Despite Trump’s Oil Blockade, the Quiet Resistance of Daily Life Continues in Cuba

For a Caribbean city known for its effervescent, out-of-doors culture, Havana has relatively few cars on its streets, not many people on its sidewalks, and a handful of places open for patrons. Life at midweek feels like a Sunday or a holiday. The background noise of competing internal-combustion engines, common to every modern city, has been replaced by the discrete whir of electric vehicles. The neoclassical buildings, with their arcades and front colonnades, stand out sharply in this uncanny calm, as if the city had time-warped back to the age of their construction. The reason for all of this is obvious: The U.S. oil blockade has made gasoline scarce, and without it, cars, generators, refrigerators, water pumps, incubators, and dialysis machines cannot operate. The point is to drive not only the economy but also everyone’s lives to a literal standstill.

But beyond this panoramic first impression, as one looks more closely, it becomes clear that life goes on. By day, the markets remain open and there is food in the stalls. By night, young people emerge from buildings darkened by blackouts and gather to play pickup soccer under whatever streetlight remains in operation. School hours and social events are rescheduled to make the maximum use of daylight hours. At a journalists’ conference, panel members simply wait out the power outages until the microphones work again; at the nightclubs in Old Havana, people take a break from dancing until the music returns. At a barrio party in the working-class neighborhood of El Fanguito, music blares from a Buena Vista-style band while organizers hand out cups of meat stew.

At home, many people leave something on when they go to bed — a light, a fan, or anything that makes noise — so they are woken up if the power returns in the middle of the night, allowing them to take care of tasks that require electricity . Rechargeable fans and light bulbs have become essentials. People who have withstood 64 years of economic blockade, including the so-called special period following the fall of the U.S.S.R. and a series of screw-tightening measures from that time onward, are not simply going to raise a white flag at the latest sign of adversity.

Indeed, it is in the insistence on maintaining the routines of daily life that a quiet resistance lies. “I’m out here just like I am every weekend,” said Juan, an electrical engineer out for a Sunday stroll on the seaside promenade known as the Malecón. Juan bristled at the media coverage that attempts to portray his compatriots as desperate, starving, at their wits’ end. “A foreign media crew shot some footage of a man who was recycling aluminum cans out of the garbage and tried to make it out like he was eating from it,” he grumbled. “That is how they twist things to make it look like we’re about to collapse.”

Still, no one denies the real hardship caused by the oil blockade — especially coming so soon on the heels of the COVID-19 pandemic. Educators said at least then there was electricity for online classes; now, there is neither gasoline to travel to in-person classes nor electricity to power their virtual alternatives. To get anywhere requires walking, walking, and more walking. Unable to travel between provinces, families spend months or more without seeing each other. As for the island’s lauded health care system, which has routinely level-pegged U.S. life expectancy at a fraction of the cost, it has been forced to triage all but the most essential functions. Some 96,000 patients are on a waitlist for operations; 11,000 of them are children.

“[Donald Trump] thinks he’s God (Dios),” said high-school teacher María Caridad Morales, before launching into a response that assumed the rhythms of spoken-word poetry. “Dios Maradona, Dios the workers, Dios the women, Dios the mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, Dios the president of Mexico, Dios Mother Teresa … that man, never, because he doesn’t want peace, because he’s harassing the Arab world, because he wants to eliminate dignity and everything people need to live.”

Back to the Bay of Pigs

Across town, in the Hall of Ferns of the Palace of the Revolution, national dignity is very much on the mind of Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel. “We defeated imperialism once at Playa Girón,” he stated, referencing the beach in the Bay of Pigs where the final victory against the 1961 U.S. invasion took place. “And if they come, we will do it again.”

The following day, at the 65^th anniversary commemoration at that very beach, the guest of honor was Nemesia Martínez Montano, the girl of the “little white shoes” whose fleeing family was hit by the strafing fire of the incoming U.S. planes. “By the time we were getting close to Palpite, a plane started flying low,” she recalled in an interview broadcast that day. “We were waving at it because it had Cuban markings — the flag and the FAR insignias — and we thought it was a Cuban plane.”

