What does tourism preserve in Havana?

The hotel has power. The neighborhood around it does not.

This is not an accident of infrastructure. It is a policy decision. In October 2024, as Cuba experienced its worst nationwide blackout in decades — the Antonio Guiteras Power Plant failing, the national grid collapsing, residents in Havana going without electricity for up to five days — Cuba’s Ministry of Tourism announced that for the 2024-2025 winter season, hotels would be equipped with backup generators to ensure stability for tourists even during energy emergencies. The announcement was made to Russian tour operators, who were the primary source of foreign visitors at the time. It was confirmed publicly. It was not reported as a scandal. It was reported as a service guarantee.

In the street outside, a woman was trying to find ice to keep her insulin cold.

In the tourist zones, the restaurants stayed open.

Havana is the most architecturally intact colonial city in the Americas. Its five original plazas, its cathedral, its fortifications, its Baroque and Neoclassical facades — designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1982 — have survived because the city could not afford to tear them down and replace them. The same forces that preserved the architecture — the US embargo, the collapse of the Soviet subsidy, the political calculus that made foreign investment structurally impossible — also destroyed the infrastructure beneath it. The city is beautiful in the way things are beautiful when the process that would have changed them never had the resources to come to pass.

The question the visitor must answer before arriving is not where to go or what to see. It is what their presence means in a city where those two things — the beauty and the crisis — are not separate stories.

THE CITY AND ITS CRISIS

Havana is a city in demographic collapse. The population had fallen from 2.1 million in 2020 to under 1.8 million by the end of 2023 — a 15% loss over three years that, in proportional terms, demographers compare to the population displacement caused by the war in Ukraine. 

The people leaving are predominantly young, educated, and professional: doctors, engineers, teachers, the workforce that a functioning city requires. What remains is aging, poorer, and more dependent on remittances from the diaspora than on any domestic economy.

María Elena Suárez has lived in the Vedado neighborhood for 53 years. During the October 2024 blackout, she went four days without power. Her refrigerator was empty by the second day. She cooked on a kerosene stove she had kept since the Special Period in the 1990s, when the Soviet subsidy collapsed, and Cuba spent a decade in similar darkness. “We know how to survive this,” she says. “But we are tired of having to.”

The blackouts are the most visible symptom of a system that has been deteriorating for decades and is now failing in real time. On an average day in 2025, the Cuban government could meet only 50-70% of the country’s electricity needs. The national grid collapsed four times in six months. In some provinces, blackouts reached 20 hours a day. In Havana, once partially shielded by its political significance, blackouts lasted several hours a day during peak deficit periods.

The causes are multiple and interlocking. The US embargo, in place since 1960, restricts Cuba’s ability to purchase spare parts, access international financing, or import the technology required to modernize aging Soviet-era power plants. Venezuelan oil shipments, which sustained the grid for two decades, declined as Venezuela’s own economy contracted. The domestic crude Cuba can extract is heavy and sulfur-rich, accelerating wear on equipment that is already decades beyond its designed lifespan.

But the crisis is not only external. Between 2010 and 2024, Cuba directed approximately 36% of its total capital investment into tourism infrastructure — new hotels, resort development, the physical apparatus of the visitor economy — and approximately 12% into energy. The 42-story Torre K-23 hotel in Havana, Cuban-financed, opened in 2025. The grid that serves the neighborhoods around it collapses regularly. When it does, the hotel’s generators keep the lights on. In the apartments within sight of its windows, families eat spoiled food in powerless refrigerators and fill buckets with water before the pumps fail.

Claudia Martínez is 24 and works as a translator for a private tourism operator in Habana Vieja. She has a degree in English literature from the University of Havana. Three of her four closest friends from university have left — one to Spain, one to the US via the humanitarian parole program, and one to Mexico. She has not left because her mother is 71 and cannot travel. “I watch them on Instagram,” she says. “They are building lives. I am waiting for the lights to come back on.”

WHAT THE ARCHITECTURE PRESERVES AND WHAT IT CONCEALS

Old Havana — La Habana Vieja — is a 140-hectare UNESCO World Heritage Site of extraordinary completeness. The colonial urban grid, the five plazas, the fortifications that once protected the most important port in the Spanish Empire’s Atlantic trade network — all of it survives, in various states of decay and restoration, in a density and integrity that exists nowhere else in the Caribbean.

The survival is paradoxical. What preserved Old Havana was not investment but its absence. The modernization that swept through Latin American cities in the second half of the twentieth century — the highways through historic centers, the replacement of colonial fabric with concrete commercial buildings, the pressures of speculative development — never arrived in Havana with sufficient force to destroy what was there. The embargo limited the resources available for redevelopment. The revolutionary government’s priorities lay elsewhere. 

