Why Cuba Can't Become a Superpower

The Superpower Audit, Episode 1: Cuba — the island that already ran the superpower experiment once.

In the spring of 1988, the largest army in the Caribbean was fighting in Africa. Roughly 55,000 Cuban soldiers were dug in around Cuito Cuanavale, Angola, facing down South African armor — and winning enough of the argument that the resulting settlement freed Namibia, humbled the apartheid regime, and is still taught as one of the most audacious power projections ever attempted by a small state. By the time the last troops came home in 1991, more than 375,000 Cubans had rotated through Angola, according to Havana's own official count. Cuba's population at the time was about 10 million.

In September 2026, Cuba's national power grid collapsed again — at least the twelfth nationwide failure since October 2024. The island's official population is now 9.43 million and falling faster than any country on Earth outside a war zone.

This series asks one question of fourteen countries: could you become a superpower, and what would it actually take? Cuba is the only one that has already run the experiment. This is what the experiment cost, and why it cannot be repeated.

First, the audit on Cuba's own terms

Strip away the superpower question and Cuba is, by several measures, one of the most effective small states of the last half-century. It built a biotechnology sector that developed its own COVID-19 vaccines — Abdala and Soberana 02 — under embargo, then exported them and transferred the production technology to Vietnam, Iran, and Venezuela. Its state biotech group, BioCubaFarma, manufactures roughly 60% of the medicines used on the island and 8 of its 12 vaccines. Its medical missions are a genuine global footprint: some 24,000–26,000 Cuban health workers are currently posted abroad, and the missions earned an estimated $5.3 billion in 2024 — about half of everything Cuba exports.

And Angola was real. A nation of 10 million sustained a 16-year expeditionary war 6,000 miles from home, fielded a peak force comparable to the entire active army of Canada, and changed the political map of southern Africa. Whatever else is true of Cuba, organizational weakness is not its problem. The state can mobilize. That is precisely what makes the barriers below structural rather than a matter of effort.

Barrier 1: The people are leaving

Superpowers are built out of people — workers, soldiers, taxpayers, consumers. Cuba is running out of all four at a speed demographers describe as without precedent in the developing world outside wartime.

Cuba's own statistics office, ONEI, counted 9,434,593 residents at the end of 2025, down from just over 11 million at the end of 2020 — a loss of more than 1.6 million people in five years, detailed in ONEI's 2025 demographic indicators. In 2025 the island recorded 68,064 births against 136,214 deaths — two funerals for every birth — and a net migration balance of −245,264, roughly 672 net departures per day. Fertility is 1.29 children per woman. More than a quarter of the population is now 60 or older, the highest share in Latin America, and independent demographers put the true resident population lower still, around 8.6–8.8 million. The UN Population Fund projects that on current trends Cuba ends the century near 5.6 million people — half its size a decade ago.

A country can survive being poor. It cannot project power while its workforce emigrates, its births halve, and its pension burden becomes the largest line item in national life.

Cuba held about 11 million people for decades, then lost more than 1.6 million in five years. Sources: UN estimates to 2020; ONEI official counts after (full sourcing on the chart).

Barrier 2: The economy cannot fund power

Power projection is a surplus activity: you fund carriers, bases, and foreign adventures out of what the domestic economy doesn't need. Cuba has no surplus. Its economy has shrunk across most of this decade, and the emblematic numbers read like a collapse in slow motion. Sugar — the crop that once defined the island and produced 8 million tonnes in 1989 — came in under 200,000 tonnes in the most recent harvests; Cuba, the historic sugar bowl of the Caribbean, now imports sugar. Tourism, the other great earner, drew about 2.2 million visitors in 2024, less than half the 4.7 million peak, and has since been hit by the fuel crisis. Cuba stopped publishing a GDP series the World Bank carries after 2020 (about $107 billion that year), which is its own kind of data point.

The embargo is real and costly — six decades of restricted access to US markets, finance, and technology, tightened further in 2026 with an oil pressure campaign and sanctions reaching the nickel sector. But the embargo is not a sufficient explanation, and honesty about that is the point of this audit: Vietnam, embargoed by Washington until 1994, is now a manufacturing exporter of consequence. Cuba's constraint is the combination — external siege plus a domestic model that has repeatedly strangled its own private sector just as it begins to generate surplus.

Barrier 3: Energy is the choke point, and patrons hold the valve

Cuba produces roughly a third of the oil it consumes. The rest has always come from a patron: first the Soviet Union, then Venezuela. When Soviet subsidies vanished in 1991, GDP fell by roughly a third in four years — the "Special Period." When Venezuelan shipments stopped in early 2026 and Washington moved to block replacement cargoes, the grid began its current cycle of nationwide collapses, with the state utility routinely able to generate only about half of demand. The island's power plants are mostly 1960s–70s oil-fired units, and a grid that cannot keep Havana lit cannot power an industrial strategy, a tech sector, or a military buildup. There is no version of a Cuban superpower that does not begin with energy independence, and Cuba does not currently have a path to it that it controls.

Barrier 4: Projection was rented, never owned

Here is the uncomfortable arithmetic of Angola: the Soviet Union paid for it. Moscow supplied the weapons, the logistics backbone, and the subsidy — billions a year — that let Havana punch at superpower weight. Cuba supplied the manpower and the audacity, which were genuine, but the capacity was rented. When the patron died, the projection ended within two years and has never resumed.

Today's Revolutionary Armed Forces number roughly 49,000 active personnel (IISS estimates), configured for territorial defense. Cuba has no aircraft carriers, no blue-water navy, no overseas bases — the only foreign naval station on the island is American, at Guantánamo Bay, which is perhaps the single most efficient summary of Cuba's strategic position ever produced by geography. Its one remaining instrument of global reach is soft: the white coats, not warships. That instrument is formidable (Part 2 takes it seriously). It is not a substitute for the hard kind.

The scorecard

Measure	Cuba	United States	China
Population	9.4M (2025, ONEI) and falling ~3%/yr	~340M	~1.41B
Land area	109,884 km²	9.8M km²	9.6M km²
GDP	~$107B (2020, last World Bank figure)	~$32.4T	~$20.9T
Military	~49,000 active personnel; no global basing	$954B spend (SIPRI 2025)	$336B spend (SIPRI 2025)
Demographics	25%+ aged 60+; fertility 1.29	Median age ~39	Median age ~40
Energy	Imports ~2/3 of its oil; grid in recurring collapse	Net exporter	Largest importer, diversified
Signature power (its own terms)	Medical internationalism + biotech: ~$5.3B, half of all exports	—	—

The verdict of Part 1 is not close. Cuba lacks the population, the economy, the energy, and the owned military capacity — and three of those four are moving in the wrong direction every single year. On the superpower test, Cuba scores lower than any country in this series except one, and it is the only country whose starting position is deteriorating.

And yet. Half of everything this island sells to the world is a service that every aging country on Earth needs more of each year, produced at a scale no other small nation attempts. Cuba's problem was never that it built the wrong weapon. It's that the weapon doesn't run on the fuel Cuba has.

Part 2: What it would take — the embargo reversal, the diaspora's billions, the doctors-as-strategy endgame, and the honest ceiling: not a superpower, but possibly something rarer.