This is a postcard from an island under siege. An island that has been cut off from the world, paralysing and imperilling 10million people whose plight grows graver by the hour.
As I gaze down from the 39th floor of Cuba‘s tallest building – a ghostly new hotel with 600 rooms but a handful of guests – the usually bustling streets of Havana are eerily deserted, for there is scarcely a drop of petrol to be found here.
Electricity is in such short supply, and power cuts so frequent, that I’m unsure whether this story will even reach you. And when the Caribbean sun sets, the dangerously potholed streets will be cloaked in darkness.
Out in the bay, the only ship I have seen in six days is a Mexican naval frigate bringing emergency aid. Any other approaching vessels risk being descended upon and turned back by helicopter-borne US Marines.
Since the airport has run out of kerosene, the azure skies are empty, too.
As Donald Trump remarked with chilling insouciance this week, his stranglehold on Cuba – the clear intention of which is to bring down a Marxist regime that has survived for 67 years – is so tight that ‘there’s no oil, no money, no anything’.
The draconian embargo he enforced earlier this month, which forbids the export of fuel to Cuba on peril of crippling trade tariffs, is fast morphing from a major inconvenience into a full-blown humanitarian crisis.
As always, it is the blameless ordinary people who suffer. Since arriving here seven days ago, I’ve witnessed scenes that might even tug at the US President’s heartstrings. With scant food in the shops and rampant inflation making even staples unaffordable, parents scavenge through mounds of putrefying uncollected trash, hoping to find scraps to feed their families. Disease from vermin and mosquitoes is rife.
Writer David Jones gives some medicines, pens and chocolate to a teacher at a primary school in Havana, Cuba
A man searches through rubbish that has been left to build up on the streets of Old Havana
Tourists ride in an old American car used as a taxi in Havana, which has been brought to its knees by the US’s blockade of oil deliveries to Cuba
Young mothers barter their meagre savings for baby milk formula and children’s medicine. When I approached a couple with a four-year-old daughter and handed them a bottle of Calpol, they were overcome with gratitude.
With pharmacy shelves empty, the paracetamol tablets I smuggled in from Britain to distribute have also been cherished like gold sovereigns. Though people struggle on with shrugs and smiles, as is their habit after years of socialist austerity, Cuba has effectively ceased to function.
Offices and colleges, theatres and cinemas, the dilapidated zoo – all have closed indefinitely.
Prioritised by Fidel Castro, the education system here was once the envy of Latin America, producing a 99 per cent literacy rate.
Now only children under 12 are going to school. With their classrooms shuttered, the older ones roam the streets ferally, lobbing basketballs around or hustling the few remaining tourists, mainly rich Russians.
At the El Salvador junior school, where lunch for 350 pupils has just been cooked on one of the charcoal fires that fug the Havana air, headmaster Juan Renier says he fears prolonged closures will create a generation of delinquents who turn to drugs and crime.
Little wonder that some two million have fled in the last few years, mostly to the US. The money they send home sustains countless families here.
Among the few Habaneros prospering from the embargo are e-cycle taxi drivers and exclusive shops selling Chinese-made solar panel kits for $700 US dollars – almost six times the average Cuban worker’s annual salary.
David Jones in front of the government owned five star Iberostar Selection La Habana Hotel in Havana
Juan Renier, principal of El Salvador primary school
Friends Victor Rigoberto Morales Suarez, Olsmil and Henrique Riquelme Armentaros who witnessed the invasion at the Bay of Pigs
So grossly obscene are the inequalities in this supposedly socialist society that only the affluent few with links to the communist party rulers can afford such luxuries. While their compadres starve, they slurp $10 cocktails and eat pizza at chic new restaurants such as Bleco.
Walking the streets of Old Havana – a modern-day Pompeii of ruined Spanish colonial facades and refurbed, candy-coloured classic American limousines – was once an enchanting experience. Now the ambience is dystopian.
Picking my way through a square overlooked by a giant Che Guevara poster, I trod on something squishy – a dead rat. On Valentine’s Day evening, on the Paseo del Prado (an elegant promenade where Chanel modelled their 2016 collection) I was beckoned by a girl looking for love of the unromantic kind.
Though she claimed to be 24 ‘Claudia’ looked years younger. She had never resorted to prostitution before, she told me. But with no money and a four-year-old son to raise, she had travelled 550 miles from Santiago on the island’s southeastern tip and was seeking her first client.
