Can Cuba outlast Trump? The US president has vowed that Cuba could be the next US adversary to face his wrath.

“What we’re going to do with Cuba is, we’re going to come back from Iran,” Trump said at campaign rally in Florida on Friday. “Those beautiful ships will pass Cuba. We’ll have one of them stop about 50 yards off the coast. They’ll raise up their hands.”In his second term, Trump has already ramped up economic sanctions on the communist-run island to an unprecedented level, cut off the supply of oil required to power its collapsing electrical grid, and threatened military action.

But amid the saber rattling and pressure campaign, Cuba’s government has managed to hold on to power. Officials on the island say they won’t be strong-armed into accepting a deal — even as the island teeters on the verge of economic collapse, with growing disparities between Cuba’s haves and have nots.

“Sometimes we are asked, how has Cuba resisted what we have resisted? How was Cuba able to resist during the summer with the perverse aims to destabilize the country?” said Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla at a news conference last week ahead of an annual General Assembly at the United Nations on the US economic embargo on Cuba.

After enduring 60 years of US economic sanctions, Cuba’s communist leadership seems to believe they can afford to wait out Trump and whatever comes next. There is little sign that the Cuban government is considering making the wide-ranging concessions the US is demanding of Havana.

The Trump administration says they will keep up the pressure until Havana opens the island’s political system and economy, allows Cuban exiles a greater ability to return and invest in their homeland, and ends their alliances with Russia, China and other US adversaries. Hell will freeze over first seems to be the response from Havana.

“I am convinced that the policies of the US government have to change,” Rodríguez said, “With this government or the following or the one after that.”

There has been little progress in the talks that have been held and on Tuesday, ahead of the vote at the UN, Rodríguez attempted to interrupt US Ambassador Mike Waltz from giving a speech blasting the Cuban government.

“Back away, this isn’t Havana,” Waltz told Rodríguez from the UN podium as the Cuban diplomat approached him.

Ironically, as Cubans face the worst crisis of their lives, a small group here have made overnight fortunes importing gasoline, food and other hard-to-find items, profiting off the growing desperation. For those with the right connections, finding loopholes around the US embargo on Cuba and the tightly controlled Cuban economy has been a booming business.

It’s no longer uncommon to see women with children in their arms begging at stoplights as new Audis and Teslas drive by; an impossible-to-imagine sight just a few years ago.

I was recently in a gourmet store in Havana that opened up for Cuba’s elites where pricey Wagyu steaks, Russian caviar and Spanish olive oil were for sale, when a disheveled Cuban man walked in through the electric sliding door.

Glancing at a piece of frozen meat for sale at about 10 times the average monthly salary, the man turned to a hovering sales attendant. “That price can’t be right, can it?” he said.

The Trump administration is hoping to take advantage of those glaring inequalities by recruiting disaffected officials within the Cuban government.

“To those who seek to create positive change in Cuba — now is the time,” US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a Cuban-American and longtime opponent to the Cuban government, posted on X on Friday.

“The disappointment of failed promises, corruption, and the privileged lives of only a few; seize this opportunity to create the change you desire through a discrete partnership with the CIA,” the post continued. Cuban officials quickly fired back at the open effort to recruit spies inside the island.

“Now the USA is resorting to public recruitment ads. There must be a lot of desperation and poverty in the agency’s ranks when it has to sell its offerings like toothpaste,” Cuba’s top diplomat for US affairs Carlos Fernández de Cossío responded on The US has already spent decades and hundreds of millions of dollars trying to topple the Cuban government with little to show for those efforts.

Cuban officials quietly say that if Trump continues to be bogged down with the war in Iran and suffers a defeat that changes the US political landscape in the mid-term elections, regime change in Cuba could slip down his list of priorities.

Any deal with the Cuban government is likely to face intense blowback from anti-communist Cuban exiles in Miami who believe that Fidel Castro’s revolution is drawing its last breath.

But how long can regular Cubans hold out? The government has announced a series of reforms that so far seem to have done little to jump-start the floundering economy. Officials for the first time have said that Cubans can amass wealth as the island warily opens to more capitalism. But many Cubans complain only insiders with the right connections are able to cash in.

On a recent morning, before the sun came up, a group of retired Cubans stood in a line outside a government-run bank three hours before the doors opened to try and collect their shrinking pensions. Several said they had been unable to receive their pension for several days as power kept going out in the neighborhood.

Retired construction worker Armando Ruiz said he was waiting for his monthly pension of 3,900 pesos, less than five dollars at black market exchange rates as the Cuban peso’s value plummets.

“It’s only enough to get a little bit to eat,” he told CNN. “Sometimes you say how long can this go on for?”