In central Havana, a giant mound of sand-colored rubble fills an entire city block. It is all that remains of the Superior Institute of Industrial Design—a stately building that in its 166 years housed a Spanish officers’ club, U.S. occupation forces after 1898, Cuba’s health ministry, and, finally, the design school. Declared uninhabitable years ago, it suffered two partial collapses in 2025. The state never sent anyone to fix it. This past February, what remained suddenly fell, entombing several squatters. When I visited in June, skinny men scaled the craggy surface, prying loose bits of brick that they carted off to build makeshift houses.

Cuba, on its current trajectory, is headed for the fate of the design school: what lies ahead is an accelerating collapse of the state and economy. Unless this course is reversed soon, rebuilding the island as a stable, prosperous, and democratic place could become virtually impossible.

A few months ago, a slow unraveling was not what most observers expected. Because of the tariff threat in place since February against countries supplying oil to Cuba, President Donald Trump’s warnings of military action, and reports of secret talks between Havana and Washington, many believed that either a power-sharing deal or a Venezuela-style military operation was imminent.

By late May, that looked less likely. By then, according to the Miami Herald, the backchannel talks had collapsed amid opposition from Florida Republicans and Havana’s rejection of Washington’s offer: U.S. investment and petroleum in exchange for President Miguel Díaz-Canel’s removal and the privatization of Cuba’s state oil company. Havana enacted 176 economic reforms in June, which expanded space for the private sector, but this did not satisfy Washington. While allowing limited U.S. fuel and food to reach the island through private distributors, the Trump administration added new sanctions against state companies and regime officials. In August, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Axios that the policy’s timeline had shifted, saying that it would take “patience and persistence” and that the regime could survive into 2028 or beyond.

There are a few ways to read Rubio’s comments. One is that the administration is bluffing. It is threatening to maintain the current extraordinary sanctions pressure either to restart the stalled negotiations or to misdirect the regime ahead of a military operation. Another is that, with the United States entangled in Iran and busy managing Venezuela, Cuba has simply been demoted as a priority. The administration has put the island on life support, with just enough U.S. fuel and food allowed to reach private firms to prevent societal breakdown, but otherwise it has no new plan. Cuba policy has been set to autopilot. A third is that the administration has concluded that waiting for the one-party system to implode from within is the only viable path to regime change, even if it is long, tortuous, and uncertain.

Regardless, what is not widely appreciated outside Cuba is how economic and state collapse—triggered by the regime’s unwillingness to reform and hastened by U.S. sanctions—is already remaking the island. The state, aside from its capacity for political repression, is rapidly weakening. The economy is contracting and growing more unequal, leaving a large underclass too poor to participate meaningfully in the new private sector. Social cohesion is fraying, and crime is rising, while plunging birth rates and emigration warp Cuba’s demographics.

All these trends predate the foreign oil cutoff and the newest sanctions by years, if not decades, but each now appears to be accelerating. The danger is that the longer the impasse lasts, the more they will calcify into the baseline conditions for any future transition, narrowing the chances that Cuba ever becomes a well-governed country—and increasing the likelihood of an even more dysfunctional, chaotic future instead. If nothing changes soon, a transitional government could one day find itself in the same impossible position as the men atop the ruins of the design institute: trying to build something safe, habitable, and lasting out of rubble.

AUTHORITARIAN ANARCHY

In Havana, I heard a joke. “Only two things work in this country: the state........

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