‘A lot of young women are selling their bodies because of this crisis,’ she said, quoting $30 to $50. ‘I’ve been trying to find customers for a week, but I’m not like the others who can just grab a passing man by the arm. I’m shy and frightened. I hope Trump will change things so I don’t have to do this.’ Older women such as Sahara Liang Sanchez, 80, who were maltreated in the 50s under the cruel pre-Castro dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, remain loyal to the revolution. As she grew up near a police station, Sahara heard the screams of tortured Castro supporters and she was molested by Batista’s henchmen.
When he was ousted, she became a Communist Youth leader and taught people to read in the nationwide literacy programme.
Times became tough in the early 90s when the Soviet Bloc collapsed and its roubles stopped propping up the command economy, she tells me, sitting in the gathering gloom of a dank apartment where masonry from the ceiling recently fell on her. Yet things are ‘far worse’ now.
It is a view being uttered repeatedly as desperate people defy Cuba’s state censorship laws. (I’m told a performance artist was jailed for nine years simply for poking fun at the regime while draped in the Cuban flag – one of 1,207 dissidents currently imprisoned, according to rights group Prisoners Defenders.) Of course, Cuba’s Castroist president Miguel Diaz-Canel blames this catastrophe entirely on Trump.
Orlando Plasciencia Exposito also witnessed the military landing in April 1961
Nemisisa Rodriguez Montano who was present during the invasion at the Bay of Pigs
However, as tourism has fallen off a cliff since the pandemic, and the country allowed itself to become almost entirely dependent on the Venezuelan oil Trump has now cut off, the economy was a basket case even before his embargo.
Many Cubans therefore believe the government is using it as an excuse for their own corruption and ineptitude.
This is particularly true of those too young to remember the all-too brief period when Castro’s egalitarian dream did indeed improve some standards, notably in healthcare and education.
That is the section of Cuban society Trump seemingly hopes to inflame with his siege, to the point where they will rise up and stage a capitalist counter-revolution.
The greed and cynicism of Diaz-Canel and his cronies is perfectly exemplified by the building of my hotel, the Iberostar Selection La Habana, a 508 ft architectural monstrosity opened last year, which dominates the skyline.
Rumoured to have cost anything up to $500million, it enrages Habaneros not only with its ugliness but because the outlay could have bought a new hospital and repaired buildings in such a poor state that one collapsed, killing four passers-by. Along with a plethora of similarly vast and soulless new hotels, the Selection, with its two open-deck pools and spa, is owned by the regime’s commercial arm, GAESA, in partnership with a Spanish multinational.
Diaz-Canel and his army friends therefore cream off a hefty share of the profits. Or did, until tourists unable to put up with Cuba’s travails stopped coming here.
According to the US State Department, the hotel deal was so palpably designed to line the ruling elite’s pockets at the expense of ordinary folk that it has been placed on the latest list of banned Cuban businesses, which explains the absence of Americans among my few fellow guests.
David Jones gives a bottle of Calpol to the four year old daughter of Lisandro and Leandro
Sahara Liang Sanchez who can not travel to see her granddaughter
Hundreds more profit-sharing enterprises, permitted after Castro’s brother Raul opened the country to a limited, regime-enriching form of capitalism, are also blacklisted.
For the grasping commissariat, however, the biggest cash cow is the ‘white coats’ – tens of thousands of medical professionals trained to work in overseas hospitals while standards in Cuba’s own decline.
This despised export industry rakes in an estimated $8billion each year. One Havana medical student told me her mother theoretically earns $800 a month as an eye doctor in Mexico, yet receives only half that sum because the government takes the rest.
As with many young people, she desperately wants the regime to fall but she says change must come from within – not on terms laid down by Donald Trump.
Cubans who risk browsing state-monitored social media sites were further enraged, a few days ago, by an investigation into the 32 Cuban military personnel killed when US special forces abducted Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro. Miami-based journalist Mario Penton, a fierce regime critic, claims one of the men who died, Alberto Hidalgo Canals, 57, kept just $100 of the $2,000 monthly salary he was paid on secondment to Caracas.
Penton says this rip-off was revealed by Canals’ family, who reportedly say he was not a soldier, just a driver, though he was dressed in military uniform for an official photograph released in honour of the victims.
Such stories are clearly intended to ratchet up pressure on Diaz-Canel, 65, a hardliner with none of Castro’s undeniable charisma. The big question is – can he ride this crisis out?
Seeking opinions, I found a hire car with fuel (the company boss evidently had friends in high places) and headed to Alamar, Castro’s so-called ‘City of the Future’ – a vast estate of five-storey tenement blocks built to Soviet design by ‘micro-brigade’ workers, in Havana’s east.
The quiet streets of Havana during the day, with buildings looking worn and crumbling
The lights are still on in old town Havana on the weekend
The former world’s largest swimming pool in Alama, sadly now fallen into disrepair, in a suburb of Havana
My escort, whom I’ll call Ricardo, enjoyed an idyllic childhood there 30 years ago, when the playpark still had brightly painted rides and seawater was pumped into a vast outdoor swimming pool.
