Is the revolution in Cuba over?

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Hello, I'm Tania Beckett. Welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service.

I host the inquiry where each week we ask one big question and get answers from four of the

world's leading experts on that topic. You can find us wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

In this bonus episode, we turn to Cuba, where mounting pressure from the United States

is deepening an already severe energy crisis. And we ask, is the revolution over?

Before we begin, I just wanted to let you know that this episode was recorded on the 19th of March.

Cuba is facing one of its most severe humanitarian crises in decades.

The island lies less than 200 kilometres off the coast of the US state of Florida,

and has for decades attempted to distance itself from its far more powerful neighbour to the north.

But now it finds itself caught in its grip. For a quarter of a century, Cuba has relied on oil from

Venezuela. The United States is now enforcing a de facto naval blockade on fuel shipments to Cuba,

preventing tankers from reaching the island and deepening its energy crisis.

Cuba has faced worsening fuel shortages, with electricity blackouts becoming increasingly

common across the island and disrupting everyday life for many Cubans. In the past four weeks,

the US-Israel war with Iran has occupied much of President Donald Trump's foreign policy agenda,

but he has suggested his focus may soon turn to Cuba.

I do believe I'll be the honor of having the honor of taking Cuba, taking Cuba. I mean,

whether I free it, take it. I think I can do anything I want, whether you want another

to. A very weak intonation.

Cuban President Miguel Diaz Canal says his government has opened channels with Washington

to ease the crisis through negotiation. But he's warned that any attempt to seize the country

would meet what he calls unbreakable resistance. With Cuba facing economic strain,

dwindling oil supplies and pressure from Washington, this week on the inquiry we're asking,

is the revolution in Cuba over?

Part one, the sugar rush. To understand why Cuba is caught in a political battle that has left

it with such dire shortages, I'd like to take you back to over a century ago and to do that,

I've enlisted the help of our first expert witness.

William Garrett, professor of Cuban and Caribbean history at the University of Florida.

In 1898, the United States entered into a four-month war with Spain. It won a decisive victory,

which amongst other things gave America control of Cuba. Part of America's incentive for the war

was to secure its interests in a commodity which was fast becoming a regular feature of ordinary

people's diets. That commodity was sugar. Within a quarter of a century Cuba's output of what

was then dubbed white gold increased fivefold, transforming it into a massive industrial-scale

exporter. But most of the sugar itself and the profits from producing it went not to the people

of Cuba, but to America. So, when in 1952, Cubans sought change that would threaten US interests,

Washington installed a military dictator. Fulgencio Batista's leadership was defined by brutality

against his own people and corruption was endemic. When Batista carries out that coup in 1952,

you get an end to political pluralism. So, you have the mafia, you have chronic capitalism,

you have atrocities perpetrated by Batista's security forces against the opposition,

you have periodic censorship, and as of 1953, you have the use of martial law.

After six long years Batista's regime finally collapsed, clearing the way for the man who had long

been waiting in the wings and was to go on to define Cuba's path for the next half century.

A revolutionary by the name of Fidel Castro. So, when Batista flees, there is almost

immediately an electric euphoria that shakes the country, and people pour out onto the streets.

Fidel Castro is having a Christmas dinner at his mom and his dad's house, and he discovers

that what he thought was going to be a much longer war suddenly ended in triumph,

and almost immediately the engine of change begins to move, and it is unanimously celebrated,

I would say, by the vast majority of Cubans. The effect on Cuba's society was immediate and

transformational. And then we have just this amazing year in 1959 of pro-capitalist, nationalist

policies, 1500 different laws being immediately decreed by the new state, and it changes people's

lives, and it changes the lives not just of the poor, but it changes the lives of middle-class

people, of working-class people. So, 1959 is really a triumph of the Cuban peoples' demands,

desires, and a really long-standing historical mandate to put Cuba's economy and its government

in the hands of the people. But after just a year, Castro's leadership started to take a more

authoritarian turn. Fidel decrees the nationalization of all foreign companies. Young people are

mobilized into militias to defend against a U.S. invasion that actually hasn't even been organized

yet, and then in October, things really take a radical route, which is when Fidel decrees

nationalization of all middle- and large-sized Cuban businesses. And so that means that by

December, suddenly you have a communist state without actually embracing communism officially,

you have a state that controls 80% of the economy in Cuba. Castro may not have explicitly embraced

communism, but Cuba needed oil, and one place that had that oil was the Soviet Union. In 1960,

the USSR started to supply the black stuff to Cuba in return for white gold or sugar.

