See gas lines and blackouts in Cuba and hear how residents are coping. Upgrade to watch the full report.
Havana, Cuba – As tensions between the US and Cuba rise to the highest levels since the Cuban Missile Crisis, the mood was grim at a recent staff meeting at the US Embassy in Havana.
“If you don’t have your bag packed yet, then pack your bag,” US Charge d’Affaires Mike Hammer said, according to a person present at the meeting.
“The Cubans have complained for years about ‘the blockade’,” Hammer told the assembled American diplomats and local staff, referring to the Cuban government’s term for the more than six-decade US economic embargo on Cuba.
“But now there is going to be a real blockade,” Hammer continued. “Nothing is getting in. No more oil is coming.”
Contacted by CNN about the diplomat’s ominous words, a State Department spokesperson said they do not comment on internal meetings.
While there is no sign of any drawdown of US diplomats from Havana, the stark warning came just weeks after a US raid in Caracas killed 32 Cuban military and intelligence officials protecting Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro – the most lethal confrontation between US and Cuban forces since the end of the Cold War.
More than 100 Venezuelans and Cubans died in the operation that whisked Maduro to a US federal court to face drug trafficking charges, which he has denied.
Maduro’s capture removed the Cuban government’s closest ally from power and severed its supply of fuel – perhaps permanently – from the oil rich South American nation.
Havana depended on Venezuela for more than one third of its oil needs, according to energy industry analysts. The US attack disrupted those shipments of oil and now both blackouts and gas lines across Cuba have grown longer and longer in recent days.
“Cuba is ready to fall,” Trump said immediately following the January 3 attack in Venezuela. “I don’t know if they’re going to hold out.”
Trump’s is a bold prediction, and one belied by the fact that the revolution founded by Fidel Castro in the 1950s has survived all manner of murky CIA assassination plots and decades of economic arm twisting.
The billions of dollars of oil sent to Cuba from socialist ally Venezuela saved the island’s economy from total collapse following the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Sensing weakness, the Trump administration is increasingly looking for ways to hasten the demise of the communist-run government in Havana.
“I think we would love to see the regime there change,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a Cuban-American and longtime foe to the Cuban government, said at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Venezuela Wednesday.
“That doesn’t mean that we are going to make the change,” Rubio continued. “But we would love to see a change. There’s no doubt about the fact that it would be of great benefit to the United States if Cuba was no longer governed by an autocratic regime.”
According to POLITICO, the White House is considering instituting a naval blockade – the first against Cuba since Soviet missiles were discovered there during the 1962 missile crisis that nearly caused a Third World War – to bar any shipments of oil from reaching the island.
Cuba’s top diplomat for US affairs Carlos Fernández de Cossío wrote on X that the reports of the naval blockade constituted “a brutal assault against a nation that doesn’t threaten the US and a peaceful people that is not hostile to any nation.”
Trump has said Cuba should strike “a deal” with the US to avoid a total cut-off, one, he said without providing details, potentially requiring the return of property confiscated from Cuban exiles who left the island following the 1959 revolution.
That demand alone would seem to be a hard-to-imagine concession for the Cuban government to swallow if there were any conversations happening. Cuban officials repeatedly told CNN their government is not involved in negotiations with the Trump administration.
If the US continues to prevent the flow of oil from Venezuela and pressures Cuba’s few remaining oil producing allies like Mexico to hold back their own shipments, the results would be catastrophic, said energy analyst Jorge Piñon.
“If the oil valve is really shut off, then Cuba faces an imminent economic collapse, no question about it. No oil, no economy,” Piñon told CNN. “A hurricane is coming.”
On Tuesday, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said her country had made a “sovereign decision” to hold back a planned oil shipment to Cuba, while adding her country would continue to show the island “solidarity.”
Already the impacts of the dwindling supply of fuel are visible nearly everywhere one looks.
I have lived in Cuba for 14 years and was still surprised by how rapidly this latest crisis struck and how widely.
On most days the multiple hour-long blackouts mean power is off more than it is on. Whole sections of Havana are bathed in total darkness each night. I have whole WhatsApp chats dedicated to where to find fuel and which solar panels to import. To be in Cuba at the moment is to witness an already beleaguered economy grind to a halt in real time.
