Cubans for decades have been buffeted by great powers, repressed by their own government, crushed by economic crises, and paraded as the victims of a succession of sanctions imposed by the White House. Glimmers of a better life came and went, either because the regime in Havana briefly allowed a sliver of greater liberty or the U.S. government tried a new tack to overthrow the communist ideology that has reigned over the island for almost 70 years. So it is perhaps not surprising that Cubanos by now have had it up to here with pretty much everyone.Consider the reaction when a boat from the international activist group Nuestra América Convoy approached Havana’s port last month. The Trump administration had recently imposed new sanctions on countries providing oil to Cuba, pushing an already shaky economy to the brink of collapse. The boat’s crew of 20 or so young campaigners carried about 14 tons of humanitarian aid, flew the Cuban flag, held a LET CUBA LIVE sign and protested against the U.S. oil sanctions. “We are all shouting, ‘Cuba yes! Blockade no!’” one crew member told Cuban state media in a phone call.The chorus of Cuban condemnation online was immediate. Yoani Sánchez, a writer in Havana, told the activists to take their “ideological tourism” elsewhere. The editorial board of El Estornudo, a Cuban magazine known for its criticism of the government, excoriated the whole effort as a “safari.” One social-media user mocked the decrepit state of the boat and the untidy appearance of its crew: “Those people on that ship seem to need more help than we do.”The Nuestra América delegation did itself few favors in seeking to connect with ordinary Habaneros. Jeremy Corbyn, the septuagenarian British leftist, who had already arrived in Havana by plane, met with high-ranking Communist Party officials in the presidential palace. Pablo Iglesias, the founder of Spain’s Podemos party, stayed at the luxury Gran Hotel Bristol in Havana (“Four unique gastronomic experiences offer vibrant cuisine and entertainment,” its website says), from whence he remarked the situation in the country was not as bad as it’s depicted abroad.The backlash to their mission stemmed from Cubans’ frustration that, once again, foreigners were making theater from their pain and appeared more interested in siding with the Cuban regime against Trump than in actually helping Cubans. That put the activists on the citizens’ grievance list—along with many others who have been there for much longer.Cubans, of course, are first and foremost furious at their own government. The ruling Communist Party rarely permits freedoms such as independent public polling, so approval ratings don’t tell the tale. But the loudness and frequency of cacerolazos—protests where people bang pots—across the island attest to the rage. Father Alberto Reyes Pías, a Catholic priest who serves 13 towns in the Camagüey province, in the island’s center, told me that the government had lost the people long ago. “We have lived so many decades of agony and it never stops,” he said by telephone. “It just goes on.”In 2021, Cubans’ anger found some release. On July 11 of that year, people in the city of San Antonio de los Baños began marching and singing “Patria y Vida” (“Fatherland and Life”), an opposition anthem designed to counter the revolutionary motto “Patria o Muerte.” The news spread on social media and protests sprang up in cities across the country for a few days, creating the biggest anti-government demonstration since the 1959 revolution that brought Fidel Castro to power. President Miguel Díaz-Canel’s government described the protesters as mercenaries and counterrevolutionaries and called on the regime’s own supporters to fight them. The government shut off the internet and the military and police cracked down, eventually extinguishing the protests and jailing more than 1,400.[Read: I watched Cuba crumble from the inside]Think tanks and scholars seeking to explain this moment of collective catharsis searched for causes outside Cuba. The Obama-era tourism boom had receded because of sanctions imposed during President Trump’s first term, and then had disappeared in the pandemic. The Trump administration also choked off European tourism to Cuba. Venezuela, Cuba’s main benefactor since the 2000s, was dealing with its own economic crisis. And countries in Latin America stopped hiring Cuban medical brigades, an export tainted by reports of forced labor, depriving the government of a key source of income.External factors have contributed to the discontent, along with an anger that’s more homegrown: Cubans’ hatred for the regime. Consider the signs they carried—DOWN WITH THE DICTATORSHIP—and the song they were singing. The lyrics of “Patria y Vida” made clear that protesters were ready to ditch members of the revolutionary pantheon, such as Che Guevara and José Martí, for a bit of foreign currency. In the song, the protesters also scolded the government for selling Cuba to foreigners as a paradise while “mothers cried for the sons that left.” We are “the true history, not the mistold one,” the protesters sang. “We are the trampled dignity of an entire people.”The largest exodus in Cuban history followed, driven by the impact of sanctions and the regime’s ineptitude and repression: About 1 million people left in the next couple of years. The Havana-based demographer Juan Carlos Albizu-Campos estimates that the Cuban population has shrunk by one-quarter in the past five years, a steeper decline than that of Ukraine’s population following Russia’s 2022 invasion. Cuba’s total number of births last year was lower than in 1899, Albizu-Campos told me. With so many young people fleeing, those left behind tend to be of older generations: Cuba’s population is the oldest in Latin America. An aging society, combined with the sorry state of hospitals, means that the overall number of deaths keeps rising even as the population contracts. “The system is not sustainable,” Albizu-Campos said of the country. “This is like a sick person in the terminal phase; there’s no way out other than death.”These days, protesters are back in the streets for the first time since 2021—although instead of shouting for “Fatherland and Life,” their slogan is now “Power and Food.” Last month, demonstrators in the city of Morón set the headquarters of the Communist Party on fire—a gesture of defiance hard to imagine even just a year ago. Many of the activists who led the 2021 protests remain in jail or exile, but the regime has become more tolerant, slowly releasing some prisoners. A couple of protesters who used to cover their faces told me they now feel they no longer must.Cuba has been under the longest-running sanctions regime America has imposed on any country, but the severity has ebbed and flowed. Soon after the U.S. military