Meanwhile, America frozen out and watching the flourishing of this alliance less than 200 kilometers

from its coastline was deeply alarmed. It was, after all, in the midst of a bitter cold war with

the Soviet Union and Moscow, appeared to be gaining a foothold right in its backyard.

So in 1961, the U.S. launched a ground invasion at Cuba's Bay of Pigs, aimed at overthrowing the

government of Fidel Castro. But the mission was a failure, and Castro tightened his grip.

But Fidel Castro is pretty much governing economically by wind and by his own instincts,

which produce great disasters. Things like the capital industry almost completely disappear,

nobody's getting access to be for pork on a regular basis because free markets are gone,

and in so many ways it's a disaster. But Castro didn't end there. In 1962, America discovered

that Cuba was housing nuclear missiles belonging to the Soviets. U.S. President Kennedy and Soviet

leader Nikita Krushkov engaged in a tense standoff. It was the closest the world had come to

nuclear conflict since the Second World War. And so when Kennedy announces to the U.S.

public on live television and shows satellite pictures of the placement of these missiles,

there are 13 days of panic. There was this kind of brinkmanship between the Soviet Union and

the United States, but never had the stakes been so high. The missiles were in the end removed

under UN supervision. Then, 30 years later, the Soviet Union unraveled, and with it, Cuba's key

economic ally. And we'll come back to what happened in the 1990s a little later. Meanwhile,

let's fast forward to the early 2000s, when relations with the United States started to improve

under First President Bill Clinton, and then more particularly his fellow Democrat Barack Obama

in 2011. What we had from 2011 to 2017 was a dramatic expansion of prosperity. There was visible

growth of small businesses on the island. There was also a more food in Havana and Sienfuel since

on the aisle that I had ever seen in my previous 20 years of being present in Cuba and constantly

visiting. But sadly, it wasn't to last, time for our second expert witness.

Part 2. Homegrown disaster

Everything that's come after 2020, it's a whole new level in terms of the difficulties

of daily life, the deterioration of public services. In the wake of Obama's reestablishing of

ties with Cuba, the island entered what became known as the golden years of tourism. Visitor

numbers hit record highs. But when in 2020, tighter US travel restrictions were imposed by the

Trump administration and the COVID-19 pandemic, the country once again hit a downward spiral.

Ricardo Torres is a Cuban-born economist. He's a research fellow at American University based

in Washington, D.C. COVID was a big shock for the economy and life in Cuba,

generally speaking. Tourism was a major industry for Cuba. It was present in many towns throughout

the country. I mean, those businesses run by families and individuals selling different

services and even goods to visitors. And it was important for a family's budget. Cuba's tourism

effectively collapsed with international arrivals plunging almost three quarters in 2020

to just over a million and falling by a further two-fifths in 2021. Cuba never really recovered,

pre-COVID levels in terms of international arrivals. Never. So there were some growth in 2022 and 2023,

but then it went down again in 2024 and 2025. And well, 2026 looks like it's going to be an even

worse year. And families feel that pain as well because they got resources, they got money from

visitors. The pandemic cut off many essential supply chains. Cuba is an island, almost all inputs

come by the sea. So shipping costs skyrocketed and that also impacted the economy. And I think

that was not initially visible in 2020, but the situation then from 2021 onwards got from bad to worse.

An additional blow came from a homegrown disaster. There was one Cuban peso peg to the dollar

and another peso that was not. And the government decided to unpick this dual currency system.