The buildings stayed because no one had the money to replace them.

Alejandro García spent 20 years working with the Office of the Historian on the restoration of Old Havana before moving into private practice. The program, he says, is genuine — the craftsmanship, the materials research, the attention to colonial detail is serious work done by serious people. It is also, structurally, a tourism subsidy. “The money that restores the Plaza Vieja comes from the visitors who photograph it,” he says. “There is no other source. The question is whether that is a problem or a solution. I think it is both.”

Walk two streets from the Plaza de Armas, and the facade is the same age, the same style, the same colonial grammar. The restoration trucks have not come down this street. The building at number 14 has a wooden prop holding up the second-floor balcony. A family lives above it. 

The interiors behind the colonial facades have been subdivided, rerouted, and held together by the ingenuity of people who lack access to the materials that would allow them to do otherwise.

THE DECISION THE VISITOR MAKES

Tourism to Cuba is not morally simple, and it has not been for some time. This is not unique to Cuba — tourism to any destination involves choices about whose economy you support, whose infrastructure your spending reaches, and what your presence means to the people living there. In Havana, these choices are more specific and more visible than in most places.

The Cuban government directly controls the tourism economy. The majority of hotels are state-owned or operated through joint ventures in which the state retains the decisive stake. Spending at a state hotel routes a significant portion of visitor expenditure through the government, which made the decision to generate.

Jorge Luis Pérez has been renting two rooms in his Habana Vieja apartment to foreign visitors since 2012, when the legal framework for private rentals expanded. The income — paid in euros or Canadian dollars — is what allows his family to buy food on the informal market when the state rationing system runs short, which is frequently. He is not opposed to tourism. He is in tourism. “Without the visitors, I don’t know what we do,” he says. “With them, at least we manage.” He does not own a generator. When the power goes out, he apologizes to his guests and lights candles.

The paladares — private restaurants that operate under a legal framework introduced in the 1990s and expanded since then — represent a different economic relationship from that of the state hotels. Spending at a private restaurant, staying in a casa particular rather than a state hotel, and using private taxis: these choices channel money more directly to individuals and families. They do not resolve the structural problem. They do not make the visitor’s presence cost-free to those around them. But they represent a materially different economic decision.

The pesos Jorge Luis earns from his foreign guests are what buy the food his family eats when the state rationing system runs short. The dollars the tourist spends at La Guarida keep the paladár’s staff employed. 

The revenue the government collects from the joint-venture hotels, among other sources, supports the Office of the Historian’s restoration program in the plaza where tourists photograph in the morning. The tourist economy is not separate from the humanitarian crisis. It is one of the mechanisms sustaining the people living inside it — and, simultaneously, the mechanism the government has chosen to protect as the residential grid fails.

IF YOU GO

Stay in a casa particular rather than a state hotel. The network of private rooms and homes is extensive, significantly cheaper than hotels, and routes your accommodation spending directly to Cuban families. Book through a platform that connects you to verified private hosts rather than state tourism infrastructure.

Eat at paladares. The private restaurant economy in Havana is genuinely good and in some cases remarkable. La Guarida in Centro Habana is the most famous. San Cristóbal, also private, is the restaurant that the Obama visit in 2016 put on the international map and that remains one of the best in the city.

Hire private guides rather than state tourism operators. The historians, architects, and Habaneros who know the city deeply and offer private tours represent the most honest version of what Havana can show a visitor willing to look past the cathedral square.

Bring cash. The banking infrastructure is unreliable for foreign cards. Euros and Canadian dollars are more easily exchanged than US dollars, which carry a penalty exchange rate reflecting the embargo’s banking restrictions.

Prepare for the blackouts. Even in the tourist-facing infrastructure, power is not guaranteed. A headlamp, a charged power bank, and the specific patience that Havana requires of everyone who lives in it are the right equipment for a visit to a city that manages, as it always has, in conditions that would defeat a less resilient place.

THE QUESTION THE CITY ASKS

The colonial city, designated by UNESCO in 1982, was preserved by its own poverty. The crisis that Havana is living through now is produced by the same combination of forces — the embargo, the political calculus, the redirection of resources toward the state’s priorities rather than its residents’ needs — that kept the architecture intact. The beauty and the suffering share a cause.

What is preserved when a city cannot afford to keep the lights on is the past. What is lost is the present: the doctors who have left, the engineers who have emigrated, the young women who make up the majority of recent emigrants, and who have decided that the future the city offers is not worth staying for

Tomás David Velázquez Felipe, a 61-year-old Havana resident, said during the March 2026 grid collapse: “What little we have to eat spoils. Our people are too old to keep suffering.”