds particularly for Cuba, a Communist island locked in a power struggle with its powerful imperialist neighbor since 1959 and heavily dependent on Venezuelan oil. I spent a month in Havana, keeping my eyes and ears open to the political atmosphere of this corner of the Caribbean.

Fall of the Tropical Wall; Total Blockade

Geopolitically, Cuba is more isolated than ever. Maduro’s fall opened the Gulf to the Yankees, who have assembled a small team of far-right thugs, “the Shield of the Americas,” to bring their backyard to heel.² As a result, several Latin American countries have severed diplomatic relations with Havana. Cuba, the beacon of the anti-imperialist struggle in Latin America, has been symbolically driven from the continent.

Donald Trump’s pressure on potential trading partners like Mexico and Spain prevents any solidarity, and Cuba’s few allies, such as Vietnam, China, Russia, and Iran, are either distant or weakened on the international stage. Venezuela’s surrender without a fight is seen from Havana as treason, especially since thirty-two Cuban “Black Wasps” special forces soldiers died in the battle.³ With Maduro’s fall, the economic and energy blockade imposed by the US on the island for over fifty years is virtually total. The result, which in the long term could be catastrophic for the population (affecting access to health care, water, and food)⁴ is already ruining Cuban daily life.

The fuel shortage (it can take months to fill a tank legally; gas costs $40 a gallon on the black market) makes all transportation difficult. In Havana, Chinese three-wheeled motorbikes are replacing buses, and horse-drawn carriages are making a comeback. The little oil produced on the island is used to power thermal power plants, which don’t produce enough for national consumption. Cubans have long been familiar with apagones—the increasingly frequent, localized power outages. The power infrastructure, dating back to the Soviet era, is aging and breaks down regularly; spare parts are scarce. A friend who lives in Alamar, on the outskirts of Havana, sometimes only has two hours of electricity a day and experiences twenty-four-hour power cuts.

To all this, add rampant inflation: One dollar buys five hundred Cuban pesos, but government salaries remain stagnant. A biologist friend earns no more than five thousand pesos a month, a garbage collector barely makes three thousand, and a policeman, essential to the regime, earns around ten thousand. Since a carton of (imported) eggs costs three thousand pesos, roughly the minimum wage, most people survive by their wits. My biologist friend transports the pets of the wealthy between Cuba and Mexico. Others live off the dollars of exiled families or small businesses (the Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises, or “mipymes”). The few newly rich live off tourism or import/export in partnership with the state. My more “lumpen” friends organize tours for groups of alcoholic Romanians in their fifties or are kept by “alternative” European women looking for sensual encounters.

Cuban agriculture and industry have collapsed. Since the fall of the real Berlin Wall—with the end of access to pesticides, machinery, and processed animal feed—Cuba produces almost nothing. They struggle to breed the large Canadian pig that forms the basis of their diet, chickens arrive by ship, and—after having been one of the world’s largest sugarcane producers for centuries—Cuba now imports sugar.

And the state is broke. Until 2019, money came in exchange for international services (sending doctors and engineers) and tourism (the state owns the hotels and infrastructure). But tourism has also collapsed, due to the combined effects of COVID and the tightening of the American embargo. During the pandemic, lacking access to Western vaccines, Cuba emptied its coffers to produce its own vaccine—the first in the world.

The shops where basic necessities (rice, bread, milk, etc.) are sold are almost empty. The few subsidized goods are redistributed through the libreta system, still in operation, which Western observers continue to view pejoratively as “rationing.” It is actually a redistribution system that allows most Cubans to survive in a context where, if capitalists had free rein to speculate on rice, the famine would be much more severe. Elsewhere, in private shops, one can find almost anything: from overpriced spaghetti to caviar .

But the truth is that the Cuban economy is on its knees. This is due first and foremost to the blockade, then to a certain degree of corruption (though less than in other countries in the region), to the mistakes of its leaders (notably, excessive centralization under the influence of the Stalinist tendencies within the Communist Party of Cuba [PCC]), and to a faith in industrial progress fueled by Soviet aid. It’s worth remembering that Cuba was the first and last Spanish colony. With the Indigenous population having been entirely massacred, the Cuban economy has known only forms of industrial agriculture: first the slave plantation, then intensive, mechanized agriculture. Colonization completely dispossessed the Cubans of Indigenous traditions of fishing, livestock farming, and market gardening—a dispossession perpetuated by the activists of the scientific revolution.

