As I write this, it's Christmas Eve. While many of us are moving through a season of comfort and predictability, I keep returning to what I saw walking through the streets of Cuba. Not in headlines or statistics, but at street level. Neighbourhoods without running water. Electricity that fails often enough to be expected. Roads and sidewalks eroded into improvisation rather than repair. Infrastructure that no longer supports daily life, but merely endures alongside it.

What struck me most were the small, improvised economies operating inside people's homes. Corner shops carved out of living rooms and front windows. Shelves mostly empty. A few scattered items; soap, canned goods, a bottle or two; offered more as possibility than supply. These were not businesses in the conventional sense, but acts of persistence. People selling what little they could source, not to grow, but to survive.

In contrast, government stores stood rigid and bare. Long lines formed early, people waiting patiently for whatever might arrive. No certainty, no choice; just endurance. Elderly men and women stood apart, looking through windows rather than lining up, watching quietly, as if calculating whether the effort was worth the return. There was no anger in their posture. Just fatigue. A lifetime lived long enough to recognize scarcity as permanent rather than temporary.

And yet, the streets were not chaotic. Homes were occupied. Communities functioned. People greeted one another. Children played. There was dignity in how life continued despite the absence of systems meant to sustain it. Pride, not in conditions, but in endurance. A refusal to surrender daily routines, even when the state no longer reliably provides the basics those routines depend on.

That contrast stayed with me. Material failure on one side; social cohesion on the other. Institutions visibly broken, yet communities holding themselves together through habit, restraint, and mutual recognition. As we sit surrounded by abundance and choice, Cuba offers a sobering reminder; collapse does not always look like disorder. Sometimes it looks like people quietly adapting, carrying on, and preserving dignity in circumstances that leave very little room for it.

Cuba's Economic Landscape

The Cuban economy rests on three pillars, each one cracked. State control dictates production and distribution, yet delivers neither predictably. Tourism brings foreign currency when it comes; when it doesn't, entire sectors go dormant. Remittances from family abroad keep individual households afloat but cannot repair what the state has allowed to deteriorate.

I watched this play out in Holguín. Hotels near the beaches sat half-empty, their lobbies staffed but waiting. Tour buses passed through neighborhoods where residents had no meaningful contact with the tourist economy happening beside them. The money flows in narrow channels, reaching some while bypassing most, and when global disruptions close those channels entirely, there is no backup system.

The pandemic proved this. When travel stopped, so did the pretense of economic diversification. Jobs vanished. Services contracted. The state stepped in where it could, but its capacity had already been stretched thin by decades of deferred maintenance and misallocated resources. Families with relatives in Miami or Madrid survived on wire transfers; families without them made do with less.

The government has acknowledged the brittleness, at least partially. Small private businesses now operate legally in food service and retail; spaces that would have been unthinkable a generation ago. Joint ventures with foreign companies receive official encouragement. On paper, these reforms signal openness. On the ground, they operate within boundaries so narrow that growth remains theoretical rather than realized.

Because the fundamental problem persists: there is not enough of anything. Goods arrive sporadically. Industrial output continues its decline. Foreign investors cal...