It was, says our expert witness, the worst possible timing. It didn't work. It didn't work because

it was not well designed. The exchange rate that they started with was not realistic,

was not market based at that time. It was already overvalued. The result inevitably is that the

prices will go up. And they've gone up significantly in the case of Cuba, state employees,

pensioners, people like that, they'll suffer. Inflation-rocketed food prices spiked and by

early 2025 shortages were widespread across the country. By this time Cubans had over several decades

seen their hopes for a brighter future dashed and many opted simply to leave.

There is growing frustration. We've seen the big wave of Cuban migration happening in the

last six years. And that's the story of people that do not see a future for all of them on the

island, that do not see remedy. Between late 2021 and early 2025, estimates suggest that almost

a tenth of the population left. But for those who remained, yet more hardship was yet to come.

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You're listening to the inquiry from the BBC World Service. We're about to jump into part three,

but before we do that, I want to let you know we have a huge archive of inquiry episodes,

including can rewilding help combat climate change and why are our taps running dry?

To listen, just search for these episodes in the inquiry feed wherever you get your podcasts.

And while there, why not click subscribe and turn on push notifications so you never miss a thing.

Now let's continue with this inquiry on Cuba. Part three, Mutual Survival.

In part one, I told you about Cuba's supply of oil from the Soviet Union, a lifeline for the

island, which was cut off with the demise of the USSR in 1989. But there is one part of the story

still missing. And that is how the country survived between the end of the Cold War and the

reestablishing of relations with the United States two decades later in 2011. And for that part

of the journey, we need to go back to just before the millennium and a man who viewed Cuba's

Fidel Castro as a cornerstone of his attempt to revive left-wing politics in Latin America,

a man who could give Cuba the oil it needed to keep afloat and get something important in return.

In 1999, that man was elected as the president of Venezuela, and his name was Hugo Chávez.

Our third expert witness is Christopher Sabatini, senior research fellow for Latin America

at Chatham House, an independent policy think tank based in London.

Hugo Chávez, when he was sworn in in 1999, talked about swimming in the sea of happiness

created by Fidel Castro towards Cuban socialism and promptly started to give them about 100,000

barrels of oil a day, a subsidized race, which the Cuban government used half of to keep the lights

on and to provide also fuel for cooking, as well as then sold the remaining half on the global

market at global prices, with generated hard currency, which it needed to import food and

medicine among other things. In return, the Cuban government provided doctors to Venezuela,

and if the agreement between Cuba and Venezuela had ended there, then it may not have been so problematic.

The trouble is, it didn't. In fact, there was much, much more to it than that.

It was a subsidy, yes, but it was also in part payment for services. The Cuban government

was providing security assistance and intelligence assistance. They're particularly good at being

able to root out potential dissent within those security forces to be able to prevent any coup d'état

that could remove the government. Clearly, the Cubans got the better end of the bargain

in terms of being able to receive and resell oil that they needed for hard currency.

It was, in essence, a cooperation between regimes that ensured their mutual survival.

When Chavez died in 2013, it's no surprise then that he was followed by a dictator in much the same

mold. Nicolas Maduro went on to lead Venezuela for over a decade. In January, he was dramatically

removed by US forces and taken to New York to face trial. Meanwhile, in Cuba, Fidel Castro had

died a decade before, but his or to credit leadership style had also survived. So the dilemma now

was what did the end of Maduro mean for Cuba? As soon as Nicolas Maduro was extractive,

one of the key demands by the US government was Venezuela had to end its oil giveaway program

to Cuba. And for Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, who's a Cuban American, for him,

this closing off that oil supply from Venezuela to Cuba was the path to finally,

after 67 years of a communist regime, 90 miles off the coast of Florida, was finally that moment

when he could have brought about or thinks he could bring about regime change in Cuba,

despite a failed embargo. President Trump has said he could, as he puts it,

take Cuba, that his capture of Venezuela's Maduro could in effect be replicated in Havana.