Meanwhile, with my euros, I suddenly find myself a millionaire, eating rice in deserted restaurants where the daily special costs a teacher’s monthly salary. Then I hang out at Havana’s “underground” parties, where the youth are getting wasted on plancha grills and reggaeton. I try to escape the places lit by generators in the middle of the apagon and make friends. The old members of the Councils for the Defense of the Revolution (CDRs) keep watch over the empty official buildings, dozing in rocking chairs. The young people organize tropical-punk parties in semi-private, semi-abandoned spaces with a destructive energy that must resemble Yugoslavia in the ’90s, but with an Afro-Cuban twist.

A Fall That Never Ends

Despite everything, social structures continue to function as best they can (free hospitals and schools, subsidized bakeries, etc.). The assholes, pretending amnesia, can say that “This proves communism doesn’t work.” And it’s true that today, state socialism looks a bit like “equality in poverty.” It’s no exaggeration to say that the atmosphere in Havana is gloomy: bitterness and disillusionment for the older generation, who experienced the revolution’s golden age; despair and a sense of absurdity for the younger generation.

In reality, life goes on. Don’t believe the miserable, defeatist narratives in Western newspapers. The musical instruments come out if there’s no power for the sound system, and the mojitos keep flowing. People are nice, of course—strangely calm, patient, and disciplined. Friends and I, just for a laugh, imagine a pandemic in France: “What would happen?” “People would fight over toilet paper, scream bloody murder because they couldn’t charge their smartphones, and commit mass suicide.”

Then, on February 25, 2026, about ten heavily armed men attempted to illegally enter Cuba on a speedboat. The confrontation with the coast guard resulted in four deaths. This is a reminder of the nonstop unspoken war waged by the US against Cuba. According to the authorities, the assailants are linked to the Cuban bourgeoisie, exiled since the 1960s in Miami. Cuban reactionary forces, a significant voting bloc in Florida—a key state in US presidential elections—dream of returning to power on the island and making the Cuban people pay for the revolution.

On national television, the mercenaries’ impressive arsenal is on display. Once again, the destabilization attempt has failed. Fidel Castro, said here to be protected by orishas, African slave ​​deities, escaped no fewer than 638 assassination attempts by the CIA. The new event serves as a reminder both of the island’s fragility in the face of its giant neighbor, and of its fierce resistance.

Economic collapse, the American blockade, and fierce resistance—this is the triptych that has characterized Cuba since the “Special Period”: the period of restrictions and economic restructuring that followed the collapse of the USSR. In the late 1980s, while the countries of the Eastern bloc were opening their economies to the market, Fidel Castro forced the Communist Party of Cuba to hold to an orthodox line. “Even if we remain alone,” he said after having high-ranking army officials executed for being tempted by Mikhail Gorbachev’s model.⁵ Since then, the island’s collapse has been continuous, but under the control of a regime that has managed to survive.

It is noteworthy that Cuba does not match the clichés a dictatorship evokes for a French person like myself. Cuba is not a police state; there is a great deal of freedom of speech—no imposing monuments or advertisements for the regime, no portraits or statues of Fidel Castro.⁶ In comparison, France is far more covered with symbols of power, with police officers on every street corner and advertisements for capital everywhere. Yet it is clear that the regime continues to rule the country with an iron fist. The opposition is harshly repressed.⁷ The single party controls all political and social life through the organizations of “popular power.” These organizations—neighborhood assemblies, building assemblies, CDRs, and company unions—are both the remnants of genuine popular power that emerged from a victorious revolution and the cogs of totalitarian social control.

Control, even if not exercised by the police, is no less powerful because it operates through these everyday organizations, capable of socially destroying someone, more effectively than prison.⁸ Che Guevara himself criticized the CDRs, which he saw becoming a kind of morality police.⁹ Today, while these aging organizations continue to govern political and social life, they no longer benefit from the revolutionary aura of their early days. Young people shun them like the plague because they have become symbols of a survivalist regime that fears its youth, and ultimately fears the masses it is supposed to represent.

