Havana

It’s hot in Havana. The summer’s electrical storms have arrived, lighting up the sky, while down on the ground we’ve been without power for 16 hours, meaning no sleep. The four-month-old US oil blockade is biting, but Cuba’s government still refuses to bend the knee to Washington, so surveillance aircraft are circling. An aircraft carrier, the USS Nimitz, has arrived in the neighbourhood. We expect an attack at any moment. Donald Trump has made it clear that after Venezuela and Iran, Cuba is next on his list for decapitation. His administration wants a change of government and the economy opened up. Cuba’s 95-year-old ex-president Raul Castro has been indicted for murder, opening the way for an abduction like the one in Caracas in January.

It’s nearly two months since Donald Trump signed an executive order imposing a total oil blockade on Cuba, and life is becoming odder. At the weekend, in a down-island town called Moron, teenage kids burnt down the local Communist party headquarters. Meanwhile, here in Havana, we’re awaiting the arrival of the Irish hip-hoppers Kneecap at the head of a humanitarian relief armada carrying solar panels. I live in a rooftop apartment. At night, it’s a good spot from which to look out over a city that once sent up music and light but is now as dark as a desert. The oil blockade, designed to either force the bankrupt Communist government into major reform or the population to rise up against them, is worsening what were already terrible blackouts.

The first scent of trouble came when Cuba’s government ordered all its non-essential workers home. By packing them off (and there are plenty of them, given Cuba is one of the world’s last centrally planned communist states) the government hoped the island’s exhausted national power grid would get a breather. It didn’t work, the main power station crashed, and Cuba went dark. At first, I didn’t think it was a big deal. Power cuts in this all-but-bankrupt state have long been a daily scourge. But it turns out there’s a categoric difference between 20 and 24 hours of blackout. I came to Cuba in 2018 for a three-month stay and here I am, now married with a three-year-old son. Friends call this my ‘Cuban midlife crisis’, which I resent.

Two Russian ships docked Tuesday in Venezuela’s La Guaira port, twenty miles away from Caracas. The stop comes after military exercises were conducted in the Atlantic, with four vessels stopping in Havana late last month. This is all part of a decades-long “look-at-us” operation, also known as a “show the flag” move, as Russia’s defense ministry puts it. While Russia’s presence in Cuba and Venezuela is not a new phenomenon, conflict in the East has only accelerated their muscle-flexing in the West. These movements mark Russia’s first extensive military exercises in the hemisphere in five years, as well as their first deployment of a nuclear submarine in close proximity to the US since the Cold War.

Could the growing tide of protests finally topple Cuba's communist government? Many Cubans are certainly angry: Sunday marked the largest-ever demonstration against the island’s regime. Organised through social media, the protests, which began in a town twenty miles outside Havana, quickly spread across Cuba. Thousands of demonstrators marched along some of Havana’s most iconic streets, chanting ‘Freedom!’, ‘Fatherland and Life’ and ‘Down with the dictatorship!’ Discontent with the regime, which took power in 1959, has been rising for the past year. Before this weekend, the most high-profile protests had been from artists and intellectuals demanding freedom of expression. But this discontent is spreading rapidly.