seized Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January, the Trump administration began hinting that action against Havana was high on the priority list and imposed sanctions on countries supplying oil to Cuba. The administration hopes that cutting off Cuba’s oil supply will force the regime to agree to implement political reforms and increase access for U.S. corporations. President Díaz-Canel initially was game to talk with Washington. But in a recent interview with NBC’s Meet the Press, he said he would die defending his homeland in the face of U.S. military intervention.Cuba relies heavily on imported oil for its electric grid and for gasoline, so the consequences were predictable and dire—and heightened Cubans’ exasperation. Regime officials blamed the hardship on the U.S. oil embargo. “The Cuban economy has been collapsing the past five years,” Pavel Vidal Alejandro, a Cuban economist based in Colombia, told me. “But the past few months have been something else. This is the hecatomb,” a reference to the ancient Greek and Roman practice of mass animal sacrifice to appease the gods. Vidal has studied how sanctions directly hurt household consumption. He told me that many of his fellow Cubans understand that but don’t want to call out the U.S. too loudly, because they are wary of repeating the regime’s talking points. Armando Chaguaceda, a Cuban historian, compared the regime to a kidnapper blaming his hostages’ suffering on those calling for their release.Maykol, a 25-year-old Havana resident who asked me to use just his first name to avoid regime reprisals, told me that lengthy power outages, already frequent before January, now occur daily. Charcoal, which many Cubans use to cook when the power is out, has become hard to find. During a blackout in February, Maykol’s neighbors chopped up a chair to use as cooking firewood rather than let the meat in their fridge rot. (When I recounted this anecdote to Albizu-Campos, he told me the only part that surprised him was that the people had meat, which has been a luxury for a while now.)Gasoline shortages have had the greatest impact. One of Maykol’s relatives sleeps at the hotel where she works to minimize her number of taxi rides, which have become prohibitively expensive. (Buses have virtually stopped running.) In his walk to the market where he sells food, Maykol zigzags through garbage that sits uncollected because garbage trucks lack fuel. Mosquito-borne diseases are thriving; Maykol is recovering from chikungunya.And yet most Cubans I spoke with wanted to set the record straight: The anger they feel toward Trump, they told me, was not as fervent as the anger they feel toward their own government. “Now the crisis is more acute because of Trump,” Maykol told me. “But this is all our fault, of the people who live here and the people in power.” Chaguaceda told me he opposed the limits on remittances imposed by the first Trump administration, because they hurt his ability to support his relatives. But now, he said, he wants the U.S. to act more decisively so Cubans’ misery ends sooner. Father Reyes told me he’s heard complaints that “el Rubito” (Secretary of State Marco Rubio) is taking too long. But some parishioners remain optimistic that this period of intense hardship finally augurs the end of the regime. A popular new saying is “Better a horrible ending than a horror with no end.” Still, there is widespread fear about what might come next and who might be in charge. Some on the island bristled at statements made by María Elvira Salazar, a South Florida representative, that “a mother’s hunger” was ultimately the price to pay “to free Cuba forever.”[Read: All eyes on Cuba]“Well she’s not going to be here to live that,” a young Cuban woman, the mother of Maykol’s baby, told me. (She asked that I not use her name.) “We will be the most affected.”Maykol seemed ambivalent about the prospect of the United States overthrowing their government. The first time I asked him, he said he was rooting for it: “I hope the gringos come.” Later in the conversation, he told me he was anxious, too. “What if we’re going through all of this for nothing?” he said. “What if the Americans come and there’s violence but then nothing changes?”If there is ambivalence over the motives of the U.S. government, no such reservations exist for another group of people outside Cuba: the community of humanitarian organizations, think tanks, foreign journalists, and activists who are focused on the island’s plight. The issue for many Cubans isn’t that these observers care. It is that they might care more about the perceived perfidy of America’s dealings with Cuba and about romanticizing life under the regime (free health care!) than they do about the welfare of Cubans. Several Cubans in exile told me they feel that much of the attention their homeland generates is only due to the oil sanctions providing another means to criticize Trump.María Cabrera Arús, a Cuban American sociologist at New York University, became so angry when her colleagues in academia asked her to sign a petition for the White House to lift the new sanctions that she wrote her own public letter. “For six decades, Cuban authorities have framed the nation as a victim of external hostility,” she wrote. But “the country’s deterioration, often perceived from abroad as picturesque or cinematic,” is mostly the result of internal politics, or “a system designed to preserve centralized control.”[Read: Cuba doesn’t care about Marxism]The Cuban American artist Coco Fusco complained to me that every time she gives a talk about her work on Cuba, an audience member asks her some version of the question: But what about the American blockade? Fusco told me that whenever she talks about Cuba with her friends, she has to “pay tributes” to what she sees as the American consensus—that the embargo is bad and has been ineffective in applying pressure on the Cuban government—before she can criticize the regime. And María Werlau, who founded a nonprofit to document the abuses the Cuban government inflicts on the doctors it sends on medical missions to Venezuela and elsewhere, told me that when scholars and journalists reach out to her to talk about Cuba, many of them want to talk only about how America is treating the island.A similar frustration greeted the Nuestra América boat on its arrival in Havana. The organization, on its website, claimed to be bringing aid “in solidarity with the Cuban people.” But the organization’s animus is clear: “There is no time to waste, as the Trump administration ramps up its assault on the island and its campaign to isolate its people.” And when the activists, after docking, received praise from the regime, many Cubans were infuriated that the people who claimed to have arrived to help them weren’t listening to what they had to say.