What is life like in Cuba under communism? If you ask the Cuban government, everything is fine. If you ask the journalist who just had his cameras seized at Havana's airport, was followed by undercover intelligence agents through the city streets, and spent a night on the eighth floor of the only hotel in Havana with 24/7 electricity planning an escape route — the answer is very different. This is a firsthand account of what Cuba actually looks like in 2025, and what communism looks like when it stops being a political theory and becomes someone's daily reality.
This video was filmed under extreme pressure in Havana, Cuba, on the eve of May 1st — Cuba's biggest annual communist march. The journalist behind it may have been inside a hotel room with Cuban spies in the lobby below. Here is everything he documented before, during, and after that moment.
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Cameras and recording equipment seized at Havana airport customs upon arrival
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What Is Life Really Like in Cuba Under Communism?
Walking the streets of Havana in 2025, the first thing you notice is the silence. There are almost no cars. The buildings that line the boulevards are crumbling, their facades peeling away in layers. The University of Cuba sits in a state of visible decay. Outside hospitals, lines of people stretch around the block — not because the hospitals are busy saving lives, but because the hospitals are barely functioning at all.
Food is scarce. Gas is nearly impossible to afford — one liter costs the equivalent of $10 USD, a staggering figure in a country where wages are government-controlled and pitifully low. The poverty on display is not the kind you catch in a single dramatic image. It is everywhere, layered into the texture of everyday life: in the empty shelves, the dark streets, the exhausted faces waiting in line for basic medical care.
This is communism not as an ideology debated in classrooms, but as a lived system — one where the government controls markets, food distribution, hospitals, media, and increasingly, what people are allowed to say and show to the outside world.
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Empty Havana streets — almost no cars due to $10-per-liter gasoline prices
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Why Is Cuba in a Humanitarian Crisis Right Now?
Cuba is currently experiencing what many observers are calling its worst humanitarian crisis in roughly 50 years. The root cause, as explained by Cuban intelligence sources on the ground, is the collapse of its oil and gas supply from Venezuela.
For decades, Venezuela under Hugo Chávez and later Nicolás Maduro supplied Cuba with heavily subsidized oil in exchange for Cuban doctors, military advisors, and political support. That arrangement has now effectively ended following the arrest of Maduro and the resulting political instability in Venezuela. With no oil flowing in, Cuba's entire infrastructure is buckling.
- Power outages are now a daily and nightly reality across most of Havana and the rest of Cuba.
- Hospitals are performing surgeries by flashlight because there is no reliable electricity.
- Transportation has collapsed — gas is so expensive that almost no private vehicles are on the road.
- Food distribution, already controlled by the state, has become even more unreliable.
The one hotel in Havana confirmed to have 24/7 electricity was notable enough that it was specifically sought out before arriving — because every other hotel's website was offline or intermittently unavailable due to power failures. That detail alone says everything about the scale of the crisis.
Does Cuba Have Freedom of Speech or a Free Press?
No. And that is not an abstract legal answer — it is something that becomes viscerally real the moment you land at Havana's airport with a camera.
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Cuban intelligence agents spotted in the hotel lobby, eighth floor footage
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Upon arrival, all filming equipment was seized by Cuban authorities at customs: both GoPro cameras, Meta smart glasses, and microphones. The only things that slipped through were an iPhone and a small microphone buried at the bottom of a backpack. Those two items became the only tools available to document what was happening.
Cuba's constitution does not protect freedom of expression in any meaningful way. The government controls all major media. Independent journalism is illegal in practice, if not always explicitly in law. Filming in public, asking ordinary citizens about their lives, or interviewing people about communism are all activities that can trigger a response from Cuban state security — and quickly.
What makes this especially sobering is that the journalist in this account entered on a legal visa. There are 12 categories of authorized travel to Cuba for American citizens; journalistic activity is one of them. The visa said so explicitly. And yet within hours of arrival, the footage was being monitored, equipment was confiscated, and intelligence agents were deployed to track movements across the city.