The current crisis is thus part of a continuing economic and political collapse, an endless fall delayed by a spectral regime. Its late opening to the market, the internet, and computerization gives Havana its particular atmosphere, where one can witness capitalism taking shape live—a ferocious, poorly established capitalism that transforms homes into grocery stores and neighborhood services and romantic relationships into a diffuse jineterismo—hustling.

What is most striking is the capacity of both the regime and the population to adapt to this ongoing crisis. In Cuba, a stronghold of the Mafia in the 1950s, there is little theft, virtually no firearms, no cartels, and no criminality, even at a time of severe poverty. Unlike other countries in the region (Jamaica, Haiti, Mexico)—not to mention my own country—there is practically no insecurity due to social violence.

What there is, is a whole body of mechanical know-how involved in keeping American cars from the 1950s running, in building without materials, and in maintaining condemned electrical infrastructure. According to William LeoGrande, a professor at American University, “The technicians working on the grid are magicians to keep it running at all given the shape that it’s in.”¹⁰ The regime promotes this “resilience” as long as it remains within the framework it dictates. Miguel Díaz-Canel, the president and first secretary of the PCC, calls this, in almost Situationist language, “creative resistance.” The slogan has something cynical about it, suggesting people “figure it out” themselves how to survive while letting the regime outlive itself. The more the global revolutionary camp retreats, the more the Party’s popular strength diminishes, the more creative resistance appears without a project (a stagnant resistance), the more the slogan expresses a gigantic racket carried on by an aging vanguard clinging to power (behind Miguel Díaz-Canel stands Raúl Castro, 94, who is only a ghost of his brother in terms of charisma). The slogan is unbearable for young people, who see it as a justification for misery and powerlessness. The more the world revolution recedes, the more the reactionary threat asserts itself, the more the Party tightens its grip, and the more popular power is confined.

Revolution, Year Zero

Intrigued by Western news reports describing an ongoing uprising in Cuba, I followed a police patrol at nightfall. Deep in the Chino barrio, I stumbled upon children and teenagers hiding under the arcades of a darkened avenue, armed with jerry cans and pots and pans. As the army’s SUVs approached, the children vanished into the alleyways, pursued by headlights—a scene straight out of Alain Damasio’s sci-fi novel Les Furtifs. The uprising became ghostly.

The organized reactionary opposition is based in Miami and lacks a social base in the country. Reformists are in exile, and artists are under pressure. Repression intensified after the 2021 social movement (notably through the emblematic Decree Law 35 against “social subversion”¹¹). The regime responded to the popular uprising with incarcerations and the distribution of visas to young people eager for democracy. As a result, an entire generation has fled or languished in prison.

If the final struggle that was supposed to bring paradise on earth to Cuba is postponed (Fidel, who was supposed to cut his guerrilla beard on the day Cuba would be totally free, died with a beard), the final fall is also postponed. To put an end to this unforgivable, degenerate, victorious revolution, only that antichrist Trump remains. Swollen with pride over his supposed victories, he does nothing but repeat that he will “take care of Cuba,” “have the honor of taking it,” etc.—but he never shows up. The zopilotes—those large, red-headed American vultures—circle in the skies above Havana. A threat looms, but it is part of the inertia.

Cuba is not Venezuela. Cuban army officers won a war in Angola against a South Africa armed by the US. The old guard is fanatical and unwilling to concede anything. According to a businessman close to the regime, the historical centers of the revolution, such as Oriente, would provide numerous guerrilla fighters in the event of military intervention. In this context, the arrival of the Americans restoring democracy seems like a pipe dream. The most likely scenario is an acceleration of capital circulation, perhaps through agreements forced by the Trump administration following the new imperialist strategy of head-chopping—that is, by ousting Díaz-Canel, negotiating with those willing to submit to the US, and then maintaining the empty shell of the regime to control the population.

