Cuba faces an unceasing crisis - but its people are refusing to give up

Defiance. It is the word I heard more than any other during my week in Cuba.

Not from politicians. From ordinary Cubans - people living through an unceasing crisis shaped by a failing economic experiment, an ageing but entrenched dictatorship and the pressure of a hostile superpower.

I met people who told me this is the hardest period they have lived through in decades.

Harder, some said, than the Special Period that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. They spoke of endless blackouts, empty shelves, collapsing salaries and young people leaving because they no longer believe their future lies here.

And yet, they refused to surrender.

That resilience is remarkable because the scale of the crisis is impossible to ignore.

Havana remains one of the world's most captivating cities, but today it feels like a city stuck between its past and an uncertain future.

Revolutionary Square, where Fidel Castro once addressed hundreds of thousands of Cubans for hours on end, is almost silent.

The giant steel portraits of Che Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos still dominate the skyline, but the conversations taking place beneath them are no longer about revolution. They are about survival.

Across the capital, the signs are everywhere.

Petrol stations without fuel. Rubbish piling up in neighbourhood after neighbourhood. Hospital wards struggling with shortages of medicines and basic supplies. Streets that once bustled now feel quieter, as wave after wave of Cubans have left in search of opportunities elsewhere.

Then there are the blackouts.

One woman told me she no longer sets an alarm. The electricity decides when she wakes. If it comes at three in the morning, that is when the washing gets done, the food gets cooked, the phones get charged and the water gets pumped before the lights disappear again.

In Cuba today, many families no longer organise their lives around the clock. They organise them around the electricity.

Dialogue, not submission

The government says the US blockade is responsible for the country's economic collapse.

There is no doubt decades of sanctions have inflicted enormous damage, made worse by the Trump administration's latest campaign of maximum pressure. Fuel has become harder to secure. Trade has become more difficult. Every new restriction is felt.

But as I travelled across Havana, I also heard another argument.

Many Cubans told me the blockade could no longer explain everything. They spoke about an economy that has struggled to reform itself, bureaucracy, salaries that no longer cover the basics and a generation that increasingly sees its future somewhere else.

When I sat down with President Miguel Diaz-Canel, I put those arguments to him directly.

I asked whether decades of economic mismanagement had left Cuba dangerously exposed. Whether corruption and an unwillingness to embrace deeper reform had compounded the suffering I had witnessed. Whether, after more than six decades of communist rule, he could still argue the system was delivering for ordinary Cubans. And whether the time had finally come to open the economy.

He pushed back on every point.

The man who succeeded Raul Castro after six decades of rule by the Castro brothers was unwilling to accept that the system had failed.

Cuba, he insisted, would not bow to external pressure. The blockade remained the overwhelming cause of the country's crisis. It wanted dialogue, not submission. It would negotiate, but it would never capitulate.

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Unwavering determination

Meanwhile, President Donald Trump continues to raise the stakes - sanctioning Diaz-Canel, indicting Raul Castro and insisting the US could one day "take" Cuba.

For the people I met, however, the debate over who bears the greater responsibility means little because they have to deal with the harsh realities of the escalating tensions between the US and Cuba.

An American pressure campaign that has a stranglehold over the island. And a system that many Cubans themselves believe is no longer capable of delivering the life they were promised.

Perhaps nowhere is that more visible than in the country's exodus. Hundreds of thousands have left in recent years, many of them young, taking with them skills, ambition and hope. Those who remain often do so because they cannot leave - or because they still believe this country is worth staying for.

What I found was not a nation that had given up.

I found a nation exhausted, proud and deeply uncertain.

Above all, I found people determined to hold on - to their dignity, to their sovereignty and to the hope that somehow there is still a way forward.

(c) Sky News 2026: Cuba faces an unceasing crisis - but its people are refusing to give up