On the last night of 1959, Fidel Castro put on a tuxedo and worked the room at the Havana Hilton. He was a year into the revolution and had just named himself head of the country's national tourism institute, and that evening he played host to American travel agents and editors, promising medicinal springs, open beaches, and a country where, in his telling, liberty and equality now reigned. A visiting American publicist was so taken he pronounced Cuba the finest democracy he'd ever seen. Ten months later, in October 1960, Castro nationalized every U.S.-owned hotel on the island, including the one he had charmed them in.
As this magazine has noted, Castro was the world's first true media revolutionary — a man who grasped image long before he grasped economics. His instinct for the camera showed early: as a law student in 1949, he turned a drunken U.S. Marine's desecration of the José Martí statue into a press event and his own debut as Cuba's loudest anti-American voice. The revolution he built was, from that first night at the Hilton onward, at least as much a performance as a program. That is worth remembering now, because the performance is finally over, and what's left on the stage is a country that cannot keep its lights on.
For most of the island, the day now ends when the power does. Across more than half of Cuba, the lights go out for twenty to twenty-five hours at a stretch. Emergency rooms run on generators that may or may not have fuel. Water stops flowing, because the pumps need electricity the country can no longer produce. The numbers behind the darkness leave no room for spin: the IMF expects Cuba's economy to shrink about 7.2 percent this year, part of a roughly 23 percent collapse since 2019. Income per person sits near $1,082 — the lowest in all of Latin America and the Caribbean. Tourism, the very industry Castro toasted at the Hilton, has cratered from 4.7 million visitors in 2018 to 1.9 million in 2025; this past February, by one count, just 249 Russians and 511 Canadians visited the entire country.
The bills for all this were always paid by someone else — first the Soviet Union, then Venezuela's oil. When the Soviet money vanished in the 1990s, Cubans called the hunger that followed the "Special Period" and waited it out. There is no waiting this one out. With Nicolás Maduro in American custody and Venezuela's oil now effectively under Washington's control, the subsidy is gone for good, and so is the argument it propped up.
Havana knows this, even if it won't say the words. This past March, the government announced that Cubans living abroad — the very exiles its founding story cast as traitors — would be allowed to own and invest in businesses on the island, and President Miguel Díaz-Canel has been quietly courting U.S. firms. The wheel has come full circle. Once again a Cuban government is inviting back the capital it once seized; only the tuxedo is missing. The slogans still run, but they have become a costume worn over a country trying to do the opposite of what 1959 did.
And the terms on offer have rarely been so blunt. Since January, the Trump administration has piled on more than 240 sanctions and choked off the oil tankers bound for the island, pressuring even Mexico to stop its shipments. The Pentagon, by multiple accounts, is updating contingency plans. The president has been explicit about where he thinks this ends: "Cuba is finished," he said in March. "It will fail very soon and we'll be there to help." On his own platform he was blunter still — "I strongly suggest they make a deal, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE." Cuba's foreign minister, Bruno Rodríguez, answers that the country's political system is "not on the table" and warns of humanitarian catastrophe. He is right about the catastrophe. He is wrong about the table — because the table is the only thing left standing.
It's worth being honest about what conceding actually means. Under the law that governs the embargo, relief is tied to concrete things: a real political opening, a turn toward markets, compensation for property taken after 1959, and an end to the partnerships with Russia, China, and Iran that Washington objects to. None of that is comfortable. All of it is survivable. What is not survivable is the present course — an oil-starved island staring down a U.S. government openly war-gaming its collapse.
For decades, endurance was sold as dignity: better to suffer upright than bend to the empire. But there is nothing dignified about a dark hospital or a mother boiling water she cannot trust. Real sovereignty for a Cuban in 2026 is not a flag flying over a blacked-out city. It is power that stays on, shelves with food on them, and a twenty-five-year-old who sees a future at home instead of on a raft.
The case against folding is not stupid, and deserves a hearing. Surrendering to pressure sets a bitter precedent. Washington has broken its word before — the cautious thaw of 2015 to 2017 was reversed inside a single presidency. A chaotic transition could fall hardest on the same ordinary Cubans the embargo already punishes, and there's no guarantee relief actually arrives if Havana yields. These are genuine risks. But they are risks weighed against a certainty: the status quo is killing the country slowly, and may soon kill it quickly.
The man in the tuxedo understood that a show must always look like it's winning, even when it isn't. His successors have kept that show running for sixty-seven years. The audience has left, the theater is dark, and the props are being quietly sold off to foreign investors. The revolutionary impulse had its century. The reasonable course now is not the heroic one. It is to drop the act, take the deal, turn the lights back on, and let Cubans get on with their lives.
Simons Chase writes for Cuba Journal on Dispatches.
