Havana/The Habano Festival, considered the great international showcase of premium Cuban tobacco, was suspended this Saturday without a new date defined, in the midst of the worst energy crisis that the Island has experienced in decades. The state-owned company Habanos SA, a monopoly in the global marketing of famous cigars, published a brief statement on its website in which it announced that the XXVI edition of the festival, scheduled between February 24 and 27, is “postponed” and that a new date will be announced “opportunely.”
The official argument ensures that the decision seeks to preserve “the highest standards of quality and experience” of the event. The reality on the Island, however, is already hitting rock bottom: severe fuel rationing, closures or readjustments of basic services and a collapsed economy that barely manages to sustain its most basic functioning.
A worker in the gastronomic sector, who has participated in previous editions of the Festival and requested anonymity for fear of reprisals, explained to 14ymedio that the suspension also thwarted plans for even greater ostentation than last year. “Imagine that this year’s private party was going to be in El Morro. The Chinese man who organized all of this intended that, at one point in the night, the lighthouse would ‘catch fire’ at the tip, all with light effects, as if it were a huge cigar. That was going to be seen throughout the city,” he says. According to the source, the businessman is “quite angry” about the cancellation of an event whose reasons, he claims, were not only the lack of fuel, but also the negative political impact of holding it in the midst of the crisis and after the trail of rejection left by the previous edition.
The worker adds that among many of the employees involved there was a dilemma this year that had not been experienced with such intensity in previous years. “On the one hand, the money was greatly needed, because they pay well and in foreign currency. But on the other hand, there was fear,” he confesses. Fear of possible protests, of being pointed out or rebuked while serving drinks and dishes to a foreign elite oblivious to the blackout and shortages. “After what happened with the Capitol, no one wanted to be at the center of a viral photo or a fight,” he says.
Thousands of Cubans reacted with anger to the waltz of millions for an elite, in contrast to a population condemned to darkness
The last edition of the Habano Festival, celebrated with a lavish gala dinner in the National Capitol, provoked widespread popular rejection that overflowed social networks. As the country endured prolonged blackouts, food shortages and a widespread deterioration in daily life, images of foreign guests toasting under restored lamps and lavishly arranged tables in one of the Republic’s most symbolic buildings were read as an obscene provocation. Thousands of Cubans reacted with anger to the waltz of millions for an elite, in contrast to a population condemned to penumbra, rationing and daily precariousness.
Each year, the Habano Festival attracts millionaires, global distributors and international aficionados to a party of select glamor in colonial hotels and luxury lounges in Havana. His auction of exclusive humidors –artistic cases that preserve legendary tobaccos– has reached stratospheric figures. In the previous edition, a commemorative humidor from the Behike Line set a historical record by selling for 4.6 million euros, and the seven pieces auctioned totaled more than 16 million, destined – according to the Government – to the Cuban public health system.
But this symbolic and real capital coexists in a grotesque way with a population that faces the limit of precariousness, after the interruption of oil supplies that Cuba imported, above all, from Venezuela and Mexico. The thermoelectric plants – most of them obsolete – operate in dribs and drabs and electricity generation never manages to satisfy national demand.
The decision to postpone the Festival comes at a time when the Cuban economy is going through an accelerated deterioration due to multiple factors: the interruption of the flow of Venezuelan oil since the capture of Nicolás Maduro, the US executive order of January 29 that threatens to apply tariffs to those who supply fuel to the Island and the chronic shortage of foreign currency that prevents the import of basic raw materials.
The suspension of the event confirms that foreign-oriented luxury and the reality of the average Cuban have entered into a contradiction that is impossible to conceal.
The energy crisis has also served as official justification for cuts in working hours, strict rationing of gasoline and diesel, temporary hotel closures and alerts even at airports, where several airlines have canceled flights due to lack of fuel. At the same time, the regime has prioritized internal control, with systematic military exercises and a visible increase in repression.
The Government insists on blaming the US embargo and the intensification of the oil siege for the crisis, presenting it as an almost exclusive effect of the blockade policy. But this narrative fails to extinguish the general perception that the national economy is foundering due to internal errors and insistence on a failed model. While negotiating with foreign distributors and exhibiting record sales figures – like the 827 million dollars earned from tobacco in 2024 – the daily lives of Cubans pass between blackouts, shortages of food and medicine, and health services on the brink of collapse.
In this context, the suspension of the event confirms that foreign-oriented luxury and the reality of the average Cuban have entered into a contradiction that is impossible to conceal. While humidors are put up for bid in the gala halls for millions, the majority of the neighborhoods of Havana and the provinces survive on the limit. It is the harsh contrast between ostentation for the showcase and everyday misery.