Some of the houses were allocated to Russian workers and the furthest edge of the estate was called Siberia.
Today, Castro’s glorious vision is a decaying emblem of communist failure. The rides are rusting, the pool empty, the streets broken and weed-strewn, the flats shambolic. With no bus service, its 100,000 residents are now trapped, often without lights, cookers or TV.
‘My generation has seen and lived through a brutal change,’ says Ricardo, who is in his 30s. ‘But it’s not the system that worries me, it’s the leaders. This is a tropical island with wonderful natural resources and no violence. Life should be good but the problem is their [the government’s] corruption. They call it socialism but it’s not real socialism – it’s lies.’
Were he and his contemporaries angry enough to do something about it? ‘Of course! I think 90 per cent of the people are mad. We are hanging by a thread,’ he said.
As of yet, the fuel crisis has sparked only a few minor public protests but Ricardo, whose work in the entertainment industry brings him into contact with many youths, believes they are only being kept in line – for now – by the fear of severe punishment.
Journeying south, along an arrow-straight highway flanked by stranded people pleading for lifts, passing rickety donkey carts and pushbikes, I reached Playa Larga.
It was here, in April 1961, that the Americans first tried to end the fledgling Marxist regime, with a coup d’etat. As older readers will remember, the so-called Bay Of Pigs invasion, in which the US sent a small army of Cuban exiles to ‘liberate’ the island, was a humiliating failure.
David Jones on the streets of Havana
The insurgents’ inflatable dinghies burst on jagged rocks, the air cover they needed to overcome Castro’s partisans never arrived and the anti-communist uprising the Americans anticipated failed to materialise. Within two days, it was all over and, among Leftists the world over, Castro’s legend was assured.
Among the handful of locals who recall those momentous events is Nemesia Rodriguez Montano, 78, whose tiny house is now a shrine to Castro. One picture shows her meeting her hero shortly before he died, in 2016. A masterful propagandist, Castro instructed a revolutionary writer to encapsulate the story of Nemesia’s flight from the Bay Of Pigs in a poem called the Elegy Of The White Shoes.
Then 14, she and her family were awakened in the dead of night by bright lights and explosions and ordered to evacuate the area in their open-backed truck.
But her mother had just bought her a pair of fashionable shoes – elegant white zapatos – and Nemesia managed to grab them and take them with her.
As they sped away, the truck was strafed with machine gun fire from a low-flying plane. Her mother was killed and her grandmother, who was badly wounded, died three years later. However, the bullet-riddled shoes were later found and put on display in a museum.
‘In 2024, president Diaz-Canel invited me to dinner and said I was a symbol [of the revolution], so I suppose I am,’ says Nemesia, who believes it important to keep memories of the disastrous invasion alive. Holding up her thumb and forefinger, she smiles: ‘Fidel always said we can’t even trust America this much.’ She clearly believes this remains true today.
But what does she think Trump intends to achieve? Probably to ‘defeat us’, she says cautiously, only this time the US was waging ‘psychological warfare’.
Orlando Exposito, who also lived through the Bay Of Pigs invasion, holds a wholly different view. He was 12 when the invaders ordered him and his two brothers to leave their smallholding.
Italian tourists Luca Gandola and his wife Valentina Cerivello walk on the beach as the US blocks shipments of oil from reaching the island nation, in Varadero, Cuba February 10, 2026
The Karl Marx theatre in Havana
They fled to the forest and sheltered in a logging bunker with other evacuees, among them a woman who clutched a statue of Cuba’s patron saint, Our Lady Of Charity. Castro’s much-vaunted social reforms did nothing for him, he says bitterly. Abandoned by his parents, he had to steal to survive. Though he later educated himself and became a teacher, he is scathing of the ‘rotten’ leaders who ran his region and dismisses their Marxist ideology as mumbo-jumbo.
Indeed, he surmises as we sit beside the shimmering bay, that had the counter-revolutionaries triumphed 65 years ago, his benighted island might now be ‘peaceful and prosperous’.
They were words that could see him jailed for the rest of his days, as he acknowledged, but he no longer cares.
Like a growing number of his compatriots, the old man by the sea yearns for liberation from self-serving pseudo-socialists who plunder the people they purport to serve. For over six decades now, US presidents have been intent on delivering democracy to Cuba. The CIA was ordered to assassinate Castro with poison pills and even an exploding cigar.
Will Trump succeed where his predecessors failed? With his ruthless siege taking an ever more burdensome toll, very soon we should find out.
