Cubans used to look back at what Fidel Castro called the “special period” after the end of the Soviet Union and its largesse and think that was as bad as things could get. They were too optimistic. Today officials talk of a “war economy”. The consensus on the street in Havana, the capital, is that shortages are worse than in the early 1990s. Cuba produces little in sufficient quantity: not sugar, which it once supplied to the world, not eggs, which it recently imported from Colombia, not milk powder, which it gets from the UN, not power, as worsening blackouts reveal. The government lacks foreign currency for imports. Inflation is rampant; a dollar’s worth of Cuban pesos at the official exchange rate is worth seven cents at the unofficial one. The price of a carton of eggs outstrips the monthly minimum wage.

The economic crisis is accelerating two recent trends. First, the communist government is losing control of the country—which is not to say the regime is about to fall. “All of us are here to save the revolution and save socialism,” Miguel Diaz-Canel, Cuba’s president, said this month. But few believe the ideological rhetoric. The government is unable to provide even the basic canasta (basket) of goods for its people, let alone anything else. The result is growing inequality, unrest and emigration. Second, in search of succour the government is moving even closer to China and Russia. These growing economic and security ties come at a time when American officials are worried by those countries’ growing influence in Latin America.