As tensions between Washington and Havana mount, what is life like for Cubans living through a weekslong oil blockade? NPR’s Adrian Ma speaks to CNN’s Havana Bureau Chief Patrick Oppmann about life on the island.
ADRIAN MA, HOST:
For millions of Cubans, daily life has turned into a desperate struggle. Earlier this week, Cuba was forced into a nationwide blackout after months of the U.S. effectively choking off oil shipments to the island from Cuba’s allies. The country continues to experience rolling blackouts. And meanwhile, President Trump continues to float the idea of taking over the country. But amid negotiations with the U.S., Cuban officials say they don’t intend to go anywhere.
For more on how those politics are affecting life for millions of everyday Cubans, we reached out to Patrick Oppmann. He’s the Havana bureau chief for CNN. Welcome, and thanks for joining us.
PATRICK OPPMANN: My pleasure.
MA: Can you just paint the scene for us? What is life like right now in Havana where you are?
OPPMANN: So Cubans, of course, have always had many difficulties, many challenges. This is a different level. I’ve lived in Cuba for 14 years, and you are seeing people begin to live out a humanitarian crisis in real time, where their food is spoiling, where most of the day – sometimes the entire day – they don’t have power. There’s no transportation now really of any kind. If you can find gas, it’s going to be hugely expensive, more than a regular Cuban who works for the state will make in an entire year. And so we’re just seeing the economy, which is already, you know, failing – this is not a well-managed economy in the best of times – but it’s grinding to a complete hold as the U.S. prevents any oil from coming in.
MA: How does that compare to the scene outside of the city?
OPPMANN: It’s much more dire outside of the city. Havana is still the capital. This is where all the government officials live. It’s where tourists come. And so there’s still some sense of normalcy. And in certain parts of the city, you get power more than other parts, but you get power every day. In the countryside, where we’ve seen some of the more violent protests, there are towns that don’t get power for two or three days.
MA: You said that you’ve been covering Cuba for 14 years, and this moment feels different. How, for the people that you speak to there, does it feel different? Are they feeling like this moment is kind of a new phase?
OPPMANN: It’s a new level of difficulty where before, they struggled to make ends meet and now they are not making ends meet. You know, one of the byproducts of this oil blockade, making a bad problem much worse, is just the pickup of trash. And I was really shocked. I went into one of the most densely populated neighborhoods in Havana, and there are whole streets that were just clogged – you know, a city block – with nothing but trash ’cause the government’s not picking up the trash anymore. They can’t pick up the trash anymore. They don’t have fuel for the trucks. And people are living next to trash piles, and they’re buried under trash, and this has potential to cause a major health crisis.
MA: My understanding is that some of this for the residents is really boiling over in frustration. I’ve seen some reports about some protests. Can you talk about that?
OPPMANN: When you go for hours and hours and almost an entire day without power, and when it gets to be nighttime and you kind of realize, one, that you’re not going to get any power that day, and two, it’s dark, so you really can’t be identified, is in you go out and you bang on pots and pans. It’s called a cacerolazo. And it’s very common in Latin America, less common here because if you protest here, you could be arrested for that. You could be tried for that.
And so for people to do this, they’re taking a big risk, and they don’t care anymore. People feel like they’ve got nothing left to lose. And particularly when you go more than a day here without any power, your food begins to spoil, and that is a huge sacrifice that Cubans have made, to have any food in the fridge at this point. The price of food has just gone shooting up.
And I should just point out here, when you don’t have power, you don’t get water because water is pumped in, and you don’t get water here every day. You get it to come every other day, every third day, you have a water day, dia del agua (ph). So if you don’t have power on your water day, you don’t get water, and that means you can’t shower, you can’t wash your plates, you’re really not living in this century anymore. And I think for a population that is an educated population that had a much better living standard not that long ago, they’re just seeing their lives collapse around them.
MA: Given that, what are Cubans telling you about the messages coming from President Trump, who earlier this week kind of mused about taking over Cuba?
OPPMANN: Obviously, there are a lot of detractors of the government that feel like the government has mismanaged many crisises now, not just this one. But there are people as well who either support the government or just are fiercely proud, and they have read stories or maybe even remember what Cuba was like before the revolution, where the U.S. essentially called the shots.
And so Donald Trump – when he says, I can take Cuba, I can do anything I want with Cuba – that really brings back some bad memories when this island was considered a kind of a plaything. And so I think people here don’t want to go back to that, but they also feel that their government here has not opened the economy like we’ve seen in China and Vietnam, and the limits here on private industry are so strict that people actually talk about, you know, the two blockade – the U.S. blockade and then the one that our government places on us.
MA: Given the kind of dire picture that you’ve painted, what are the consequences of this continuing?
OPPMANN: So already, you know, the government says there are about 100,000 people on a waiting list for surgeries. If you went to a hospital now, whereas before they would have a generator with fuel during a blackout, now there’s no fuel. You’d probably have doctors holding up cellphone camera lights so you can have light during the operation. You know, there might not be running water in the hospital. You might be sending your kids to school, and there’s no power during the entire day, which, in the summer here, is going to get very uncomfortable.
And it’s all these little things that add up to kind of a cascade effect, where you’re already hearing about people having crops that can’t get to the city, and so they’re rotting. Inflation’s out of control, and people here are already, you know, just hanging on, and I think people have fallen well below the poverty line. So people – everyone kind of, at this point – many people, I should say – are looking for a way out, and the desperation is getting such that you hear about crimes you never heard about before. You see these protests on a nightly basis, which is something that was not common here, and you can just kind of feel a society breaking down in real time.
MA: We’ve been speaking with CNN’s Havana bureau chief Patrick Oppmann. Thanks again.
OPPMANN: Thank you so much.
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