CUBANS TODAY, THEY KNOW HOW TO DEFEND THEIR RIGHTS.

through the small but steady domestic oil production on Cuba’s north-central coast, which touches the oil-rich Gulf of Mexico. Owners of modern, fuel-injected cars buy special if they can afford it to prevent the lower-octane fuel from damaging their engines.

High-ranking Cuban public officials often get both government cars and a monthly gasoline ration; their pay of US$30 to US$40 a month makes it impossible otherwise to afford gas that costs more than US$4 a gallon. As in virtually every aspect of the Cuban economy, special gas cards provided to state employees to buy the fuel fed a thriving black market.

Throughout the day, state officials can be seen filling the tanks of their government car, then leaving the skies clearer but residents worried about Cuba’s future energy supplies.

The replacement of oil money with tourism dollars has accelerated both the decline of Cuba’s ailing state-run businesses and the growth of its small private sector. Whereas oil money went entirely to the Communist state, much of the tourism is going to private enterprise — taxi drivers, private restaurants and bed-andbreakfasts that provide higher value service to tourists trying to avoid the high prices and poor service at state-run eateries and hotels.

“Those who work in the private sector have, in one way or another, seen improvement in their quality of life,” said Omar Everleny Perez, a Cuban economist and expert on the private sector. “The state worker on a salary hasn’t seen that.”

There’s also a geographic disparity, with rural areas and towns that don’t draw tourists seeing deeper, more protracted shortages.

In Cuba, there’s a widespread sense that deeper cuts in Venezuelan oil would push the entire country over the edge into intolerable economic problems.

A near-constant refrain is that Cubans can tolerate deep deprivation, but would not stand for a repeat of the Special Period. On Aug. 5, 1994, at the depth of postSoviet crisis, Havana residents clashed with police around the Malecon seaside promenade in civil unrest that only subsided after Fidel Castro rushed to the scene and called for the protests to end.

Fidel’s brother and successor, President Raul Castro, has announced that he will step down from the presidency in February 2018. His most likely successor appears to be his first vice-president, 56-year-old Communist Party official Miguel Diaz-Canel, but the government has said nothing about the handover process.

Cubans are highly skeptical that a new leader without the credibility conferred by the Castros’ founding role in the Cuban revolution will be able to guide an increasingly well-informed and worldly population through a new period of profound economic hardship.

“If Venezuela falls, if Venezuela changes and they don’t send Cuba any more oil, it’s going to be like it was, in 1991, ’92, ’93. It’s going to be hard,” said Li Nelson Florentino Abreu, an 80-year-old retired electrical engineer. “And Cubans aren’t sheep. They aren’t going to put up with everything. Cubans today, they know how to defend their rights.”