“Then, along the road, the plane attacked the truck … It killed my mother and wounded two of my brothers — the youngest and the oldest — as well as my grandmother, who was shot in the spine and never walked again. I saw my mother’s insides — I saw her entrails. My father had to make me look, because I didn’t want to leave her.” Now 78, Nemesia survived the first invasion only to potentially face another one in her twilight years.

In and among the nationalism buoyed by a renewed foreign threat, questioning voices are not all that hard to find. A man selling tours on the street, for example, contended that not enough of the food aid provided by the Mexican government has made it down to ordinary people. Inside the conference, Yasiel Hernández, a final-year journalism student at the University of Havana, reflected on the state of the profession. “It’s true that Cuba is an example of perseverance and resistance,” he said. “But political communication has not kept pace with many of the real things happening on the ground … There is, perhaps, a failure to represent other realities that also exist in the country.”

To the confoundment of the standard authoritarian clichés, opinions on the island aren’t uniform nor are people particularly inhibited in expressing them; quite the opposite, in fact. But to conclude that any but a tiny minority would welcome the arrival of U.S. troops requires a dangerous and delusional leap of logic. However asymmetric the situation may be, and despite the ravages of the current siege, Cuba would fight — an eventuality for which it has spent a long time preparing. “And that,” said Pedro Velázquez, another conference attendee, “is what is giving the Americans pause.”

The Race Against Time

After 730,000 barrels of crude oil provided by the Russian-flagged tanker Anatoly Kolodkin were refined and fed into Cuba’s grid, the lights suddenly came on. This meant more games of pickup soccer; more cars circulating on those phantasmal streets; as many patients as possible, hopefully, knocked off the waiting lists. But the relief was frustratingly short. Days later, however, still more promising news was announced: For the first time, the Cuba Oil Union had successfully refined its own high-density, high-viscosity crude oil using a technology called “thermoconversion.” But setting up a pilot plant and stepping up production will take time — the overarching resource, beyond the oil itself, that the Trump administration is determined to deny the government. Without more oil, a deficit of over 2,000 megawatts remains at peak demand hours.

As April slipped into May, thousands braved transport woes to fill the Havana streets on International Workers’ Day. At the same time, the Trump administration was turning the screws, yet again, by means of an executive order broadening secondary sanctions against Cuban individuals and companies. On May 7, Trump sanctioned the military conglomerate GAESA under the new authority created by the order, and on May 18, the U.S. State Department announced yet another round of sanctions against Cuban officials and state entities.

As if the flurry of announcements were not enough, CIA Director John Ratcliffe visited the island to keep the pressure on, the Justice Department issued indictments against former President Raúl Castro, and the USS Nimitz and its strike group steamed into the Caribbean. Meanwhile, in an attempt to deflect the fact that the real and repeated threat is coming from the United States, Axios published the claims of anonymous U.S. intelligence officials asserting Cuba has planned to dispatch a swarm of 300 recently-acquired military drones against the naval base in Guantánamo Bay. Thus, obscenely, do elements of the U.S. press provide cover for any future U.S. aggression.

Among all the bluster and maneuvering — designed to stun and daze before any bombs do — two bits of good news managed to squeeze themselves in. The first: that Cuba is “pulling off one of the fastest solar revolutions on the planet,” with one gigawatt of solar energy being installed in the last year and an estimated two gigawatts coming online by 2028. And the second: that a poll published in early May found that Americans oppose going to war with Cuba by an overwhelming 64 percent; excluding the “not sures,” the percentage of those opposed rises to 81 percent. Outside of certain sections of Miami, the war-fevered dreams of Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Sen. Lindsey Graham to pivot to Cuba after Iran have no base of support among the broader population. That is no guarantee it won’t happen anyway, but if so, it would take place without a public mandate and with little patience if an invasion were to be bogged down by popular resistance.

Meanwhile, in Havana, the quieter resistance of daily living carries on — albeit with a bit more noise than before.