A priest led me up battered stairs to a tiny room at the top of a church. From the window, we gazed down at the decayed colonial villas and scattered trash fires of eastern Havana. He pointed to the yellow wall behind us, where someone had sketched a meticulous map of the local street grid. “They posted armed guards here, to watch over us,” he said.

Cuba’s Communist government, the priest said, took over the convent, cloister, and school of Los Escolapios after the revolution of 1959, expelling the nuns and setting up a guard post—one part of the regime’s sprawling apparatus of surveillance and control. The church downstairs was virtually closed, the congregation mostly exiled or jailed in accordance with Communist Cuba’s atheist principles.

The guards are gone now, along with the portraits of Fidel Castro and the secular schoolteachers who commandeered the convent’s lower floors after the revolution. The church is in the process of reclaiming the magnificent 18th-century cloister from the state, which left it in ruins. The priest, Iván Guerra Álvarez, made clear he believes that history is approaching another turning point, and that the Communist regime will soon be gone. “The Church will play a big role in the transition,” he told me.

“We are the biggest institution in Cuba outside the government.”No one can say when or how that transition will happen. Donald Trump may or may not have “the honor of taking Cuba,” as he boasted after imposing an oil blockade on the island earlier this year. The Cuban regime has stifled any viable domestic opposition. But the withering of the state—a process that has been under way for decades—has accelerated, and is shocking to see up close.

The ration cards that used to guarantee basic foodstuffs for every Cuban had been blank for weeks when I visited in August. Police and soldiers were once ubiquitous throughout the country, but I saw hardly any.

In far-eastern Cuba, I met a fisherman who told me that he and others like him, who lacked electricity for refrigeration, have gone back to traditional methods of drying and salting fish. The average monthly salary for public-sector employees in Cuba—including doctors and teachers—is about 6,500 pesos, which is less than $10 and far below the cost of a subsistence diet (a single carton of eggs can cost up to 4,700 pesos). Even getting small amounts of cash can be a trial: Banks sometimes limit withdrawals to 1,000 pesos (less than $1.50) per person per day.

The government still purports—on faded billboards, in party speeches—to meet all of the material and spiritual needs of its citizens, but it is now bankrupt in every sense. Almost no one believes in the system anymore, and many, especially outside Havana, behave as if the government simply does not exist. As in the Soviet-dominated Eastern bloc during its final years, destitution is leading people back to older faiths. Afro Cuban Santeria and Catholicism have flourished, and “house churches” have proliferated, often evangelical and sometimes consisting of nothing more than a dozen folding chairs in someone’s living room.

Guerra Álvarez led me down from the church tower to the main sanctuary of Los Escolapios, an atmospheric shift he half-jokingly likened to a trip from North to South Korea. We found ourselves in a noisy crowd of more than 100 schoolchildren and worshippers. A teacher dressed as an angel, with a white beard, wig, and gown, was giving Bible lessons in the dimly lit nave. Afterward, volunteers handed out lunches of rice and beans. To see so many people looking so cheerful was striking; Cuba is now a country full of empty streets and abandoned buildings, having lost as much as a quarter of its population to migration in the past few years.

The expanded role of the churches is partly an outcome of American policy: The U.S. government has long favored the Catholic Church as an intermediary. When the Trump administration approved a $100 million aid package for Cuba in May, it was on the condition that the funds be distributed by faith-based groups and humanitarian organizations. But the rise of religion in Cuba is also a measure of the state’s withdrawal—and perhaps a hint at the island’s future direction.

I came to Cuba expecting to see suffering. What I did not anticipate was the near-total collapse of the state. This was evident even in Havana, where all-day blackouts are routine, but things are much worse in the eastern half of the island, which has long been poorer and less developed. Cuba’s religious revival has burned brightest there, especially among Pentecostal churches, whose traditions include faith healing and miracles.

I drove to the east with the photographer Moises Saman, an 18-hour journey that sometimes made us feel as if we were traveling back in time. Weaving slowly among enormous potholes, we passed few other cars. As we got closer to Santiago de Cuba, Cuba’s second-largest city, we saw almost as many horse-drawn carts as motorized vehicles.

