The US oil blockade has created huge geopolitical and economic pressures for Cubans, leading to government advisories warning against travel to Cuba. But while the island remains open for visitors, what is everyday life like for local people and businesses reliant on tourism? Cuba expert and frequent traveler Claire Boobbyer reports.
The last monthly pay cheque of 6,000 CUP (US$10) Tania Rodríguez received for work at a foreign-managed hotel was in February. Speaking from her home in central Cuba, the university graduate says the government offered her replacement work as a hospital cleaner for 3,000 pesos a month (US$5). She declined.
Later, cleaning work at a beach hotel emerged, but it meant sleeping on-site—not possible with elderly parents and a young child. Rodríguez cooks on her patio with charcoal—a 20-liter bottle of gas on the black market is unaffordable at 60,000 pesos (US$90). She’s emotional as she relates how she sells clothes, shoes, sheets of wood lying around the house; she’s contemplating selling a fridge and water tank to buy food. “We are going downhill without any brakes,” she says. She credits her family’s survival to a friend, a Canadian tourist she met years ago, who tops up her bank card.
An oil blockade imposed on January 29th by the Trump administration has almost paralyzed Cuba. Blackouts hit islanders for 22-23 hours a day, fuel prices have shot up, and cross-country transport is withering. Water supply is increasingly unavailable to many homes as water pumps need a power supply, hospitals are struggling to function, and many medicines are only available on the black market. The energy choke triggered airlines to begin pulling out, and countries including the UK, Ireland, Switzerland and Australia banned non-essential travel to Cuba. In a shock move, Canada, historically the source of most of the island’s visitors for decades, repatriated its tourists in February.
In 2017, Cuba’s tourism sector generated USD$3.3billion, 10 percent of the country’s GDP, writes Paolo Spadoni, Associate Professor at Augusta University and co-author of a recent book, The Cuban Tourism Industry. Tourism is a big player; it’s said up to 500,000 Cubans are directly and indirectly linked to the industry relying on wages, revenue, and tips.
It feels like a different place today. At a poetry reading last month at the Ojo del Ciclón cultural spot in Havana’s old quarter, Urszula Abolik, a Polish American who’s been visiting Cuba for 12 years, was one of just two tourists. “I’ve never seen Havana that quiet. These artists and dancers … they still show up for their art, but it’s very hard for them right now. You cry that Havana is like that.”
During Abolik’s two-week stay, she danced tango, stayed in a B&B where the power never failed, moved around in local fixed-route taxis and bicycle rickshaws, and saw small groups of tourists from China, France and Argentina. At a packed solar-powered club listening to the charanga-style (Cuban dance music) Aragón Orchestra, Abolik was the only foreigner; and the only diner at the superb Buena Vista Social Curry Club during a set by acclaimed Cuban pianist José Portillo.
One of the biggest issues are the wages for two-thirds of the employed population who work for the state. The average monthly Cuban salary was 6,930 pesos (USD$11.55) last year. The average pension is USD$4.50 a month.
The unfolding crisis in 2026 has deeper roots. The US Embargo against Cuba imposed in 1962 has been tightened over the years. In 2021, President Trump placed Cuba on a State Sponsors of Terrorism List, crippling its ability to receive foreign aid and process financial transactions. The move nullified the ESTA visa-waiver scheme for entry into the US too, for travelers who visited Cuba on or after January 12th 2021. Over 67 years of the Castro family rule, internal mismanagement of its centrally planned economy has prevailed, COVID-19 further devastated tourism, from which it never fully recovered while over-investment in tourist hotels post-pandemic squeezed out services in greater need.
This dismal picture is borne out by the figures. Between January and April this year, the island recorded 328,608 visitors, a 56 percent drop against the same months last year. At Cuba’s tourism height, in 2017-18, a few years after President Obama normalized relations with the US and eased travel restrictions, almost five million people visited for the rich culture, nature and beach resorts. With all this in mind, who is still advocating for travel to Cuba?
In typical circumstances, UK-based Cuba specialist tour operator Love Cuba sends 5,000-6,000 travelers to the island each year. But despite the UK’s Foreign Commonwealth Development Office (FCDO) advising “against all but essential travel to Cuba”, its CEO Damien O’Brien says about 20 people a month are heading there with Air Europa, the only airline flying from mainland Europe, with specialist insurance.
Love Cuba offers transfers to Havana hotels and the all-inclusive beach resorts of Varadero, Cuba’s premier 13 miles of sand, two hours east of Havana. Cuba’s state-owned hotels, a major source of revenue, have historically been ringfenced, powered by generators and with reliable sources of food. As electricity supply has been on the blink since COVID-19, Cuba’s private entrepreneurs and new Micro, Small and Medium-Sized Businesses (Mipymes) have imported power storage systems such as EcoFlow—tapping power from sockets or solar panels—to run businesses and homes.
