‘Starving to Death’: Young People in Cuba Tell of the Toll of Trump Administration’s Sanctions

As Cuba’s humanitarian crisis deepens, young people describe daily life without reliable food, water, electricity or hope for the future.

No food, no water, no electricity, the constant smell of burning garbage. The U.S. embargo, in place since 1962, was supposedly intended to promote democracy in Cuba, but over the past seven decades it has only left the country economically strangled and starved of resources. 

Over the past few months, Trump has escalated the pressure campaign that has drained the few resources that keep Cuba’s 10 million residents afloat. Now, the country has fallen into literal darkness. 

I studied at the University of Havana in spring of 2024. When I was there, I was often asked, How can the U.S. do this to us? I didn’t have the heart to tell my peers that most U.S. citizens did not really know the extent of our embargo, if they knew about it at all, on Cuba and how it hurts ordinary people, regardless of how the words “communism” or “socialism” play into U.S. perspectives of the country. 

The U.S.’ 1962 sanctions on Cuba—the longest-lasting on any country—followed the Cuban Missile Crisis and Cold War tensions, prohibiting bilateral trade. In the early 1990s, Cuba’s economy tanked after the Soviet Union’s fall, as the few trade partners that would ally themselves with Cuba and against the U.S. began struggling themselves. 

In 1996, the Helms-Burton Act further isolated Cuba from global trade by ensuring any country that assisted Cuba would also be subject to U.S. sanctions. Any subsidies, support or exports to the country meant no trade with the U.S. Any vessel—say, a boat transporting goods for trade—that enters or arrives at a Cuban port still cannot unload or reload in the U.S. for six months after. 

In 2021, the U.S. put Cuba on the list of state sponsors of terror, which furthered extraterritorial jurisdiction to non-U.S. companies. This means that banks and institutions dealing with Cuba can receive fines from the U.S., making it impossible for foreign investment to enter the country, and nearly impossible for them to trade. 

It is not hard to imagine why so few countries trade with Cuba: Doing so means backpedaling from business with the U.S. 

These policies were implemented in the name of promoting democracy in Cuba, pressuring it toward free, fair elections. Yet what has followed—and worsened recently—is a humanitarian crisis. U.S. sanctions globally lead to over half a million deaths every year. The U.N. has repeatedly called for the U.S. to lift its sanctions on Cuba.

Instead, a little over six months ago, Trump signed an order imposing further sanctions on Cuba. Since then, only one oil tanker—from Russia—has reached the island, in March. Talks continued, as did a “maximum pressure campaign,” (according to New York Times reporter Natalie Kitroeff) alongside an indictment against former President Raúl Castro, brother of Fidel.

There is no fuel for aviation, and the electrical grid is completely down. Women are delivering babies in darkened hospitals, and doctors are trying to keep patients alive without screens to monitor their vitals. 

After kidnapping Venezuela’s president in an overnight bombing campaign earlier this year, Trump said on March 16, “Cuba’s in its last moments of life. I do believe I’ll be having the honor of taking Cuba. That’s a big honor.” Amid the nationwide blackout, on March 29, he declared, “Cuba’s a mess … and they’re going to be next.” 

Sanctions are known to be an ineffective method for true political pressure, instead hurting ordinary citizens. They worsen inequality, lower incomes, increase infant mortality and tend to cause devastating human rights issues—often pushing governments to heighten repression to slow action against the state. It is unacceptable during warfare to deliberately target innocent civilians, but what happens when there are no controls on sanctions that do the same?

Cubans have experienced the “pressure” of sanctions for seven decades—yet no regime change has come.

In 2024, when I studied abroad at the University of Havana, Cuba’s private sector (which had restrictions relaxed in 2011 by Raúl Castro) outsold its state sector for the first time in decades. Still, the embargo’s trade restrictions and failing power plants devastated the island’s infrastructure. Tropical rainstorms filled streets with waist-deep water, canceling my classes. Even then, blackouts were common: Walking to the 18th floor that I lived on in the dark when the power was off, and having to shower with buckets, were common occurrences. At the same time, private stores were popping up in residential spaces, and art scenes were blossoming. (The program I studied with is now cancelled due to the crisis.)

No Sleep, No Food, No Future: Young and Desperate in Cuba

I recently spoke to Paula (whose name has been changed for fear of government retribution), a Havana local I befriended while studying, to get a better idea of what life in Cuba is like under the most recent round of sanctions, and what has changed in the past two years.

