Cuba’s Point of No Return

A man pushing a handcart in Havana, Cuba, July 2026 Norlys Perez / Reuters WILL FREEMAN is Fellow for Latin America Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. More & Download Print unlock this feature or Sign in. Save Sign in and save to read later Copy This is a subscriber-only feature. or Sign in. Chicago MLA APSA APA Chicago Cite not available at the moment MLA Cite not available at the moment APSA Cite not available at the moment APA Cite not available at the moment Request reprint permissions here. Regardless, what is not widely appreciated outside Cuba is how economic and state collapse—triggered ’s unwillingness to reform and hastened by U. S. sanctions—is already remaking the island. The state, aside from its capacity for political repression, is rapidly weakening. The economy is contracting and growing more unequal, leaving a large underclass too poor to participate meaningfully in the new private sector. Social cohesion is fraying, and crime is rising, while plunging birth rates and emigration warp Cuba’s demographics. All these trends predate the foreign oil cutoff and the newest sanctions by years, if not decades, but each now appears to be accelerating. The danger is that the longer the impasse lasts, the more they will calcify into the baseline conditions for any future transition, narrowing the chances that Cuba ever becomes a well-governed country—and increasing the likelihood of an even more dysfunctional, chaotic future instead. If nothing changes soon, a transitional government could one day find itself in the same impossible position as the men atop the ruins of the design institute: trying to build something safe, habitable, and lasting out of rubble. AUTHORITARIAN ANARCHY In Havana, I heard a joke. “Only two things work in this country: the state security apparatus and the hospitals.” It was too generous to the hospitals. About state security, it was true. Repression is the only thing the Cuban state still does well. This owes less to any apparent abundance of resources than to the leadership’s entirely rational unity. The headquarters of the Directorate of Penal Institutions, which administers the country’s prison system, is as decrepit as any building in central Havana, with cardboard filling broken windows. But the generals and spy chiefs know how much they would lose from political liberalization. If the Trump administration has tried to convince some of them that there are off-ramps, it does not appear to have succeeded.