Lights Out in Havana

It’s 7:30 a.m. in Havana, Cuba, and the sun is slowly rising above the malecón, the highway that runs along the city’s northern coastline. The orange glow of the sunrise reflects off the waves beating against the seawall. I run north, then east toward the harbor’s edge. After turning around, I pass the U.S. embassy for a second time. It’s surrounded by a dark fence—a reminder of the past six decades of friction.

This scene from my visit last spring resurfaced in early January, when Cuba’s future was again called into question following the capture of Nicolás Maduro, the illegitimate President of Venezuela. Since then—and especially now—the situation has consumed the news. As I write this, the entire island is without power. Last week, residents of Morón burned furniture from the local Communist Party headquarters, and those in Santiago de Cuba have been banging pans in protest. This comes as Russian oil is en route to the island, where it is set to test the U.S. blockade, which forbids the import of fuel and is currently enforced by two U.S. Coast Guard cutters patrolling the area. 

The questions that dominated my time in Cuba have only multiplied. Is a free Cuba on the horizon? How long can the Cuban people endure? 

Looking for answers, I reached out to my former Spanish teacher and two friends, all of whom had just returned from the island. They traveled there on a study-abroad trip made possible by the “Support for the Cuban People” license, which allows Americans to visit Cuba provided they support “individuals and non-governmental agencies that promote independent activity.”

All three described an eerie quiet: “Driving around—we drove an hour and a half out into the countryside—and just looking out the window for a lot of that, you just see people sitting on porches, like nothing is actually happening,” Shaffer Broughton, a junior at Woodberry Forest School, said to the “Independent.”

Bryan Li, also a junior at Woodberry Forest, described his trip to a local market with a University of Havana student he met on the street. “The vendors are very enthusiastic about getting paid in U.S. dollars instead of [Cuban] pesos—because they want to have enough U.S. dollars to leave Cuba,” Li said. During his visit, the exchange rate on the street was 510 pesos per USD. The official rate is 24. 

U.S. dollars are valuable not only as a means for leaving, as approximately 2.75 million Cubans have left since 2020, but also for purchasing food at “MiPyMEs,” private grocery stores which are better stocked than the state-run bodegas. Last spring, on a separate run down the malecón, a couple stopped my friends and me, asking for euros or USD. The bodega didn’t carry baby formula, they said.

Now, of course, the situation is far worse. No oil has entered Cuba since January, and the country only produces 40% of the oil it needs. Rolling blackouts have made it impossible for citizens to keep food cold, caused schools to close, and forced surgeries to be cancelled. Tourist infrastructure, however, is shielded from the worst of it. “We were sheltered in one of the few hotels where they accommodate all of the tourists, so our lights were on the entire time,” said Drew Collier, one of the two teachers who led the trip Broughton and Li were on.

The regime has traditionally diverted its limited resources to hotels because tourism was seen as an economic lifeline. But after COVID, visitors have not returned to the levels that party leadership expected. With the blockade and tensions between the American and Cuban governments, hotels have only further emptied.

This decline explains some Cubans’ frustration. “[The University of Havana student] did say that a few years ago Cuba was a nice place, but right after COVID, it began to decline because of the embargo,” Li said. 

Many citizens outside the hospitality industry would question this view. With Cuba’s finite resources, well-lit hotels filled with well-fed guests have always meant that someone nearby went without. This inequality predates the revolution—government officials in Havana used to take bribes from American tourists while rural Cubans suffered the effects of the declining price of sugar. 

In Collier’s view, the Cuban people are fed up. “The atmosphere is noticeably different—at least to me—from years past,” he said. “People seemed frustrated, exhausted, and almost at a breaking point. They are still Cubans, famously upbeat, happy, and positive, but there seemed to be a heavier weight than usual on their shoulders.”

He even noticed “abajo la dictadura,” or “down with the dictatorship,” graffiti on a building in Havana. These kinds of anti-regime messages are traditionally rare because the government has the authority to make arrests on the vague charge of “dangerousness.”

I felt the anger Collier described last spring. One of my last evenings in Cuba, a friend and I were walking back to the hotel when a man struck up a conversation, asking for a few dollars. We gave him what we had, but the conversation continued as he pointed to the crumbling soccer stadium nearby and compared it to the paved embassy row and the towering Selection La Habana—a brand-new skyscraper hotel. 

Whether Cuba is on the cusp of meaningful change remains to be seen, but as long as everything from freedom of expression to electricity is reserved for an elite few, Cubans’ anger can only continue to grow, leaving the island in the darkness that afflicts its people today.

Morgan Jay ’29 (mjay@college.harvard.edu) left Havana with more questions than he had when he arrived.