Paula included her friend, Lupita (name also changed), in her WhatsApp responses to my questions. Both are in their twenties and worked as tour guides before the crisis, with their sights set on careers as a graphic designer and a journalist, respectively. Now, they work together in the public library. 

“It’s not that easy,” said Paula. “I lost my job as a tour guide since we do not have any clients because few airlines are working in Cuba. That was my main income. … We haven’t been able to work [at the library] in three weeks because of the national power cuts. … Whenever it doesn’t have power, they close.”

Lupita explained there are two or three hours of electricity maximum per day—and sometimes, none at all. “Those hours can come in the morning, the afternoon, but also at night. [If] we get electricity at 2 a.m., you need to wake up, get out of bed, start putting on the washing machine, cooking, charging everything, and it’s exhausting.”

For Cubans like Lupita and Paula, there is no reprieve from the Caribbean heat: no fan, no A/C, no shower.

“You are always tired. You are always hot,” Lupita told me. “You always want to shower. [But] in order to get the water to our tank on the roof of our building, we need electricity. If there is no electricity, we don’t have water … so we basically steal water from a neighbor. The neighbor knows it.” 

Access to drinking water typically comes from delivery trucks, which are hardly running due to the lack of fuel, and 80 percent of Cubans rely on electricity to fill their water tanks. 

With freezers and fridges not working, it is almost impossible to preserve food. “There is almost no food in the fridge,” says Lupita. “We tend to cook for the day and the day after it. Otherwise, the food will go bad. This poses a threat for our economy because we need to spend more money on food that can potentially go bad. Foods that last longer, like canned food or preserved food, are more expensive now. Healthy food is also very expensive.”

“The fact that [you can only buy] food for the day—or two days, tops—is crazy,” says Paula.  “The food that you buy is not in the best state. You have to be really careful with that… [stores] get the same power cuts as every house: If they have a huge power cut for more than one day, they might have to leave the stuff out of the freezer for some time. Imagine it’s a product that comes from another country, and then you don’t even know how many times [it has] been freezing and defrosting.

“We’ve been throwing out food that just spoils because of the power cuts. Imagine that using the freezer is not an option anymore.”

For food that doesn’t spoil, cooking is another hurdle. In some parts of Havana, gas and electricity come from the grid system, Paula explained. For others who are not connected to it, they typically buy their own gas canisters to cook with. 

Yet, Paula says, “Those gas containers have been super expensive lately. They used to give them to us from the government, but that’s not the case anymore. You have to wait for a month to get one of them. … So, many people are using charcoal to cook. People [even in] apartments are trying that because it’s the only way to cook when you have a power cut.” 

Children Are the Biggest Victims of Sanctions

Since January, there are no reliable buses and no public transport. There is no fuel for garbage trucks, leaving neighborhoods to burn their own trash—even in the cramped areas of downtown Havana—and the smell is omnipresent. If trash isn’t burned, mice and mosquitoes run rampant, and Cubans are already suffering from widespread mosquito-borne diseases. Antibiotics and regular over-the-counter medicines are a rarity.

In 2024, I brought a suitcase full of medicines. I had been warned about the impossibility to find, much less buy, any of the treatments I relied on: Advil for my period cramps and my regular headaches, Tylenol for the occasional fever, Tums, Midol, throat soothers and cough suppressants—things I took for granted. When I left these products with my host mother, she immediately told her community in a WhatsApp chat with the entire neighborhood. A neighbor who had gotten a hip replacement asked for some Advil. A mother asked for Tylenol for her sick baby. I was appalled by the embargo’s consequences, and struck at the community’s kindness that felt so unfamiliar. 

Other basic needs, like sleep, have become luxuries as well. “There is no electricity at night—never, ever, ever. Nights are very warm these days … we don’t sleep well,” says Lupita. “Almost never.”

Paula adds, “Of course, if by any chance you get the power in the middle of the night, that means that you will probably wake up to do certain stuff that you need to do with electricity.”

In those rare moments, sleep becomes the least important thing. 

The entire country is facing exhaustion—and sleep deprivation is particularly dangerous in children. One study shows elementary-aged children who consistently sleep less than nine hours every night—children in Cuba are currently hoping for two to three—are significantly impacted in the regions of the brain that affect“memory, intelligence and well-being.” 

“I think not sleeping well or not having breakfast every day, that’s the situation for many, many families, and of course, that’s really affected kids,” says Paula. “They play outside, and they must feel the heat when they get back home.”

