Cuba used to have European friends – there’s a reason why even now they have deserted it too

People walk down a street during a power outage in Havana, Cuba, 25 May 2026. Photograph: Ernesto Mastrascusa/EPA

For many Europeans of my generation, Cuba was as much a progressive cause as a country.

In our selectively idealistic student days (mine were in the mid-1970s), it was a plucky little country that had overthrown a corrupt regime in cahoots with the US mafia. In a popular revolution led by the charismatic Fidel Castro and iconic guerrilla leader Che Guevara, it then withstood a crippling US economic embargo to defend its independence. Hasta la victoria siempre! (Ever onwards to victory!)