Inside Cuba’s collapse: Hunger, blackouts and growing unrest

On May 29, 2026

Updated May 29, 2026, 11:13 a.m. ET

Yunia Figueredo, an independent journalist in Havana, sent me a voice message recently from her daughter’s phone because her own had no data connection.

Earlier that morning, she had tried to boil eggs for her youngest daughter’s breakfast during one of Cuba’s brief bursts of electricity.

“The electricity came on for one minute, then three minutes later they cut it,” Figueredo said. “The egg is still there in the pot.”

Her daughter has health conditions that prevent her from eating staples like rice or beans. With charcoal nearly impossible to find, almost everything in her kitchen depends on electricity that may last only minutes at a time.

“This is not life,” Figueredo said. “We are dying here.”

Cuba is in the grip of its worst crisis in decades. Blackouts last most of the day. Pharmacies are empty. A liter of gasoline now costs more than a Cuban worker’s monthly salary.

Over the past several days, I contacted Cubans by WhatsApp and Signal – journalists, activists and ordinary citizens across the island – and asked them three questions about daily life, the national mood and what they think about the United States and its role in Cuba’s crisis.

Across Cuba, daily life has become an exhausting, round-the-clock struggle to secure the basics. Food exists, but at prices most Cubans cannot afford. A carton of eggs costs 3,800 pesos. The minimum wage for public workers is 2,500 pesos per month (roughly $4.50).

“I don’t know how Cuban workers eat,” Niober Garcia Fournier, a freelance journalist who lives in Guantánamo, told me.

“It is sad that an island has no fish,” said Emilio Almageur, a journalist in Guantanamo Province.

“Cooking has become a battle against time,” said Mabel Páez Díaz, an independent journalist in Havana. “When the power comes on at two in the morning, that’s when you have to take advantage and cook.” She told me that cancer patients now buy chemotherapy serums on the black market when they can find them at all.

In central Cuba, independent journalist Alberto Hernandez said he often begins the day with only a small cup of coffee. “There is nothing else,” he said. “It’s not comparable to the life we were living just a few months ago.”

A different kind of suffering: ‘Human values … have been lost’

The shortages are not merely physical.

“When you have electricity, you half-live,” Garcia Fournier told me. “When it goes out, it’s like you’re floating in space – consuming the minimum to stay alive, but not really living.”

In Havana, Páez Díaz described lying awake in the heat and mosquitoes, waiting for dawn because sleep no longer comes easily during the blackouts.

“Your body and mind don’t rest,” she said.

Hernandez said the hunger and instability are beginning to have deeper effects.

“Human values and joy have been lost,” he told me. “You notice more violence and arguments in the streets. People confront each other over a little food.”

Many Cubans described a similar emotional exhaustion – the feeling of living in a permanent state of survival where almost all mental energy is consumed by finding food, medicine, fuel or electricity.

Multiple Cubans in different parts of the country told me that people now criticize the government openly in ways that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.

“People are beginning to speak up – not to confront the government directly, but they’re talking,” Garcia Fournier said. “Before, everyone was silent. Today, everyone speaks against the government and they’re not easily fooled anymore. But when a police officer walks by, they go quiet. They’re not yet willing to pay the price.”

In Sancti Spíritus, Pedro Luis Hernández saw it differently. “Today, in any public space, you find people openly speaking out against the regime,” he said.

“Many who were loyal to the revolution feel abandoned, betrayed and forgotten,” Almageur told me. “Everyone speaks openly and shows their discontent. Even those who gave their whole lives to this system.”

Since mass protests in July 2021 – the largest Cuba had seen in decades, with thousands taking to the streets demanding food, electricity and freedom – demonstrations have continued across the island, often met with arrests and repression.

Cuba’s leadership blames the embargo. Cubans blame the system.

For years, the communist regime’s standard response has been to blame the United States. The American embargo, officials insist, is responsible for every shortage, every blackout, every empty pharmacy shelf.

Páez Díaz argued that most Cubans no longer accept that explanation. “We have all seen that ambulances are missing while police cars and motorcycles are plentiful,” she said. “Every cent this government generated ended up in their pockets.”

Almageur was more direct. “The chicken we are eating comes from the U.S., as does the rice and milk,” he said. “The main cause of the misery we live today is not the embargo – it is bad administration, corruption, the regime’s pressure on the people, low salaries, inflation and the lack of freedom that oppresses Cubans.”

My interviewees are not a random sample of Cubans – they are mostly opposition activists and independent journalists. But their descriptions of daily life were strikingly consistent across different parts of the island.

Several told me that most Cubans now support U.S. intervention. Pedro Luis Hernández estimated that 80% of Cubans support the U.S. pressure campaign against the regime: “We truly believe that our salvation depends very, very greatly on the United States government.”

Not everyone agreed. “Some see Trump as the only one who can do something for Cubans,” said Alberto Hernandez. “Others see him as a demon who ended the hopes of those who wanted to reach the United States.”

In Figueredo’s Havana neighborhood, people regularly approach her and her husband – both known as human rights journalists – with a single question: “When is it happening?”

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