An entire generation growing up under these circumstances does not bode well for their futures, or for that of their country.  

While family lives are upended, children are also home from school. Without electricity, schools were forced to close for summer vacation early, says Paula, and were already having shorter schooldays. Paula says admissions tests for universities and certain high schools were also canceled. Younger kids, she says, feel a lack of motivation in educational settings, and families are growing frustrated at the government. They are also missing months of valuable education.

“It’s not like before: Even if families weren’t that okay with the government, they still liked to have a normal life. But now, with these day-long power cuts, the families must be [speaking] really badly about the government, and the kids [are] receiving all of that information,” Paula says. 

There is no such thing as routine without jobs and school. Instead, focus turns to the crisis at hand: finding food and water.

More than half of those killed by sanctions globally are children under 5 years old. One study finds that sanctions have a similar death toll as wars, and should be used with restraint by governments. It also finds that “longer-lived sanctions episodes resulting in higher tolls on lives,” for those who have experienced these sanctions for their entire lives, like nearly all Cubans have.

The study urges, “Evidence that sanctions lead to losses in lives should be sufficient reason to advocate for the suspension of their use,” and that they should be “considered alongside parallel evidence on the effectiveness of sanctions in reaching their stated goals.”

The U.S. embargo is thus not only deadly, but largely ineffective. No regime change has come. The study cites the U.S.’ sanctions as a deliberate example of causing the “deterioration of living conditions in target countries in some cases being acknowledged by policymakers as part of the intended mechanism.” 

While child health and access to free education were successes of the 1959 Cuban Revolution, the past decade has shown an increase in child and infant mortality. The sanctions prohibit medicine, medical tests, equipment like cardiac catheters and ventilators from entering the country because they contain more than 10 percent of U.S. components and are thus banned from being sold in Cuba.

The U.S. also bans Cubans from accessing scientific research and information from biomedical databases.

More than half of the medicines produced in Cuba are in short supply, leaving families with children who have chronic illnesses uncertain about treatment access. The survival rate for children’s cancer is 15 percent lower now that chemotherapy medicines are unavailable due to the sanctions, and has left nearly 10,000 children awaiting surgery.

Pregnant Women Give Birth in Dark Rooms

In Cuba, food shortages lead to underweight pregnant mothers and their newborns. Malnutrition from food shortages leads to weak immune systems and adverse growth and development. Mothers and their doctors are struggling to even get to the hospitals because of the fuel crisis, so delivery rooms are left dirty and understaffed, and mothers are unable to get the care they need. Sanctions truly are life or death, as the U.S. sanctions are directly targeting the most vulnerable. 

“Children … must feel the weight of the country,” says Paula, “mostly because there are more and more children asking for money everywhere. Some, because they might need it, and others because they are maybe encouraged by their families or their friends that do it. [Children begging] is a phenomenon that has been growing in the past few years here in Cuba, which wasn’t the case before COVID.”

Beyond facing escalated responsibility for families and households during crises, women and girls are facing new hardships as well: Menstrual hygiene products are increasingly hard to find.

“We [can] only buy them in the private stores, which are usually imported, and not everyone can access those stores. Before we got them at the bodega, where we get the monthly products that are subsidized by the government. At that point, we used to get pads [for] each girl or woman, but that’s not the case anymore,” says Paula.

Another side effect of downed electrical grids particularly affects women: leaving the house after dark, with no street lights. 

“Power cuts make it impossible for us to walk around. It’s pitch black after 9 p.m. everywhere you go. Only certain areas have some power, but the rest is so black that it is really scary to go out. Usually, you would take transportation to get back safely, but it’s really expensive right now due to the fact that we don’t have fuel. The taxis have, of course, higher prices,” says Paula. “I’m a young person: I like to go out and everything. I would say a lot of people just don’t go out because of that. In the case of girls, I would say it is even more because of how insecure we feel in the streets.

“[The lack of security is] a new thing. I always thought about Cuba as a really safe country, and it is, still; even though the situation is really out of hand, it’s still a really safe country.” 

Yet it is Cuba’s community that, through crisis after crisis, supports each other in the face of continued hardship.

“The communities are really working together these days. It has always been a thing here in Cuba [that] anything you need, you can ask your neighbor, as [is] tradition here. But lately, because everybody knows that everybody’s having a hard time, that creates this sense of empathy among people,” Lupita told me. “Every time we can, we try to help each other. … We usually get together at [a] friend’s house [who has electricity when we don’t] to charge the things that we need. Also with food: If there is anyone that lives in an area that [has electricity], we tend to give them our food so they don’t spoil.

