Havana experienced widespread fuel shortages, suspended bus service and prolonged blackouts in spring 2026 following a near-total blockade of oil shipments implemented under President Trump's maximum pressure campaign against Cuba, according to the White House. Taxi drivers could not find gasoline for sale, uncollected garbage accumulated in heaps, and residents queued outside bakeries for their daily government ration of bread.

Many streets in the capital carried little vehicle traffic, and the Malecón, the city's seaside promenade, was largely deserted and covered with brown seaweed. Russian and Canadian airlines suspended flights to Cuba after the Cuban government said it was running out of jet fuel.

Trump returned to office in 2025 and his administration implemented the maximum pressure campaign, which included the oil blockade. In his first term, he had reinstated travel restrictions on Cuba, increased sanctions and closed the U.S. Embassy in Havana in 2017. President Biden left most of those restrictions in place. The U.S. government designated Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism, impeding Cuba's ability to access international banking services, and the Trump administration pressured Latin American countries to cancel their agreements with Cuba to provide Cuban doctors.

White House officials expressed a desire for regime change in Cuba, including the removal of President Miguel Díaz-Canel. "The honor of taking Cuba," Trump said.

More than one million Cubans have emigrated from the island in recent years, and birth rates have declined. "The sanctions have everything to do with it. They are strangling us," said Cuban journalist Liz Oliva Fernández. "The truth is, most of the people who are still here are just waiting to leave," she said. Around 2016, when the Cuban government partially opened its economy and U.S. travel restrictions were relaxed, Fernández said her friends expressed optimism about staying. "For the first time in my life, my friends were questioning: 'Maybe I should stay, maybe I have a future here,'" she said. "The narrative wasn't, 'Oh, poor Cuba.' It was about Cubans creating things. We wanted to be a part of the change, to be part of the transformation," she said. Most of those friends, who launched nonprofits and pop-up restaurants around 2016, now live in countries around the world, according to Fernández.

In spring 2026, 25-year-old Gian Carlo Brioso sold his possessions and prepared to fly to Italy. Brioso, a singer and guitarist who performed near Mick Jagger at the Rolling Stones concert in Havana in 2016, trained as a nurse and worked at a military hospital after college, but lost that job after he expressed support online for the San Isidro protest movement, which opposes government censorship of artistic expression. He has kidney stones and has been waiting more than a year for surgery because hospitals are overloaded and lack basic medicines. "The whole system has collapsed," Brioso said. "If a young person wants a future, this is not the place," he said.