He created this idea that this could be done neatly, cleanly with no loss of US lives, maybe even with

not many US fingerprints on it. So we're in a situation here where Trump thinks he has a template

for, if you will, regime change, although it's not really regime change, maybe just trying to get

a more compliant government, but one that isn't going to work in Cuba for various reasons.

The question now is, what might those reasons be?

Part 4. Blockades and Blackouts

Changing the power structures in Cuba has something that the Republicans have been talking about

for 60 years. And so finally, feeling that they are close to doing that is something that would be

a symbolic win for many of them, after many, many decades of feeling frustrated by this

more island than managed to survive without them. When Trump cut off Venezuela's oil shipments to

Cuba and threatened to put tariffs on any country that sold oil to the island, it's antiquated

power grid was strangled, causing blackouts. Fuel prices rocketed, and it now costs more than

$300 to fill up a car's fuel tank. This is more than most Cubans earn in a year.

Renata Segura is the program director for Latin America and the Caribbean

at the International Crisis Group, an independent conflict monitoring organization.

The Trump administration understood that that choking strategy was going to really trigger a

humanitarian emergency in Cuba. And so what it is allowing right now,

US companies, they are allowed to sell oil to private sectors in Cuba. So essentially the idea

is that the oil goes not to the government, but only to private actors. So companies, individuals

that have the money to do so. So that has alleviated a little bit of the pressure. But for example,

Russia, which was hoping to send oil directly to the Cuban government, that is not allowed.

And the Trump administration has posted votes around the island, which have determined that no

tankers can come to Cuba. So no government to government oil is coming right now.

In March, Cuba's president, Dears Canal, said that no fuel had entered Cuba for the government

in three months, which was the reason for the blackouts. But as we've heard, the US does allow

American and foreign companies to sell oil and fuel to private Cuban businesses and individuals,

allowing a trickle to get through to where it's needed. Nonetheless, our final expert witness says

the squeeze on Cuba is the most dramatic for over half a century. I think this is probably the

weakest moment for the communist regime since the revolution of 1959. I think obviously Cuba has

faced enormous pressures from the United States for the last few decades to try and really change

the way that its political and economic system works. But these seems to be the moment in which

they are perhaps the most cornered and where something is going to have to give because the

economic situation is really, really as dire as it has ever been. So how does all of this end?

Washington is fairly divided. And I don't think that you can say that the US has one goal in mind.

On the one hand, you have the people that have connections with Cuba, many of them,

Republican congressmen from Florida, and others that have a more ideological take on why Cuba

should change. And so there is a very clear anti-communist stand among those centers of the

Washington establishment, and those people want regime change. I think there are others that see

that it is going to be very difficult to do a real regime change as the one that some of them

are wanting, because they understand that the whole state is very sort of coherently connected

that overthrowing the entire thing could just produce chaos and violence, and that maybe something

that is a more step by step route is the appropriate way around. Meanwhile, the future of the Cuban

people seems once again to be hanging in the balance, which takes us back to our question.

Is the revolution in Cuba over? The island's dictatorship has brought poverty and repression,

but our final expert witness says she's not convinced the current crisis will finally deliver

lasting change. I would going to see the end of the communist regime there has been in place since

the revolution that was led by Peter El Castro in 1959. I think that is still a very big question,

Mark. And honestly today, I would say that we are looking more likely to a situation in which

there is an opening of the economic system, but less movement on the political sphere. I think

that that's what I would be putting my money if I had to bet today.

You've been listening to the inquiry from the BBC World Service. This edition of the inquiry

was presented by me, Tanya Beckett. The producer was Matt Tulson. The researcher was Evie Ubsley,

the editor Tom Bigwood, and the technical producer was Cameron Ward.

Thanks for listening. Normally, the inquiry won't be here in the documentary, so why not

subscribe to the inquiry as a podcast where we have a huge archive of episodes which cover

subjects such as how can rewilding help combat climate change and is the 2026 World Cup

an own goal where I explore the economy of World Cup tickets. Just search for the inquiry wherever

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