“Generally, I try to be nice to people on the street, especially because I know that nobody’s having the best sleeping nights, and people are really worried about everyday life. … That has created this atmosphere [that] all of us are going through the same thing.” 

Power outages occurred while I was in Havana in 2024 as well, though less frequently. Friends went without running water for days at a time. When I left Havana to visit other provinces, sleeping without fans and A/C was the norm, as Havana’s energy was consistently prioritized. Still, any night of the week, live salsa bands played, street corners downtown filled with the sounds of reggaeton, rumba and free dance classes tucked in school buildings after hours. Everyone I met considered themselves an artist in some capacity.

Now, even those are disappearing: the things that make Cuba distinctly Cuba.

“Everybody’s trying to take refuge in the few places that we get to go nowadays [at] nighttime, but also at reading clubs, movie clubs or something like that,” said Paula. “There are a few, but because of the [oil] situation, many of the places that we were used [go] to are closed.” 

From outside the country, it is incredibly difficult to communicate with Cubans. Cubans—in my classes, at dinner tables, on the street—were shocked to hear how little we knew about the country we had chosen to study in. But the lack of information and communication between our countries is by design: Sanctions prevent websites from being opened by Cuban servers, even free or educational ones such as Gallup. While the U.S. accuses the Cuban government of censorship, it is American websites that geoblock Cubans from medical research, social media and general information websites—even the ones that aren’t selling services, which would be illegal for Cubans to use. This restricts information about what is happening in Cuba, and makes dialogue between the two countries almost impossible.  

“Like Being Inside a War”

“We are completely aware that the government is not taking care of the situation now, and they don’t pretend to. There is a lot of repression, political arrests,” Paula says. “Even protests cannot be done without having fear of somebody seeing you and putting you into jail. It’s kind of like being inside a war, but a softer one.”

“[People] are protesting every day, but still, nothing changes,” she continues. “The only thing that might happen is that they put you in jail, which has been something that has happened lately.”

“How is it possible … to have the rest of the world watching that and not doing anything about it?” asks Paula. “The organizations that are supposed to [help] are just not doing anything about it. … There are people that are actually starving to death right now. People that are in jail because they protest against a dictatorship that we did not choose. … There must be something that [people] can do from the outside in order for us to change the government here.”

Young people like Paula and Lupita feel like there is no future in Cuba. 

On top of the detrimental impacts of lost sleep and a lack of resources to support young people, Cuba has suffered from a brain drain due to mass emigration. Though free healthcare and education are still accessible to all, the quality has lowered in recent years due to the lack of resources and constant power cuts. There is still a food ration program and universal pensions, but what the government is able to provide is still not enough. Over 1 million people have left Cuba since 2022—nearly one in 10 people. After COVID shut down Cuba’s tourism economy, it has failed to bounce back and instead suffers from losing its primary sector of income for most, including Paula and Lupita. 

“I don’t really see myself here. I hope I can be out of Cuba soon,” said Paula, who has been accepted to a masters program internationally and is waiting on a visa interview. But if it doesn’t work out, “it doesn’t matter if it’s crossing borders or something. At some point you just do whatever you can to leave. … [It] is something that I’ve been trying to do since 2020, and it’s finally possible. It’s the general idea of the younger generation that you feel like you’re wasting your time here.

“To be a young person right now in Cuba … is trying to leave the country and emigrate somewhere else. … The idea of not being able to leave Cuba right now feels really depressing. … If I didn’t have any plans to leave the country, I would probably be much more affected by the crisis right now … but not everybody has that same possibility. I can assure you that anyone between 20 and 30 is trying to leave the country as soon as they can.”

For the country young people are forced to leave behind, Paula knows it needs help. “It feels like some kind of betrayal.” 

“What Cubans probably need the most is some kind of intervention,” Paula continues. “We know that we are inside of a dictatorship. We need help to change the government. It has been 70 years without us being able to actually do something about it, like 70 years of brainwashing, of indoctrination, of exile, emigration. The population that we have left [is] not strong enough to face the government. If you don’t have the basic needs covered, or at least [enough] power to sleep at night, you wouldn’t have the strength to actually face the government.”

In the face of a regime that has no intention to change, and after decades of sanctions that have failed to produce the democracy they supposedly promote while starving Cuban residents, it’s time for the U.S. to confront the human cost.