By Angry GenXer<\/a><\/p>\nHAVANA TIMES \u2014 During the \u201cSpecial Period\u201d (the 1990s), amid that crisis of scarcity and social erosion caused by the collapse of the \u201csocialist camp,\u201d the ghost of the \u201czero option\u201d haunted Cuba: what would the country do if its imports dropped to zero?<\/p>\n
Today, authorities and social media voices among those of us who remember the \u201990s are invoking that ghost again. Let\u2019s go in order:<\/p>\n
Before January 29, 2026, Cuba was already suffering a dramatic deterioration: blackouts, insufficient or expensive transportation, inflation. The government improvised palliative measures, without real success.<\/p>\n
Tourism has not recovered: visitors never returned to more than just over half of those who came before COVID. The corporate establishment built enormous hotels that remained empty. Almost nothing exportable is produced, except for some medicines, tobacco, rum, and minerals. In the domestic economy, we extract a little sulfur-laden oil and grow part of our basic food supply (although even some sugar is imported).<\/p>\n
The most dynamic sector of the economy consists of various import ventures and retail or service businesses for consumers who can afford them. Their scale ranges from huge para-state corporations and large private chains to family networks, where merchandise arrived by plane and was sold in informal wholesale markets (like the famous \u201cCuevita\u201d in Havana) or went directly to families through \u201cgarage sales.\u201d<\/p>\n
The government, corporations, and smaller private firms extract money that reaches Cubans who receive foreign currency from abroad or from other businesses.<\/p>\n
The once-famous Cuban public health services are deteriorating due to lack of supplies and personnel, ridiculous salaries, and a critical shortage of medicines (which often must be bought on the informal market).<\/p>\n
Material degradation is compounded by the erosion of social bonds: culture is in crisis, much of the intelligentsia has emigrated, solidarities are fading, and prison-yard morality often prevails on the streets. Above, there is no access to foreign credit due to the US embargo and Cuba\u2019s very long history of unpaid debts. Below, there are hardly any life projects except emigration. The future is uncertain.<\/p>\n
Then Trump appears<\/p>\n
Declaring Cuba in emergency status as an \u201cunusual threat to national security,\u201d he adds to existing restrictions the ploy of sanctioning, with more tariffs, countries that export hydrocarbons to Cuba.<\/p>\n
It is supposedly a blow aimed at the Cuban government \u2014 accused of hosting Russian and Chinese spy bases \u2014 yet those \u201cabove\u201d do not suffer the hardships endured \u201cbelow.\u201d They will not suffer from this tightening of the blockade\/embargo, because Cuba is a class society, and the blockade\/embargo is also a class weapon: it strikes below, and in the middle, never at the very top. Poor, vulnerable people \u2014 subjected to violence, restrictions on freedoms, and limited access to resources and opportunities \u2014 are today the targets of class confrontations deployed by the two powerful establishments on both sides of the Florida Straits.<\/p>\n
Cuba is living exceptional historical moments<\/p>\n
Events are accelerating. We do not know what will happen.<\/p>\n
We have spent two weeks with transportation tending toward zero: urban buses are not running; fuel is not sold to private drivers. For several months, cooking gas has not been sold. The issue of aviation fuel (official international alert from Havana: JET A1 NOT AVBL) is especially worrying: there are no longer outbound flights from Canada and Russia \u2014 Cuba\u2019s main tourist markets \u2014 planes arrive empty to take stranded nationals back; European airlines restrict flights and refuel aircraft in the Dominican Republic.<\/p>\n
The Cuban president and his ministers mainly speak about medium and long-term measures to improve the situation.<\/p>\n
But Keynes already said: in the long run we will all be dead.<\/p>\n
No one knows what survival will look like next week. Mexico (Cuba\u2019s last major supplier) is no longer sending oil, nor is Russia (Putin said he would send it, but that fleet moves clandestinely because of the war against Ukraine). China is a net oil importer.<\/p>\n
Many compare this reality to the \u201czero option\u201d of the 1990s: they call the current moment \u201coption 0.2.\u201d Although neither that nor this would really be options, but rather necessities \u2014 unforeseen?<\/p>\n
An unforeseen crisis?<\/p>\n
The Special Period of the \u201990s was based on pre-elaborated strategies that Cuban military personnel learned in the USSR (I read in HT that a Russian engineer designed it). The fall into the abyss was not abrupt as it is today, which seems to have caught everyone off guard \u2014 above and below. There were even publications for the public (a two-volume book: Solutions for Difficult Conditions, or something like that); establishment representatives gave instructions in community and workplace assemblies (today they do not even convene them, probably out of fear); functional infrastructures existed (there were sugar mills; thermoelectric plants may not have had fuel \u2014 over time Cuban engineers learned to use domestic crude, high in sulfur \u2014 but they did not break down as often as now). The Ministries of the Armed Forces and Public Health promoted herbal medicine.<\/p>\n
Tourism and remittances were increasing and served as a lifeline before Chavez\u2019s Venezuela appeared. An economist notes that pork production \u2014 then the main animal protein \u2014 increased in that era; today that production has fallen drastically, and the main meat is chicken\u2026 imported from the USA.<\/p>\n
A neighbor comments: \u201cFidel didn\u2019t make promises; he knew what there really was; now he\u2019s no longer here.\u201d I don\u2019t know if he\u2019s right.<\/p>\n
In the \u201990s there were moral reserves in the generations of the \u201crepublican\u201d and \u201csocialist\u201d eras. It was normal for a company or state driver to give a hitchhiker a free ride, or for a private trucker to charge regular prices for a late-night \u201crescue\u201d trip. Today, generations born in the \u201990s and after dominate daily life. Their morality is different. Sometimes I feel we are heading toward a \u201cwar of everyone against everyone.\u201d<\/p>\n
In Cuba\u2019s history there have been two US naval blockades: in 1898, when supplies to the Spanish Army were cut, forcing Spain to sign peace separately with the United States to end the war in Cuba; and in 1962, during the Missile Crisis, which practically did not materialize because the USSR, also separately, negotiated with President Kennedy.<\/p>\n
I do not know whether there will be a naval blockade this time. What is already happening is a free fall:<\/p>\n
\u201cOur\u201d selfish establishment took no precautions, fostering a catastrophe. Another selfish establishment uses genocide as an instrument of political pressure against its counterparts here. The Cuban people are the victims.<\/p>\n
Read more from Cuba here on Havana Times.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Miguel Diaz Canel answering questions about the current Cuba crisis. Screenshot By Angry GenXer HAVANA TIMES \u2014 During…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":477422,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[45,49,48,46],"class_list":["post-477421","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-business","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-economy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/477421","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=477421"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/477421\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/477422"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=477421"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=477421"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=477421"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/image-13-600x333.png\")
Miguel Diaz Canel answering questions about the current Cuba crisis. Screenshot<\/p>\n