By all accounts, Cuba is enduring the worst economic moment in the 67-year history of its communist revolution.
While the island nation has endured periodic episodes of mass migration, food shortages and social unrest in decades past, never before have Cubans experienced such a wholesale collapse of the social safety net that the country’s leaders — starting with Fidel Castro — once prided themselves on.
“I, who was born there, I, who lives there, and I’ll tell you: It’s never been as bad as it is now, because many factors have come together,” said Omar Everleny Pérez, 64, an economist in Havana.
As Trump administration officials congratulate themselves on a triumphant military victory in Venezuela, in which President Nicolás Maduro was seized and the United States claimed control over the South American country, eyes have now turned to Cuba, which enjoyed a warm relationship with the jailed president and which depended on the oil he sent.
Of Cuba, “It’s going down for the count,” Mr. Trump said Sunday, dismissing the need for military action there, because he said the government was likely to collapse on its own.
Odalis Reyes can see evidence of Cuba’s decay with her own two eyes.
From the window in her cramped sitting room, Ms. Reyes, a seamstress in Old Havana, looks out at a relic of the country’s obsolete past, the rusting hulk of an electric power station that once provided electricity to her poor neighborhood on the edge of the popular tourist district of Cuba’s capital.
Now it serves as a reminder of the constant blackouts.
“Yes, many hours without electricity, many, many — 14, 15 hours,” Ms. Reyes, 56, said. “Oh, that terrifies you, it terrifies you, because food — which this is the hardest thing — you’re afraid it will spoil.”
“We don’t even know how we’re going to get by anymore,” she added. “We’re like human robots, humanoids.”