As I write this, it’s Christmas Eve. While many of us are moving through a season of comfort and predictability, I keep returning to what I saw walking through the streets of Cuba. Not in headlines or statistics, but at street level. Neighbourhoods without running water. Electricity that fails often enough to be expected. Roads and sidewalks eroded into improvisation rather than repair. Infrastructure that no longer supports daily life, but merely endures alongside it.
What struck me most were the small, improvised economies operating inside people’s homes. Corner shops carved out of living rooms and front windows. Shelves mostly empty. A few scattered items; soap, canned goods, a bottle or two; offered more as possibility than supply. These were not businesses in the conventional sense, but acts of persistence. People selling what little they could source, not to grow, but to survive.
In contrast, government stores stood rigid and bare. Long lines formed early, people waiting patiently for whatever might arrive. No certainty, no choice; just endurance. Elderly men and women stood apart, looking through windows rather than lining up, watching quietly, as if calculating whether the effort was worth the return. There was no anger in their posture. Just fatigue. A lifetime lived long enough to recognize scarcity as permanent rather than temporary.
And yet, the streets were not chaotic. Homes were occupied. Communities functioned. People greeted one another. Children played. There was dignity in how life continued despite the absence of systems meant to sustain it. Pride, not in conditions, but in endurance. A refusal to surrender daily routines, even when the state no longer reliably provides the basics those routines depend on.
That contrast stayed with me. Material failure on one side; social cohesion on the other. Institutions visibly broken, yet communities holding themselves together through habit, restraint, and mutual recognition. As we sit surrounded by abundance and choice, Cuba offers a sobering reminder; collapse does not always look like disorder. Sometimes it looks like people quietly adapting, carrying on, and preserving dignity in circumstances that leave very little room for it.
Cuba’s Economic Landscape
The Cuban economy rests on three pillars, each one cracked. State control dictates production and distribution, yet delivers neither predictably. Tourism brings foreign currency when it comes; when it doesn’t, entire sectors go dormant. Remittances from family abroad keep individual households afloat but cannot repair what the state has allowed to deteriorate.
I watched this play out in Holguín. Hotels near the beaches sat half-empty, their lobbies staffed but waiting. Tour buses passed through neighborhoods where residents had no meaningful contact with the tourist economy happening beside them. The money flows in narrow channels, reaching some while bypassing most, and when global disruptions close those channels entirely, there is no backup system.
The pandemic proved this. When travel stopped, so did the pretense of economic diversification. Jobs vanished. Services contracted. The state stepped in where it could, but its capacity had already been stretched thin by decades of deferred maintenance and misallocated resources. Families with relatives in Miami or Madrid survived on wire transfers; families without them made do with less.
The government has acknowledged the brittleness, at least partially. Small private businesses now operate legally in food service and retail; spaces that would have been unthinkable a generation ago. Joint ventures with foreign companies receive official encouragement. On paper, these reforms signal openness. On the ground, they operate within boundaries so narrow that growth remains theoretical rather than realized.
Because the fundamental problem persists: there is not enough of anything. Goods arrive sporadically. Industrial output continues its decline. Foreign investors calculate risk and conclude the obstacles outweigh the opportunities. The reforms address symptoms while leaving the underlying structure untouched. And so the economy continues; not collapsing outright, but not functioning either. Just persisting, month after month, in a state somewhere between stagnation and managed decline.
Understanding the Political Context
The Communist Party has governed Cuba for sixty-five years without interruption and without competition. Power remains concentrated, decisions opaque, and dissent constrained. The system that consolidated after the revolution has calcified into something else entirely; not dynamic ideology but institutional inertia. Whatever openings toward private enterprise exist operate at the state’s discretion, subject to reversal, always conditional.
I noticed what wasn’t said more than what was. Conversations about daily hardships; power outages, food shortages, crumbling infrastructure; flowed easily. But discussions about governance stopped short. Not from fear, exactly, but from a kind of practiced caution. People knew the boundaries. They had learned them over lifetimes. What they talked about openly was leaving. Not as abstract possibility but as active planning. Young professionals weighing visa pathways. Skilled tradespeople calculating how to transfer credentials abroad. Families debating whether to send one member ahead to establish residency elsewhere. The exodus is not dramatic; no mass movements, no flotillas. Just steady, quiet departure. Doctors, engineers, teachers; the very people Cuba invested in training; concluding that their futures lie elsewhere.
