How Cuba is faring in its economic war with the US, and what it bodes for the future of the island’s regime
In this mix of reportage and analysis published a little earlier this year by the left-wing French publication Le Vent se Lève, journalists Vincent Ortiz and Pierre Lebret take us inside the worsening daily situation in Cuba, and the stresses it is placing both on society, and on the regime which has ruled the island since 1959.
Faced with an energy crisis prompted by the drying up of oil imports from Venezuela after the American intervention there, the government has issued an edict for the nation to “Do more with less”. “It’s what Cubans have been doing for decades”, an interviewee retorts. Inventiveness, adaptation: these have been watchwords for Cuban citizens trying to get by with what they have, what little they can purchase, or receive in direct support from the state.
In one of Havana’s working-class districts – the finca of Marianao – a retired schoolteacher reuses the water she has cooked her rice in to feed the plants. Coconuts serve multiple uses: the milk can be reused as skin cream, the husk can be mixed with a little bit of charcoal and paper (in this case, a few pages of the local Communist party newspaper) to make fire for cooking. State rations – the “libreta” – buy much less than they used to. School breakfasts have been cut. Rates of child mortality (historically one of the best in Latin America) have doubled since 2018, the article reports. A minister recently resigned after stating that Cuba had no beggars – a claim contradicted by daily evidence on the streets of Havana.
For some, the current situation recalls a version of the “special period” following the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of its subsidies to the fraternal Cuban regime. [For a different take on this, read Abrahám Jiménez Enoa’s wonderful piece ‘The Hunter’ in Issue #1 of Translator, translated by Lily Meyer]. Ortiz and Lebret suggest that even those Cubans who oppose the current regime have a soft spot for Fidel Castro’s rule in the 1990s, when the Cuban regime managed to survive the Soviet collapse that proved fatal to most of the world’s other avowedly Communist states.
The election of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela offered Cuba a lifeline, the article suggests – a lifeline that has now been cut. But there was another, trickier set of alliances that served the Cuban regime in that time. In a fascinating aside, the article looks at how the regime got around the American embargo – reinforced with the 1996 Helms-Burton Act – with the help of hyper-capitalist commodity traders (the article cites Vitol, Trafigura and Marc Rich) ready to run the risk of American ire in return for a handsome profit. For a while, instead of the USSR, Cuba’s lifeline was Vitol SA, a Switzerland-based company which bought and refined Cuban sugar in places as far away as Kyrgyzstan. A French bank operated on the island through its Channel Island affiliate.
Then things started to get trickier – not under Donald Trump, but under Barack Obama – with American authorities using the dollar by financial institutions around the world as a tool to get them to follow American rules. The article cites a French businessman whose French account was shut down for making a trivial €8.50 transfer to Cuba. Under the first Trump administration, the article explains, things tightened further, with little pushback from Europe. Under Trump II, Latin American countries have been forced to repatriate Cuban medical missions (a source of Cuban soft power and income) while tourism has become trickier.
Cuban businesses operate more freely than the Cuban state does (for example, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has confirmed it’s legal to export petrol to a private Cuban company, as long as it has no links to the state). But this, the article suggests, poses a different kind of ideological challenge. Le Vent se Lève speaks to a young Communist cadre: “America’s entrepreneurial mentality is seeping in, bit by bit”. The solidarist expressions she grew up with have become the subject of social media memes.
Marielisa, affirms her support for the regime’s “orthodoxy” and its talking points. Electricity cuts mean the streetlamps are out. On the other hand, “In which other Latin American capital could one walk home at night, in the dark, without being attacked at once?”, she asks. She fears liberalisation – but knows her position is a minority one.
The journalists attend a public meeting on the parlous state of Cuban healthcare. There’s real tension between fears of how liberalisation might change Cuban society, and the need to address growing shortages. “Things can’t go on like this”, one participant says. It’s a painful insight into a society struggling with the consequences of a burned-out economic system, amid a geopolitical environment that offers very little support.
The original article by Vincent Ortiz and Pierre Lebret, ‘La Havane, abandonnée face à l’embargo le plus dur de son histoire’ was published in French by Le Vent se Lève on March 8, 2026.
It is available here.
Le Vent se Lève is an avowedly left-wing progressive French publication operating since 2016, highly critical of what it terms the oligarchy in control of mainstream French media, in opposition to the ideological dominance of neo-liberalism, and in response to the success of the far-right in occupying the information space on social media.