Driving in the city has become more perilous as traffic lights are frequently out at major intersections. Several government-run radio and TV stations in the provinces have had to suspend operations for lack of electricity and fuel to run generators.
Cubans have endured decades of economic tough times and shortages of every imaginable kind, often with a well-sharpened sense of gallows humor.
One Cuban friend recently asked me, “What’s the difference between Cuba and the Titanic?
“The Titanic still had its lights on when it went down,” he replied with a weary smile.
A state-run TV presenter recently drew jeers this week from many Cubans when she said on her program that Cuban revolutionary and poet José Marti lived in an era before electricity in Cuba “and was a genius.”
When I meet Gerardo, a doctor who did not want CNN to publish his last name out of fear of government reprisals for discussing the island’s precarious economic situation, he was happy to be filling up his aging Peugeot from the 1980s using an online system at one of the last filling stations to accept Cuban pesos. He had waited 29 days for his turn at the pump.
“Things are going to get tough,” he said. “I am happy to have been selected today. I don’t know if I will be able to get any next time.”
Long lines for gas even stretched for hours at filling stations that charge in US dollars, where a tank of gas costs $52 – more than most Cubans make a month.
In Cuba’s provinces the unfolding energy crisis is even more severe.
In his tiny backyard in the town of Artemisa, photographer Dairon Blanco Urra demonstrated a small charcoal grill he used to make coffee during power cuts.
“A lot of people do their cooking this way now,” Blanco said.
Blanco said he was luckier than many residents as he had a small generator that he hooked up to his fridge to keep the food from spoiling. He said he let his neighbors store their perishables in his fridge during longer outages.
“It’s really worrying,” he said. “When the power goes out, food goes bad. What you bought a month ago spoils within two or three days.”
Blanco said his biggest concern during the blackouts is that the already unstable internet connection drops and he is unable to send photos to clients.
“I have to wait for four or five hours for it to come back on, and that also prevents me from getting ahead,” he said. “How am I supposed to make a living?”
Many of Blanco’s friends have left the country, among the more than two million Cubans to have emigrated in recent years. Blanco said he wants to stay in Cuba but realizes the economy may not yet have hit bottom.
“I have to wait and see what happens,” he said.
Following our interview as we left Artemisa, except for a handful of houses with generators rattling, the entire town was in complete darkness.
Far from bending to the pressure, the Cuban government is digging in. Newscasts have begun to show military exercises and soldiers training citizens to repel an invasion.
The government talks about “a countrywide war,” where the entire populace would fight a bloody and protracted guerrilla conflict.
“The best way of avoiding any kind of aggression is that the imperialists would have to calculate what the price would be,” state TV showed Cuban President Miguel Diaz telling high-ranking officers following a demonstration of exercises using what appeared to be Cold War-era tanks and helicopters.
Most Cubans I know have relatives in the US, avidly consume American culture and have only ever been welcoming to me and my family. They came out in droves to greet then President Barack Obama when he visited Havana in 2016 and declared he had come to bury “the last remnants of the Cold War in the Americas.”
The idea of a confrontation between my country of birth and the country where I have now lived more than a quarter of my life seems pointless and cruel, an event that would play into the hands of extremists on both sides.
Already too much of Havana – a once beautiful city now littered with debris from buildings collapsing under years of neglect – looks like a war zone.
No official conflict has been declared but there is a body count amidst the rising tensions between the US and Cuba.
When this month the remains of the 32 Cuban combatants killed in Venezuela were brought back to the island, the government pulled out all the stops to give them a hero’s welcome.
Tens of thousands of students and workers were bussed in to pay their respects at a memorial in Havana’s Revolution Square despite the shortage of fuel and public transportation.
Many in the crowd seemed to be merely going through the motions and when a rainstorm swept in, they abandoned the line to seek cover.
But others waiting appeared to burn with the indignation of an era in US-Cuban relations that until recently had been relegated to the history books.
I asked a well-dressed, white-haired woman named Iliana what she would do if the US were to attack Cuba as it had done in Venezuela.
“We would confront whatever comes with great force, with great determination,” she said, her voice shaking. “And whoever doesn’t have a weapon will throw a stone. We don’t know what is going to happen, but we are willing to die.”
