Patria o muerte?

After sunset the city plunges into darkness. I switch on the light of my phone to avoid stepping in the garbage or falling into a pothole. It’s an hour walk from Habana Vieja to my flat in Vedado. The gasoline skyrocketed to 9 dollars a liter and the streets are empty. If I am lucky I can find a ride on a broken 1957 Plymouth almendrón or a pedal tricycle. I tried to rent an electric scooter but there is no power to recharge. And during this week apagon (power outage) I also had no water in the house.

It looks like the end of the road for the Revolucion cubana. Surely it’s the end of illusions.

In the popular barrios families scramble to cook what they can and store what little remains. Prices go up by the day. And pesos, the local currency, is worth nothing. A crate of eggs costs 3.000, six dollars, the average monthly pension. One of my friends, a doctor, earns 4.600 pesos, roughly 8 dollars: he quit his underpaid job and left for his aunt’s hamlet in the countryside. But even there he barely survives. Agriculture is in ruins. There is no money to buy fertilizers. Campesinos can’t rise pigs or even chickens because they cannot feed them. Trucks lack the fuel to collect milk.

Old folks who supported Fidel are losing hopes. It’s much worse now than during the “periodo especial”, they say, when the fall of the Soviet Union brought the economy to the brink of collapse: “Life was very hard at that time” recalls Pedro, who lives in a rundown building in calle San Lazaro. “But with the libreta (rationing card) you could make it. Not now: I only received some sugar and rice two months ago. It lasted less than a week”.

For the first time I saw children begging in the streets of Habana, people rummaging through piles of trash in search of food scraps and cans to recycle, men washing themselves in foul-smelling puddles. Hospitals don’t have enough medicines to treat their patients, whose relatives must buy tablets and pills on the black market at exorbitant prices. Many schools don’t have enough staff to teach their students. And a new cheap and lethal drug, el químico or papelito (a chemical cocktail that contains fentanyl), has been spreading for several months now in the city’s poor neighborhoods and in Centro Habana.

There isn’t a single young person I’ve spoken to who doesn’t want to flee the island. “If I had the money” Eva says “I’d leave right away. I don’t want my children to grow up in this hellhole. There’s no future in Cuba”.

Long gone are the Obama years of the booming tourism, which provided some relief, generating employment and foreign currency. Most hotels are now closed, restaurants and bars are empty, many airlines have canceled flights and cruise ships no longer dock at the port. I only met a few small groups of Italians, Poles and Japanese wander aimlessly through the narrow streets of the old town and take selfies in front of the baroque cathedral and the colonial buildings or sadly follow in Hemingway’s footsteps between the Floridita and the Bodeguita del Medio. The sounds of rumba and son echo through the nearly deserted streets, steeped in nostalgia and neglect. Even the jineteras who work along the Malecón have been left without customers.

The country’s economic failure has eroded the social achievements in health and education that for decades were pillars of legitimacy for Cuba. The government has always blamed the sanctions and the embargo imposed by the United States and has never acknowledged its own responsibility: the rigidity of the political system, the lack of reforms, the suppression of dissent, failures in economic management, and growing and alarming social inequalities.

Donald Trump has beheaded Venezuela, depriving the regime of its main ally and oil supplier, and is threatening to resolve the Cuban issue once and for all by strangling the island, even at the risk of a humanitarian crisis, which is now looming. Everyone is asking for a cambio, a change. No one knows if or when it will happen. Negotiations are currently underway between the U.S. government and el cangrejo (the crab), Raúl Castro’s nephew. But Cubans no longer believe in promises, slogans and propaganda. They are tired of waiting. El sueño se ha acabado, the dream is over.