Cuba's Collapse: A Return to an Island Lost to Despair

Seven years had passed since the writer last set foot in Cuba. When he returned in July 2025, the island he found bore almost no resemblance to the one he had left in April 2018. Back then, in the years following the Obama-Castro thaw of 2014, Havana had felt alive with possibility. Luxury shops opened in Central Park. Chanel held its annual show at the Prado. The Rolling Stones played a concert for 300,000 people at the Sports City, and Mick Jagger shouted from the stage that the times were changing. Cubans who had built lives abroad returned to start again. Obama visited and crowds lined the streets to watch his motorcade pass. Even the most cynical allowed themselves to imagine a future without return.

That moment did not last. The opening closed almost as quickly as it had begun. Florida's Trump movement reasserted itself. The pandemic arrived. The government's economic mismanagement deepened. A new law effectively banned private ownership of any media. Food shortages became so severe that the government began requesting powdered milk from the United Nations World Food Programme. The electrical system collapsed under the weight of fuel shortages and neglected infrastructure, leaving neighborhoods dark at the same hour each day. By 2022 and 2023, according to economist Juan Carlos Albizu-Campos, Cuba's population had contracted by 18 percent—from just over 11 million to approximately 8.5 million people. The island was emptying.

Walking through Old Havana in July 2025 meant encountering a ghost of what had been. On Obispo Street, where tourists once crowded a decade earlier, only a handful of visitors moved between shuttered storefronts. The Plaza de Armas no longer sold books or antiques. The restaurants that had given life to the Cathedral Plaza had vanished. Outside the Bodeguita del Medio, two women in costume smoked wooden cigars for photographs that rarely came. An elderly woman in a wheelchair asked for money to eat. Nearly everyone the writer encountered was begging—some offering discontinued currency bearing the faces of revolutionary heroes in exchange for any help. The streets held more elderly than young. The few young women visible were often being courted by foreigners willing to rescue them from the island.

The physical decay was everywhere. According to official data, 35 percent of the country's housing stock was in poor condition. In the weeks before the writer's visit, one building had collapsed in Santos Suárez, five more in Guajay, another in Compostela, and a balcony on Muralla Street. Garbage accumulated for weeks without collection. Parks had become dumping grounds. In Centro Habana, between the pillars of buildings, people sold worn shoes, faded shirts, rusty wire, and sweet pastries—a commerce of scraps.

Yet beneath this decay, a new class was consolidating. Private small and medium businesses had replaced much of what the state once provided. New restaurants served international cuisine at international prices, frequented now by the owners of these private enterprises and their families. Massive new hotels—one with 42 stories on Calle 23, managed by Iberostar; another, the Gran Muthu Habana, near Fifth Avenue—stood largely empty, their purpose unclear. The economy had become heavily dollarized. On the black market, dollars traded at nearly triple their official rate. Simultaneously, a new synthetic drug called El Químico had begun spreading through neighborhoods. A single dose, printed on a piece of paper and costing less than a dollar, contained carbamazepine, benzodiazepines, animal anesthetic, formaldehyde, fentanyl, and phenobarbital. Users described it as a surge of energy that filled the body with cramps, a moment where only the heartbeat could be felt and the ears seemed to close.

No one believed in the Revolution anymore. Díaz-Canel's government inspired neither affection nor respect. When people spoke of him, they whispered—some said he carried bad luck, that a tornado had struck Havana when he took office, that the Saratoga Hotel had exploded, that the Matanzas oil storage tanks had burned. The Trump administration, meanwhile, continued tightening restrictions. During the writer's stay, it banned Airbnb. Before that, it had suspended licenses for remittance transfers, ended humanitarian parole, halted family reunification processes, restricted university access to artificial intelligence, and threatened to prosecute investors in the national biopharmaceutical industry. The blockade deepened. Money now traveled in suitcases instead of through official channels.

In the Vedado neighborhood where the writer had once stayed, the market on F Street stood nearly empty, its counters holding a few scattered garlic cloves, peppers, onions, yucca, and beets spaced far apart. In a back corner, a young woman sold ice cream—strawberry, chocolate, caramel, guanabana—worthy of the finest Italian gelateria, served in plastic cups. The best jazz on the continent could still be found if one searched through the noise of the neighborhood. But the Presidente Hotel's terrace sat vacant. A decade earlier, people had gathered on the sidewalk of Calle 2 to catch the hotel's wifi signal and call relatives abroad. Now most paid for phone plans that made such gatherings unnecessary.

The island's inhabitants could not imagine what came next in this story, or how much worse things could become. Where once the vision of a new humanity had taken root, despair now spread. The people of flesh and blood—no longer abstractions in political debates—were left with nothing but the knowledge that they were trapped on an island that no longer believed in itself.