The cycle of internal pressure from the regime and underlying external threat from the US goes on. Historical time has stopped. Daily life is made up of aimless wandering, minor hardships, restrictions, and wild parties. A resistance without a plan. This creates an atmosphere of endless waiting, an absurd daily temporality, well described by Josué Veloz Serrade—to cite the comrades of La Tizza—as time zero.

In this zero time, eras blend and overlap. Part of the population lives in the 1960s, fueled by anti-imperialist propaganda, subsidized bread rolls, and the expectation of a Mexican ship, Russian aid, or the arrival of Martians. (According to my neighbor, eighty-year-old Comandante P., a guerrilla hero, extraterrestrials are coming to Earth to prevent the nuclear World War III that threatens the solar system.) Another part, connected to virtual globalization and the private market, dreams of being able to plug in their computers for more than two hours a day. In the background, the 1950s also reappear: pre-revolutionary Havana with jazz bands for the wealthy, sex tourism, and capitalists lying in wait. The young French executives at the Havana Club (50 percent of whose capital is owned by Pernod Ricard) tell me, with the utmost innocence, “Cubans, they need a bit more whipping.”

Teslas and horses, the difficulty of finding anything other than rice and beans, always accompanied by an artificially iced daiquiri, give the country a strange quality, somewhere between the developing world and the West. The dysfunction of central elements of modernity (internet, electricity, transportation), a city without surveillance cameras, illegible places (shops in living rooms, bars and nightclubs that resemble squats), lend a surreal atmosphere to daily life and a magical aura to the city. It feels like a post-apocalyptic moment where the apocalypse never actually happened. My Cuban friends must forgive me for this lightheartedness regarding their daily suffering, but to my eyes there is something beautiful and pleasant about this frugal city, stripped of much of the superfluous, where structural unavailability makes people available, and where they build homes in abandoned colonial palaces.

It’s obvious that Cubans, like Iranians, are caught in a double blockade: one from the outside, imposed by the champions of imperialism, and one from within, maintained by a paranoid regime. But once that’s said, nothing has been said. The French media talk only about the internal blockade, highlighting Cuban Trump supporters, who are, in fact, a minority.

We are told that the buildings are falling into ruin. It is the heritage of colonial Europe that is crumbling, and it would cost millions to renovate it. But is it necessary? It is the anthropological model of the West that is eroding. A large majority of its population no longer desires it, while the rest of the world never did. Journalists should learn to see beyond the ruins and the promises, as the Chinese-American anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing suggests. They should take an interest in self-construction and how people inhabit the ruins of colonialism as much as those of socialist promises, with equal inventiveness and courage.

What is never mentioned in reports about Cuba is that unavailability (in Hartmut Rosa’s sense) leaves room for chance, spontaneity, and forms of self-organization. And this phenomenon in Cuba is historical. Every time the government has been unable to stem external pressure on its own, it has had to open itself to social movements in order to maintain its grip, thereby strengthening self-organization. Conversely, to survive, it has sometimes had to become rigid and resort to repression, as in 2021. This dialectic of openness and closure lies at the heart of Cuban politics.

Threatening and dangerous reactionary adventurers; an absent bourgeoisie; a more or less egalitarian, mixed, creolized society (at least from my French perspective); two hundred years of anti-imperialist resistance; radical artists who have gone underground and definitively broken with institutions; heretical communists; mystical Afro-Cuban groups; a nihilistic youth inventing Afrofuturist ways of life: all the right ingredients for a “historical setback”—for the return of the revolution through its self-destruction.

There is, of course, this vicious circle: external pressure reinforces and justifies the regime’s rigidity. But there is a way out of this circle when the people seize the momentum, the temporality, as the comrades of La Tizza collective put it, and take back control of their revolution. This is unfortunately prophetic, and it would require reinventing a revolutionary project capable of competing with the impulsive allure of capital as much as with fascist utopia. Nothing less than the realization of creative resistance. This task falls to the global revolutionary camp. But the Cuban people have no choice. And it would not be surprising if this heroic people, in its cultural ferment, increasingly brought into contact with a global ferment through the entry of capital, were to find answers that will once again guide that international revolution.