The streets of Trinidad, one of the main tourist destinations in Cuba, appear completely deserted in a video recorded last Sunday, Mother's Day, by the Facebook user "Yamila Emprende Onli."
The Cuban woman walked through the city and passed by the San José restaurant—one of the most well-known in Trinidad—without encountering a single tourist or hardly any passersby.
"Today is Sunday, Mother's Day, and look at how the streets of Trinidad look. It's unsettling. In previous years, there was hardly any space to walk through these streets because they were filled with tourists."
The image contrasts with what Trinidad was for many years: a 16th-century colonial city, designated as UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1988, which structured its entire local economy around tourism: private homes, paladares, crafts, transportation, and guides.
The parish priest of the Church of San Francisco de Paula, José Conrado Rodríguez, summarized it harshly to the Miami Herald: "It was a complete economy based on tourism... Now they have no way to live." He added: "Their hotels are empty."
The collapse is not only affecting foreign tourists. Cubans themselves have stopped going out on the streets, not just due to mass emigration, but because their salaries are not enough to socialize.
With gasoline at 4,000 pesos per liter and power outages lasting up to 20 hours a day, families are taking shelter in their homes to avoid the heat and conserve the little they have.
The situation is repeated throughout the entire country. The result is cities that resemble ghostly scenes, especially painful during dates that once drew massive celebrations.
Trinidad is not an isolated case. The empty streets of Limonar, Vedado in Havana, and the images of Cárdenas have been documented in viral videos throughout 2025 and 2026, all sharing the same common denominator: cities without life.
The data from the National Office of Statistics and Information (ONEI) indicates that Cuba welcomed only 1.8 million tourists in 2025, the lowest figure since 2002 excluding the pandemic, representing a drop of 13.4% compared to 2024. In 2018, the island received 4.7 million visitors.
The tourism debacle is accompanied by a human exodus. More than 1.4 million Cubans have left the island since 2021, with estimates placing the actual population below eight million.
Eighty-nine percent of Cubans who remain in the country live in extreme poverty, according to the Cuban Organization for Human Rights.
The Las Dunas hotel in Trinidad closed in 2026, a further sign of the decline of local tourist infrastructure in a city that, as the YouTuber Ana de Cuba described during a tour last March, "seemed frozen in time and had less social life than in the 18th century."
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