The state knows this. It cannot stop people from calculating risk and choosing exit over endurance. What remains is a country increasingly defined by who has left rather than who stays. Hospitals short-staffed. Classrooms overcrowded. Industries unable to retain expertise. Each departure weakens capacity further, which prompts more departures, in a cycle the government acknowledges but cannot reverse.
Frustration occasionally breaks into visibility. Protests in 2021 spread across cities, fueled by power failures and empty shelves. The state responded with arrests and restrictions. The protests subsided, but the underlying discontent did not. It simply returned to its usual state; present but suppressed, waiting not for permission but for another breaking point. And the government, having spent decades demanding loyalty while delivering scarcity, now faces a population that has stopped expecting solutions and started planning departures instead.
Fintech and Digital Economy
You see mobile payment apps in Cuba now. Not everywhere, but enough to notice. Young people in cities transferring small amounts through their phones. Digital wallets holding convertible pesos. Some blockchain enthusiasts running projects that exist more as concept than scale. The technology has arrived, years late, operating in a country where the infrastructure to support it barely functions.
Internet access costs money most people don’t have to spare. When you can connect, the service drops randomly. Loading a simple payment screen takes patience. What runs seamlessly in Bogota or Mexico City stutters and fails in Cuban cities where networks weren’t built for this kind of traffic. The apps exist, but the foundation beneath them doesn’t.
The government permits these innovations while keeping them on a short leash. Every financial service requires authorization. Foreign partnerships move through bureaucratic channels designed more for control than facilitation. Regulations prioritize oversight over expansion. So fintech develops, but slowly, in careful increments, never quite reaching the momentum needed to change how most people handle money.
Across Latin America, fintech rewrote the rules. Millions of people gained access to banking, credit, and business tools they’d never had before. Governments cleared regulatory pathways. Private capital poured in. Mobile phones became financial instruments. Cuba missed that wave entirely. Not because the technology doesn’t exist on the island, but because everything surrounding it; connectivity, capital, regulatory flexibility; remains absent. The tools are there. The system to make them work is not.
Infrastructure Challenges
The power goes out regularly enough that people no longer react with surprise. Refrigerators sit idle for hours. Fans stop in the middle of humid afternoons. Streetlights fail, leaving neighborhoods dark. The energy grid runs on equipment installed decades ago, maintained sporadically, never properly replaced. Renewable sources remain mostly theoretical; discussed in planning documents but absent from actual generation capacity.
Roads tell the same story of deferred maintenance compounded into failure. Potholes go unfilled. Pavement cracks widen into gaps. Public buses break down frequently, their parts scavenged from other broken buses. Port facilities operate with cranes and loading equipment that should have been retired years ago. Every stage of moving goods; from factory to warehouse to dock; involves workarounds for infrastructure that no longer functions as designed.
I saw factories still running machinery from the 1970s. Storage facilities with rusted roofs and cracked foundations. Utilities held together by improvisation rather than investment. Production doesn’t stop entirely, but it slows. Bottlenecks form at predictable points. Distribution becomes irregular. The economy cannot diversify when the physical systems supporting industry barely sustain current operations, let alone expansion.
The government announces modernization plans periodically. Energy projects. Urban development initiatives. On paper, they address the problems. In practice, funding never materializes at the scale required. Bureaucratic processes delay what little money does arrive. International sanctions complicate procurement of equipment and technology. Projects launch, stall, resume partially, then fade into the background as attention shifts elsewhere.
What remains is infrastructure in slow-motion failure. Not catastrophic collapse, but steady erosion. Systems designed for a different era, maintained inadequately, asked to support an economy they can no longer sustain. And every year the gap between what exists and what’s needed grows wider, while the resources to close it grow scarcer.
Human Impact
The crisis shows itself differently depending on where you stand. Retirees living on fixed pensions watch prices climb beyond what their monthly income can cover. Public-sector workers, paid in Cuban pesos, find their wages worthless against inflation that moves faster than any salary adjustment. Families pool remittances from relatives abroad just to afford basics. The math stops working. Walk through residential streets and the smell hits you first. Garbage decomposing in tropical heat, uncollected for weeks. Organic waste mixing with plastic, the stench settling into neighborhoods where municipal services have given up. Dead trees stand skeletal, never removed. Polluted water moves through concrete channels, carrying sewage and debris past homes where people have learned to live beside contamination they cannot escape.