Poverty is not new in the country, but the number of street beggars I saw shocked me. On the seafront in Santiago, a mother and daughter approached me, both of them skeletally thin, to ask for money. The mother, a white-haired 76-year-old, told me that their only means of support had been her son, who had worked as a security guard and died of cancer last year. Now they spend all day begging and collecting plastic bottles in the hopes of trading them for a few pesos, she said. They get nothing from the state. Later, I visited their home, a filthy ground-floor room where they sleep on metal bed frames topped with cardboard instead of mattresses. When I asked whether there was any electricity, the mother said that they did not even have a bulb.

The failure of Cuba’s health-care system may be the most damning indictment of its Communist regime. Castro once held up the country’s network of local clinics as a model for the world, visible proof that socialism could triumph where capitalism had failed. He sent hundreds of thousands of doctors overseas, an “army of white coats” to bolster Cuba’s image and generate money for the state. (It later emerged that the doctors had been given little choice and many were victims of what has been called forced labor.)

Some doctors are still being sent abroad, but more have simply fled Cuba. On Cayo Granma, an island at the entrance to the bay of Santiago, I found a single nurse caring not only for all 870 residents but also for many people from the neighboring coastal areas. She no longer knows how many people she is responsible for, because doctors have been leaving the region so fast that she cannot keep track of the patients forced to seek new care.

Her name is Clara Luaces, a woman of 55 with a direct gaze and an air of brisk competence. Her clinic was a room the size of a large closet, hot and crowded with patients when I arrived; outside, it was almost 100 degrees. A 12-year-old boy with a fever sat on a bench, an IV drip in his arm; a girl with a skin infection sat nearby with her mother.

“We have to work miracles here,” Luaces said, answering my questions as she checked the boy’s pulse and adjusted his IV. The government had stopped piping water to the island three months earlier, she said, and the resulting lack of clean water had led to a sharp rise in bacterial fevers and skin infections. “Even young people are dying on me,” she said. She was chronically short on medicine and had very little money of her own to supplement the clinic’s supply.

The boy began moaning, and Luaces comforted him, putting a pillow under his head and calling him “sweetheart.”“I’m not going to retire,” she said, looking up at me, “because there is no one else to take this on.”

Luaces did not want to talk about politics. She confined herself to saying that she had been a student during what Castro dubbed the “special period” in the 1990s, when Cuba went through a severe economic crisis after losing its Soviet patron and the regime seemed on the brink of collapse. What is happening now, she said, is “much more special.”Others lashed out directly at the state. Not long ago, the country bristled with informants working for the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution. But when I asked people about the CDR, some laughed, and few seemed worried about being overheard.

One evening on a beach in Baracoa, a man in his 30s asked me what I thought about Communism. He was lying in a hammock talking with four other men, drinking cheap sugarcane rum from a plastic bottle; they had been complaining about the ever higher prices of rice, beans, and other basic foods. I told him I thought Communism was a lousy way to run a country.

He looked squarely at me and said, “I shit on Fidel Castro’s mother.”The other men laughed. He uttered a few more obscenities. Then, suddenly, all of the humor drained from the man’s face. His voice went taut with anger, and tears welled up in his eyes.

“Cuba is frozen in time!” he shouted. “There’s no hope. It’s a sad thing to be born a Cuban. That’s what I think, and I don’t care; they can send me to prison if they want.”The other men had gone silent.

Here is another measure of Cubans’ anger at their government: During nine days of travel around the island, I did not meet a single person who blamed Donald Trump or the United States for their situation. I sometimes reminded them about the blockade Trump had started earlier this year, cutting Cubans off from the cheap oil that Venezuela had been supplying before the U.S. military captured Nicolás Maduro in January. Hadn’t things gotten worse since then?

“I don’t see any change since January,” a retired engineer named Guillermo Almeida told me. “That oil from Venezuela wasn’t reaching the people anyway.”He and others said that the more important turning point was the coronavirus pandemic, which destroyed Cuba’s tourism industry and shrank the value of remittances from family members abroad that many Cubans depend on, exposing more fully a state that had long been depleted. Another man put it differently: “It seems to us that the real embargo is inside of Cuba.”

The churches have taken on much of the Cuban state’s old role in keeping people alive. In Baracoa, I met Raul de Jesus Muñoz Munder, a Pentecostal pastor who has been evangelizing in the area for 32 years. He had seen hunger and deprivation, he said, including during the years he spent in a tiny church in the mountains, but nothing as bad as the present.

