Is Cuba on the Brink of Collapse? A Photographer Took a Road Trip To Find Out

The Pulitzer Center's support for this reporting was made possible through the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF)

For months, the United States has been waging what it describes as a “maximum pressure campaign” against Cuba, blocking oil imports to the island, levying criminal charges against a former leader and squeezing the already fragile economy with new sanctions.

The Trump administration has made no secret of its end goal: the collapse of Cuba’s Communist government and the dawn of a new era of political and economic liberalization.

“It’s failing like never before,” President Trump said of Cuba in a speech to the United Nations General Assembly last week. “It will fall.”

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And yet, despite a crisis of power outages, severe fuel shortages and dramatic price spikes, life in Cuba goes on.

Photographer Lisette Poole González recently set out on a road trip across the island to document this consequential moment.

Over two weeks, she traveled between Havana in the west and Baracoa, a city on the eastern edge of the island. She toured remote provinces rarely visited by international journalists in recent years thanks to government restrictions and the difficulty of procuring fuel.

She encountered beaches typically teeming with tourists that were spookily empty, and fishermen unable to work because they lacked gasoline to go to sea.

Public transportation has largely ground to a halt, and the repeated collapse of the national power grid plunges the entire island into darkness for days at a time. Even on a good day, most Cubans receive just a few hours of electricity. Water shortages are common.

Poole González captured resilience in the face of hardship: A man showering outside in a rainstorm. Horses pulling people in carriages. Teenagers pushing children on a carousel that stopped turning long ago.

But she also showed people engaged in more typical activities: Working out. Attending church. Releasing Yoruba offerings into the gentle waves of the Caribbean sea.

She often trained her lens on youth — members of a generation born decades after Fidel Castro toppled Cuba’s right-wing dictatorship in 1959, turning the island into a global symbol of leftist resistance and beginning one of the world’s longest enduring experiments in state-run socialism.

These young people have come of age at a time of heightened government repression and the prolonged economic stagnation caused by U.S. sanctions and mismanagement by Cuba’s leaders. Access to the internet has widened their perspective, and many told Poole González that they dream of joining the exodus of more than 1 million Cubans who have left the island in recent years.

The trip prompted personal reflections for Poole González, who was born in the U.S. to a mother who departed Cuba with her family a decade after the revolution. Homes that her grandfather constructed in the city of Matanzas still stand.

“I think often about my family and what life would have been for us if they had never left,” she said.

In rural Holguín province, about 420 miles east of Havana, she visited Castro’s childhood home, a rambling wooden farmhouse that is now a national monument and museum. There were no visitors.

Nearly seven decades after Castro’s revolution, the legacy of his ambitious project hangs in the balance. Among Cubans, there is a sense — and a hope — that some kind of change is on the horizon. But what it will mean for them remains to be seen.