Many of the island’s 80,000 hotel rooms, concentrated in north-coast resorts are closed. By June 5, several international brands managing state-owned hotels were forced to sever links with their Cuban partner, Gaviota—the tourism arm of Cuba’s military—to meet an ultimatum set by the Trump administration: Foreign companies to cut ties with GAESA, a military-owned Cuban conglomerate (of which Gaviota is a subsidiary) which controls much of the Cuban economy, or face sanctions.
Meanwhile, the 10 million islanders are collateral, its people shorn of sanity, dignity and a recognizable way of life. More terrifyingly: “You have a country that is left bleeding to death,” says Spadoni, of the sanctions.
For Cuba’s private sector, which includes thousands of B&Bs and boutique hotels boosted by solar power and generators, the situation isn’t much better. In the far east in Baracoa, 500 miles (805 kilometers) from Havana, Manuel Riquenes, owner of B&B Villa Paradiso, said he’d had four tourist reservations since January.
Víazul, the island-wide tourist coach service, cut its route to Baracoa post-pandemic, but remains operational on the island. Private vans—when they have fuel—run between Santiago de Cuba, 90 miles from Baracoa, for USD$215; private trucks and vehicles for 10,000 pesos (USD$15). “Tourists fear getting stuck and being unable to find their way back in time to take their return flights,” explains Riquenes.
“Everyone is pretty much afraid to go. We stay at Cuban-owned places and eat at Cuban-owned restaurants and shop at Cuban-owned markets. The money’s going directly to the people there. They really need it.”
- Kyle Tuna Gairhan, chef and founder, Buen Sabor Tours
One of the biggest issues are the wages for two-thirds of the employed population who work for the state. The average monthly Cuban salary was 6,930 pesos (USD$11.55) last year. The average pension is USD$4.50 a month. A decision to unite Cuba’s dual currency in 2021—phasing out the Cuban convertible peso (CUC) leaving only the Cuban peso (CUP)—spawned inflation, the resulting high cost of living and spiraling black market rates, which all islanders refer to in transactions.
The estimated basic basket of nutritional food costs 14 times the average salary. For the Revolution generation, a less than USD$5-a-month pension with no back-up from remittances abroad, is unviable. This month, the UN said the US sanctions are stripping Cubans of “essential supplies and services, including water, food and healthcare.” In June, 695 Cuban pesos fetches one dollar on the black market. Tourists change money in the illegal black market or in official exchange bureaus which offer a ‘floating rate’—right now, that’s 553 CUP to the USD.
East of Havana in the town built in 1916 by chocolatier Milton S. Hershey, French Canadian Anne-Marie Flynn runs a restored Hershey’s Chocolate home as a B&B, Casa Cub’Anita. All 56 reservations were canceled this year and the four locals she employed are out of work. “The taxi driver I worked with in the last five years has sold his car to feed his kids,” she tells me.
“We need tourism,” says Flynn. “We have food but no work, no income, no nothing. And we need to show this clown [Trump] next door that we’re still able to stand up even with no fuel and with the type of genocide, the silent genocide, that is affecting us.”
Sussel Rodríguez, CEO of the Estampa Collection, says her flagship hotel La Reserva in Havana remains open, but their Loft Habana Boutique Hotel overlooking the city’s harbor has been repurposed for art pop-ups and craft workshops.
Speaking on behalf of the creative community which, in Havana, is still running events, concerts, and art shows, she says: “Like many Cuban entrepreneurs, we’ve stopped waiting for things to change to try to create movement with the tools we have. I’d like to continue in the fight and not give up.”
Also refusing to give up on the country he hopes to relocate to is Memphis-based chef Kyle Tuna Gairhan. This month, he’s taking only two visitors on his Buen Sabor Tours: “Everyone is pretty much afraid to go,” he says “We stay at Cuban-owned places and eat at Cuban-owned restaurants and shop at Cuban-owned markets. The money’s going directly to the people there. They really need it.”
Tourism to Cuba from the US is sanctioned, but one legal way is under the ‘Support for the Cuban people’ reason. Gairhan’s ‘Support for the Cuban People’ initiative combines a food tour with a humanitarian approach which he calls Un Plato Más (One More Plate); he collaborates with a Cuban chef to make fusion Cuban-southern barbecue cuisine, and donates it to local people. Come autumn, the Havana outdoor venue will be a regular fixture, shifting to a restaurant the next day to fund the cost-free food.
He also likes to correct a fact often missing from international news reports: “In Cuba, there’s food. All the shops are open pretty much and imports are coming in. There’s no food shortage; it’s a wage shortage. People can’t afford to get food.”
Punishing US sanctions are driving Cubans into the ground. On June 18th, the Cuban government announced a package of major reforms to open up the economy while Cuban leaders defend their right to sovereignty throughout high-level talks that are ongoing but stalling. As one tourism worker said of the impasse: “It’s like the electricity at the moment. You never know when the situation will be fixed.”
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Travel writer, photographer, and Cuba expert, Claire regularly writes about Latin America, Vietnam, and Laos. She fell in love with Latin America some 20 years ago after backpacking from Chile to the Colombian coast.