Muñoz Munder described his work almost as if it were a military operation. Every week, he said, he meets with a team of associate pastors at his church, and each man reports on the situation in his home neighborhood: who is sick and needs medicine, who needs food, and how to get it to them. The pastor’s congregation has about 1,100 regular members, but he provides aid to a much larger group. His denomination, the Assemblies of God, has expanded from two to 40 churches in the Baracoa region over the past three decades.

The growth of the evangelical movement is hard to quantify in Cuba, where the Catholic Church was once almost universal. No independent numbers on religious affiliation exist—the government has long had a lock on surveys. But everyone I spoke with, both inside and outside the country, agreed that the evangelical presence has surged in recent years.

In Baracoa, I stumbled upon several different evangelical services one Saturday evening, each of them loud and raucous, the congregation on its feet and clapping along. These kinds of scenes are still a little jarring to many older Cubans. They tend to associate church with more orderly Catholic rituals, and grew up without seeing much of the flamboyant evangelical religiosity that has become common across Latin America. But the island is changing. I heard a fair amount of God talk even on the street. One afternoon in Camagüey, a beautiful, decaying city in east-central Cuba, an elderly woman in a wheelchair called out to me as I passed her open front door.

“We have to tell people that God exists,” she said, in an urgent tone. “God’s word has to be fulfilled in its entirety.”One of her children had left the country, and the other one, a high-school teacher, was in prison; she said he’d been given a 14-year sentence for accusing a high-ranking official of corruption. The old woman was living alone, and the only thing she had left was her faith.

In Havana, I visited a nursing home owned by the Catholic Church that was full of former civil servants and military officers. In one room I found a dozen old men, their beds lined up about a yard apart. Each had a single narrow locker for all of his earthly possessions. A nurse gave me permission to speak with residents but cautioned me that they were “very sad.”Many of them, she explained, had had distinguished government careers but had found themselves abandoned by both the state and their family at the end of their life. In many cases, their children had left the country.

One of the men, a wiry 65-year-old, had fought for two years in Angola, where Castro had sent hundreds of thousands of soldiers in the 1970s and ’80s to support a Communist-aligned government. The former soldier had once been a fan of the revolution; you could tell because he had a big tattoo of Che Guevara on his right arm. He’d gotten it when he was 18. He showed me several scars left over from battles in Africa, and I asked him how he felt about the situation in the country.

He answered with an expletive. I asked him what should be done to make things better. Cuba needed to be bombed, he told me. Specifically, Raúl Castro, Fidel’s brother and successor, should be bombed. And Raúl’s daughter Mariela. And the prime minister, Manuel Marrero Cruz.

Again and again during my travels on the island, people told me: . They didn’t just mean the hunger and sickness and lack of electricity. They meant the anger, the emptiness, the absence of music and laughter.

There used to be a musical group on every corner of Santiago, an 81-year-old man who had spent 45 years as a singer in a band recalled. Now there were none.

After the 1959 revolution, Fidel Castro enshrined atheism in the new state, exiling many prominent Catholic figures and sending believers to reeducation camps. But in a sense, he did not so much banish religion as create a new cult, with its own rituals and holy martyrs. That cult staggers on today in a weird half life, abandoned by most of its people after decades of misery and repression, yet somehow defying a final collapse.

The only immaculately clean place I saw in all of Cuba was the Santa Ifigenia Cemetery, where Fidel’s ashes are held, in Santiago. The grass there is green and mowed to razor-perfection, the walkways carefully swept; not a single visitor was in sight when I went there.

As I stood looking at the rounded granite boulder that marks Fidel’s tomb, patriotic music began blaring from invisible loudspeakers, and an honor guard of soldiers in neatly pressed uniforms began goose-stepping in unison, rifles pointed skyward. They marched to the mausoleum honoring José Martí, Cuba’s great nationalist hero; presented arms; and relieved a group of similarly uniformed compatriots, who marched back. They do this changing of the guard every half hour, all day long, I was told.

Watching those perfect soldiers, you could believe for a moment that you were in another place—perhaps that far-off country Castro had dreamed of, where socialism is triumphant, no one is sick or unhappy, and everyone aspires to follow the heroic example of the man who led a glorious revolution. Then a breeze swept across the grass, carrying the acrid stench of burning garbage, and I remembered where I was.