In today’s Cuba, scarcity has been reorganized into a hierarchy. The island’s crisis is no longer experienced as a shared deprivation, but as a split-screen reality: in one frame, steaks, imported groceries, rooftop restaurants lit by candles, and new hybrid vehicles; in the other, ration lines, blackouts, and people combing trash for anything that can be exchanged for cash. The old promise of egalitarian hardship has curdled into something more politically corrosive, inequality that is not only pervasive, but unmistakably visible. This new stratification is being driven by the growth of a legalized private sector that the state has learned to tolerate because the alternative is collapse. After small and medium-sized enterprises were authorized in 2021, the number of registered businesses surged, and informal ingenuity hardened into an economy of storefront stalls, living-room kiosks, and street markets selling what state distribution cannot reliably provide. For many families, these businesses have become less a sign of liberalization than a substitute for a failing public supply system: the private sector is portrayed as the channel through which food still arrives, often imported and often priced in ways that only the currency-connected can pay. But the private economy’s lifeline is also its cruelty. Prices in these shops are free-market in everything but name, and they land hardest on those trapped in state salaries and pensions. Basic staples, like sugar, flour, and eggs, are described as costing sums that can swallow days or weeks of income. The result is a familiar authoritarian pattern: survival is not allocated by rights, but by access, access to dollars, remittances, overseas relatives, or private-sector wages. Those who can convert foreign currency thrive; those who cannot are left to calculate hunger against rent, darkness against transportation, medicine against food. There is now a pyramid of currencies and purchasing power, where electronic peso transfers used in the state sector sit at the bottom, weakened further by shortages of cash that force people to queue simply to withdraw their own wages. Above that sit semi-convertible instruments and, higher still, actual dollars, especially dollars held abroad that can pay for imports. The black-market exchange rate becomes the unofficial truth of daily life, widening the gap between those who live inside the official economy and those who operate in the shadow system that actually functions. External pressure intensifies the sense of emergency, and the crisis is framed as deepening under renewed U.S. efforts to squeeze Havana, particularly through tighter constraints and a push to choke off oil supplies. Fuel shortages ripple outward into everything: longer lines, higher prices, and workarounds that again belong mostly to the affluent, hybrid cars, electric scooters, and home solar panels. Even mobility becomes a class privilege: the ability to move through the city without waiting a day for gasoline is treated as another marker of the new Cuban social order. Meanwhile, the government’s posture toward the private sector appears deeply ambivalent, dependent yet resentful. The state is described as periodically blaming entrepreneurs for inflation or “speculation,” while simultaneously tightening controls that make business harder: limiting company size, forcing transactions into local currency, and channeling imports through state intermediaries. The message this sends is not stability but conditional permission, an economy allowed to exist as a “necessary evil,” never secure enough to build long-term confidence, and always vulnerable to sudden rule changes. The most haunting contrast in the piece is not rhetorical but physical: delicatessens offering luxury imports at discreet addresses while, a few blocks away, people scavenge trash for recyclable bottles to sell for a few pesos each. In the 1990s, hardship after the Soviet collapse was brutal but broadly shared; now deprivation has been sorted into separate worlds, and the separation itself becomes the grievance. When a system can no longer provide, it does something subtler: it allows some to buy their way out, then calls the resulting inequality an unfortunate side effect rather than a political choice. In that sense, Cuba’s crisis is not only an economic emergency but a moral rearrangement. The state’s retreat has not produced freedom so much as a market in survival, where the privileged can purchase normal life while everyone else inherits the consequences of failed governance. The danger for the regime is not merely that people are hungry or exhausted, but that they are hungry and can see exactly who is not.