What Happens When a Journalist Tries to Film in Cuba?
The sequence of events unfolded quickly. After leaving the airport without most of their equipment, the team began filming in the streets — documenting the empty roads, crumbling infrastructure, and the long queues outside a hospital. Near the hospital, an undercover police officer was spotted approaching. The team left in a taxi before contact was made.
Later that evening, while conducting a street interview about communism near the hotel, a woman approached and appeared to begin recording on her phone. When confronted, she claimed to be on a phone call — but her phone screen was open to the camera app. One of the security guards followed her discreetly and watched her meet with another Cuban intelligence operative.
By 9:30 that night, Cuban intelligence agents were confirmed to be in the hotel lobby. A man who had been seen alone at the hotel earlier that day was now with two others. The lobby was being watched. The exits were being monitored. And outside, a blacked-out vehicle was visible from the eighth-floor hotel window, positioned to watch the building's entrance.
The options being weighed that night included: attempting to blend in with hotel guests and slip out undetected, reaching the US Embassy roughly a mile and a half away on foot, buying a last-minute flight to avoid flagging the purchase in advance, or — as a last resort — stealing a boat and surrendering to the US Coast Guard at sea.
Why Does Cuba Have No Power and Constant Blackouts?
The power crisis in Cuba is directly tied to the loss of Venezuelan oil. Without fuel to run its power plants, Cuba cannot generate consistent electricity for its population. The result is a system of rolling blackouts that affect homes, businesses, and critically, hospitals.
Surgeons in Havana are reportedly performing operations using flashlights. That is not a metaphor or an exaggeration — it is the practical consequence of a government-controlled healthcare system in a country that no longer has the energy resources to keep its hospitals lit.
For ordinary Cubans, the nightly blackouts are simply life. Streets go dark. Fans stop. Refrigerators fail. The original plan for this documentary was to walk Havana's streets after sunset specifically to show these blackouts on camera — to let audiences abroad see what it looks like when an entire city loses its lights because of a failed political and economic system.
How Does the US Embargo Affect Cuba in 2025?
The US embargo against Cuba has been in place since the early 1960s and remains one of the most debated foreign policy measures in American history. In practical terms, it restricts American businesses from operating in Cuba and limits financial transactions between the two countries.
The Cuban government consistently points to the embargo — which it calls el bloqueo, the blockade — as the primary cause of the country's economic suffering. Critics of that argument note that Cuba's government has had over six decades to build a functional economy and has instead maintained a system that concentrates power while delivering poverty.
In 2025, the geopolitical temperature has risen further. The Trump administration's posture toward Cuba has hardened, and figures like Marco Rubio have publicly floated the idea that a regime change in Cuba would not be unwelcome. Whether that rhetoric leads anywhere concrete remains to be seen — but on the ground in Havana, the tension is palpable.
What Do Ordinary Cubans Think About Communism?
This is the question that Cuban intelligence most wanted to prevent from being answered on camera. The mere act of asking Cuban citizens what they think about communism — on a public street, with a microphone — was enough to trigger surveillance, equipment seizure, and an intelligence operation against a visiting journalist.
That response is itself an answer. In a country where people felt genuinely free to praise their government, there would be no need to silence journalists who ask the question. The fact that asking ordinary people about communism is treated as a national security threat tells you more about the Cuban government's confidence in its own people's loyalty than any official propaganda ever could.
In 2021, Cuba saw its largest anti-government protests in decades. People took to the streets demanding food, medicine, and freedom. The government's response was mass arrests. The same march that brings thousands into the streets every May 1st to celebrate the revolution also serves as a reminder of what happened to those who protested in the opposite direction.
Communism, as this account makes clear, is not simply an economic system. It is a system of control — over markets, over media, over movement, and over the story a country is allowed to tell about itself. What happened in Havana was not an anomaly. It was the system working exactly as designed.
