HAVANA — Thousands of Cubans took to the streets of Havana and cities across the island on Thursday in the largest spontaneous protests seen on the island in years, driven by unprecedented shortages of food, medicine, and fuel that have pushed the population past desperation point. The demonstrations — which security forces largely stood down from rather than confront — underscore the accelerating collapse of Cuba’s state-controlled economy as the flow of subsidized oil from Venezuela has all but dried up.
The protests erupted just hours after President Miguel Díaz-Canel announced what he called the most sweeping structural reforms in decades — a 27-ministry restructuring, the creation of municipal governments with independent access to hard currency, the opening of small and medium private enterprises, and the gradual replacement of the decades-old ration book system with targeted cash assistance. The measures amount to an implicit admission that the old model has failed.
They were not enough to quiet the streets.
“We cannot eat, we cannot move, we cannot live,” read one widely shared post from a Havana resident, representative of the anger fueling the demonstrations. Videos circulating on social media showed protesters marching through theحي Obispo neighborhood of Old Havana, some chanting “Libertad” — a word long suppressed on the island. Unlike previous rounds of rare public dissent, security forces did not move to disperse the crowds with force, a notable departure that analysts attributed to both the scale of the protests and a calculation within the government not to inflame an already volatile situation.
The immediate trigger is economic. Cuba has been in freefall since the collapse of the subsidized oil arrangement with Venezuela — a supply chain that for years kept the island’s power plants running, its buses moving, and its factories fed. With that lifeline severed, the government has been forced to ration electricity, ground public transport, and cut food imports. The World Food Programme warned in April that 2.3 million Cubans — roughly one in five residents — are now food insecure.
Díaz-Canel’s reform package, announced Wednesday, amounts to a quiet surrender. The planned reduction of ministries — from 27 to 20 — reflects the government’s inability to sustain a bloated bureaucratic apparatus it can no longer afford. The opening of small private enterprises marks a reversal of the sectoral closures of 2021 under pressure from the Communist Party’s most hardline factions. The replacement of the ration book — long the spine of Cuban social provision — with targeted cash assistance is an acknowledgment that universal subsidies have become unaffordable.
Yet the reforms face a fundamental problem: there is no money to fund them. Cuba’s foreign reserves have been depleted by years of sanctions, the pandemic, and the collapse of tourism revenue. International credit is inaccessible. The new municipal governments with hard-currency autonomy will govern municipalities that have no hard currency to govern.
The protests are also a referendum on the government’s handling of the Venezuelan crisis. Cuba was the principal regional beneficiary of Caracas’s oil subsidies — receiving up to 100,000 barrels per day at preferential prices — and in return provided medical and intelligence services that anchored the Maduro government’s security apparatus. As the Maduro government has come under US pressure, that exchange has frayed. Cubans are now paying the price for a geopolitical bet that did not pay off.
Regional leaders have taken note. Brazilian President Lula da Silva, through the foreign ministry in Brasília, called for a “humanitarian corridor” to allow food and medicine shipments to reach Cuban ports without requiring government approval — a direct challenge to Washington’s embargo that reflects the Lula government’s broader effort to position Brazil as a mediating power in hemispheric crises. Mexico’s President Sheinbaum offered medical supplies through the island’s own diplomatic channels, a more cautious approach that avoids direct confrontation with either Washington or Havana.
It remains unclear whether the protests will force a more fundamental reckoning with the island’s political structure. Cuba’s Communist Party has survived previous moments of popular anger — the 1994 Maleconazo, the 2021 protests triggered by the worst COVID outbreak in the hemisphere — by a combination of targeted repression and strategic concession. What is different this time is the economic context: there is no Soviet subsidy to wait for, no oil bonanza on the horizon, and a population that has run out of patience.
The United States State Department issued a statement calling for “peaceful assembly and the protection of basic rights” — language that stopped short of endorsing the protests but signaled the Trump administration’s view that the Cuban government is approaching an inflection point. Whether Washington will move to ease sanctions in the event of a political opening, or tighten them further in the hope of accelerating one, remains the defining unanswered question.