'Tipping point': Humanitarian crisis in Cuba continues to grow, aid group director says
"It's really dire," said one expert on the island nation.
Cut off from its primary source of oil since early January due to the ongoing U.S. energy blockade, Cuba is in the throes of an economic collapse. Food and water are in short supply, and residents are coping with prolonged electrical blackouts and using wood or charcoal to cook, one humanitarian worker in Havana told ABC News.
"Basically, Havana looks like a ghost town," said Valerio Granello, director of the humanitarian group CARE Cuba Country, based in the island nation's capital. "There are only a few cars moving around, and you can see people walking or using electric vehicles that are rechargeable on those two to three hours per day that you are getting electricity, or just getting around by bicycle."
Granello told ABC News that he's noticed an increase in the number of people begging in the streets of Havana for money and searching through mounds of garbage piled up around the city, looking for food.
Granello said the cost of public transportation in Cuba has increased five times and food prices have climbed to a point that many vulnerable people, including the elderly and the disabled, can no longer afford to pay.
"I'm mostly speaking about Havana because I'm in Havana. But, of course, if this is the situation in the capital city, you can imagine what is happening outside of town," said Granello, adding that the country is still recovering from damage caused in October by Hurricane Melissa.
Making matters worse, Cuba's Ministry of Energy and Mines said in a social media post on Monday that the country's national electric system suffered a "total disconnection," causing a nationwide blackout and intensifying civil unrest.
"It is understandable that the prolonged blackouts cause distress in our town, as a consequence of the U.S. energy blockade, cruelly intensified in recent months," Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel said in a post on X Saturday, apparently referring to Havana. "What will never be understandable, justified, or tolerated is the violence and vandalism that threatens citizen tranquility and the security of our institutions."
Granello said the supply of drinking water in Cuba is also limited, and that "we need to consider that 95% of the population is relying on electricity for pumping water."
Some farmers in the countryside also are having problems transporting their goods to cities because the Cuban government has severely rationed the sale of fuel throughout the country of some 10 million people, Granello told ABC News.
Granello said tourism, one of the main drivers of the Cuban economy, has halted almost completely since the beginning of February because major airlines have stopped flights to the island because there's no jet fuel available.
In a televised media event on Feb. 5, Diaz-Canel blamed the "aggressive and criminal" U.S. policy toward Cuba regarding the energy blockade for affecting vital services on the island including education, transportation, food production, tourism and more.
President Trump calls Cuba a 'failed nation'
The current crisis in Cuba began earlier this year after the United States put an oil blockade in place, which cut off Havana's access to foreign oil shipments, including those from Venezuela, its main supplier.
In a Jan. 29 executive order declaring a "national emergency" with respect to Cuba, President Donald Trump said the "policies, practices, and actions of the Government of Cuba constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat, which has its source in whole or substantial part outside the United States, to the national security and foreign policy of the United States."
During an event in the Oval Office on Monday, Trump said that he believes he’ll "have the honor" of taking Cuba.
"It's a failed nation," Trump said. "They have no money, they have no oil, they have no nothing. They have nice land. They have nice landscape. You know, it's a beautiful island."
"The U.S. publicly threatens Cuba almost daily, with overthrowing the constitutional order by force," Diaz-Canel said in a response Tuesday. "And it uses an outrageous pretext: the harsh limitations of the weakened economy that they have attacked and sought to isolate for more than six decades."
"They intend and announce plans to seize the country, its resources, its properties, and even the very economy they seek to strangle to make us surrender," the post continued, adding that "any external aggressor will clash with an impregnable resistance."
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has been quietly negotiating a resolution to the crisis with figures close to the Cuban government, said on Tuesday that Cuba has "got some big decisions to make."
"They don't get subsidies anymore. So they're in a lot of trouble. And the people in charge of them, they don't know how to fix it," Rubio said. "So they have to get new people in charge."
Diaz-Canel publicly acknowledged in a televised address Friday that Cuba was holding talks with "representatives of the United States government" as Trump intensifies his pressure campaign against the regime.
"We want to avoid manipulation and speculation," Díaz-Canel later added, explaining that the talks were still "in their first phase" and that negotiators from both countries were working "to establish an agenda."
'A tipping point'
Sabastian Arcos, director of the Cuban Research Institute at Florida International University, told ABC News that the crisis in Cuba began long before the Trump administration imposed sanctions.
"This is a long-winded crisis that began with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, when the Cuban economy and the Cuban regime were faced with dealing with the real world, the real-world economy without its former patron, the Soviet Union," Arcos said.
Arcos alleged that instead of spending money on fixing its crumbling infrastructure, the Cuban regime stole or misallocated funds and invested in a "gigantic security service to keep the regime in power."
The situation in Cuba has now gotten "really dire," according to Arcos, who said that the U.S. sanctions have led the regime to "a tipping point."
"This didn't start on January 3," Arcos said, referring to the date U.S. forces captured Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro and brought him to the United States to face drug trafficking charges, which in turn cut Cuba off from its main source of oil. "It was already there. It just got worse."
Arcos said as the conditions in Cuba worsen, there is "a potential for a gigantic humanitarian crisis in Cuba that will be blamed on the United States, even though the regime is the main culprit."
ABC News' Mara Valdes contributed to this report.
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