Revolutionary monuments sit abandoned, concrete cracking, weeds pushing through seating where crowds once gathered. Community buildings stand gutted; brick walls exposed, windows empty, vegetation creeping through doorways. These represented collective investment. Now they decay while the state lacks resources to intervene.
Hospitals run short on medicine. Schools operate with outdated materials and overcrowded classrooms. Doctors and teachers, trained at state expense, leave for opportunities elsewhere. Each departure weakens what remains.
Younger Cubans face limited opportunities, restricted travel, a political system offering no meaningful participation. The choice becomes endurance or exit. Increasing numbers choose exit.
People adapt where they can. Home-based shops. Informal trade networks. Mobile payment apps for those with connectivity. Survival mechanisms, not solutions. And as conditions tighten, even these improvisations struggle to compensate for what the state no longer provides.
Future Outlook
The immediate future looks like more of the present. Inflation will continue. Food shortages will persist. Public services will decline further. Political rigidity prevents the kind of reforms that might reverse these trends, and nothing suggests that rigidity is softening. Emigration accelerates. Social discontent deepens. Investors stay away.
China has invested massively across parts of Africa and South America, building infrastructure, financing development projects, extending its economic reach into regions Western capital abandoned or ignored. Cuba, ninety miles from the United States with educated labor and strategic location, should theoretically attract similar interest. Yet it doesn’t. The combination of American sanctions, bureaucratic obstacles, political unpredictability, and state control over every partnership makes Cuba a calculation where risk vastly outweighs return. Even partners willing to navigate complexity eventually conclude the barriers aren’t worth it.
Recovery would require the government to do what it has shown no willingness to do: implement structural reforms that genuinely open the economy. Expand private enterprise beyond token gestures. Allow foreign investment without suffocating control. Enable technology adoption with actual infrastructure to support it. These pathways exist in theory. In practice, the state maintains its grip while conditions deteriorate.
Infrastructure modernization alone would demand resources Cuba doesn’t have and can’t attract. Energy systems need complete overhaul. Transport networks require rebuilding from foundation up. Industrial facilities need replacement, not repair. Even if funding materialized, bureaucratic inertia and policy inconsistency would slow any progress to ineffectiveness.
What’s likely is more of what already exists: adaptation without improvement, endurance without resolution, systems persisting in failure rather than collapsing outright. The gap between what Cuba needs and what its government will permit continues widening. Social patience, already tested beyond what seemed sustainable, will face further strain. At some point, quiet adaptation stops being enough. Whether that point comes soon or later depends less on policy than on how much more people are willing to endure.
Conclusion
Cuba’s crisis is no longer theoretical. Inflation, currency distortion, shortages, and collapsing productivity have moved beyond macroeconomic indicators and settled into everyday life. The political system remains centralized and resistant to meaningful reform, while emigration accelerates as more Cubans quietly conclude that endurance has limits. What remains is a country sustained less by functioning institutions than by habit, resilience, and social restraint.
An economy built on state control, tourism, and remittances has proven fragile in the face of shocks. The pandemic and domestic policy failures exposed structural weaknesses, but they did not operate in isolation. The American embargo continues to function as a blunt and punitive constraint, limiting access to capital, trade, and financing, and raising transaction costs across every sector. Its effects are not abstract; they surface in shortages, underinvestment, and the slow degradation of essential systems. While the embargo does not explain all of Cuba’s failures, its rigidity amplifies each one.
Incremental openings toward private enterprise and foreign investment reflect an awareness of the problem, yet reform remains cautious and uneven. Inflation persists. Supply chains remain brittle. Scarcity continues to organize daily life. Technological initiatives, including mobile payments and digital wallets, suggest a path toward modernization, but limited connectivity and tight regulatory control restrict their reach and impact.
Infrastructure mirrors this paralysis. Energy systems fail routinely. Transport and industrial capacity continue to erode. Investment, when it arrives, is insufficient to reverse years of neglect. What holds the country together is not policy coherence, but the resolve of its people; communities functioning in spite of the systems meant to support them.
That resilience, however, is finite. Pride and endurance can absorb only so much institutional failure. Without structural reform, credible investment, political flexibility, and a reassessment of external pressures, adaptation hardens into stagnation. And as daily life becomes more constrained, the quiet patience visible on Cuba’s streets risks giving way to deeper and more destabilizing social strain.
Marc-Roger Gagne MAPP
@ottlegalrebels