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The renowned American journalist Daniel Allott issued a warning this week that resonated throughout the hemisphere: “Venezuela is collapsing… and so is Cuba.”
In his opinion article published in The Hill, the former editor of the influential Washington outlet described a parallel crisis that threatens to sink two authoritarian regimes sustained for more than two decades by corruption, drug trafficking, and political repression.
While the government of Nicolás Maduro wobbles under international pressure, the regime of Miguel Díaz-Canel faces a structural collapse that has already surpassed the crisis of the Special Period.
Widespread blackouts, uncontrolled inflation, a sharp decline in production, and massive emigration paint a picture of national ruin that Allott described as "a slow but sure collapse of the Cuban system."
If Venezuela is on shaky ground, Cuba is beginning to fall, summarized the analyst, who warned that the island is experiencing its worst moment in six decades, with a paralyzed economy, a currency without value, and an exhausted society.
Blackouts, hunger, and mass exodus: The symptoms of collapse
The text from The Hill gathered shocking data for its readers, but what Cubans experience is part of their daily life, among them the fifth national blackout in less than a year that Cuba endured on September 10th.
The electrical grid, corroded and in disrepair, has collapsed twelve times in the last 14 months. In many towns, Cubans cook by candlelight, charge their phones at work, and sleep on rooftops to escape the heat.
The energy decline is dragging the rest of the country down. Shipments of Venezuelan oil, which for two decades were the economic lifeline of the Castro regime, decreased from 56,000 barrels per day in 2023 to less than 8,000 in June 2025.
La Habana now depends on emergency shipments sent by Russia or Mexico, which are insufficient to meet internal demand.
The result is devastating: the Cuban peso is around 450 per dollar in the informal market, state salaries amount to less than 20 dollars a month, and tourism—once a driving force of the economy—has plummeted by more than 50% in the last decade.
In parallel, sugar production fell below 150,000 tons, the lowest level since the 19th century. “Today Cuba imports sugar, a tragic irony for a country that was a global agricultural powerhouse,” noted Allott.
All of this is compounded by an unprecedented demographic crisis: more than two million Cubans, nearly 20% of the population, have left the island in just four years. The country is losing doctors, engineers, and teachers at a pace that makes any internal recovery unattainable.
Two Declining Twin Dictatorships
The analysis from The Hill also highlighted the interdependence between Havana and Caracas. For 25 years, both regimes supported each other: Venezuela paid with oil, while Cuba provided intelligence, doctors, and instruments of political control. However, that "revolutionary" alliance is starting to crumble.
"Cuba and Venezuela are two exhausted revolutions clinging to a crumbling ideology", wrote Allott.
The journalist quoted the Cuban dissident Óscar Biscet, who defined both governments as “twin dictatorships that sustain themselves through corruption and transnational crime.” According to Biscet, castroism “effectively occupies the political and military institutions of Venezuela,” using that influence to export repression and drug trafficking.
A collapse with hemispheric implications
The article's final warning pointed to Washington. A collapse of the Cuban regime, just 90 miles from Florida, would have immediate consequences: new waves of migration, a power vacuum, and the risk of foreign interference.
"The flashing lights in Havana —Allott warned— could be the next alarm in the hemisphere."
The diagnosis arrives as the United States strengthens its military deployment in the Caribbean, as CiberCuba has documented in recent weeks, and when the Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado calls for a regional alliance "to free Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua from communism".
If Venezuela is already experiencing its collapse in plain sight, Cuba is suffering it in slow motion, under an official silence that cannot hide the disaster. As Allott concluded, "the pillars of Cuban socialism — energy, tourism, sugar, healthcare, and education — are all crumbling at once."
And this time, neither Raúl Castro nor Maduro's oil will be able to sustain it.
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