Inside Cuba under tough U.S. sanctions | 60 Minutes

Cuba has been under communist rule since the 1960s. The Cuban government employs most of the country's workers and runs the hospitals and schools. Opposition parties are illegal. For decades, a US embargo cut the island off from American trade. Now, the Trump administration has tightened that vice, strangling its oil supply and threatening to sanction those who do business with the Cuban regime, making it nearly impossible for the government to buy fuel, food, or medicine. Washington says the failure is Havana's, a corrupt communist regime that has mismanaged the country for decades. Havana blames Washington, saying the sanctions are designed to turn Cuba into a failed state. The Trump administration wants Havana to know there are quote no escape valves. It has even threatened to take Cuba. Each side blames the other. Caught between them are more than 9 million Cubans. Last month, we traveled there and found a country in freef fall.

In Cuba today, the basics have become luxuries. Pharmacy shelves are bare. Lines for bread stretch around the block. And during daily blackouts, most of the country disappears into darkness. Cuba's crisis has been decades in the making. Its leaders have jailed critics, limited free speech, and Washington says the regime has hoarded billions of dollars. But Havana's government blames the US. >> The United States has no legitimacy to what they're claiming. They just have brutal power against the whole population of another country. That is criminal. Carlos Fernandez Deosio is Cuba's deputy foreign minister and a main negotiator with the US. >> How are the restrictions imposed earlier this year different from the embargo that has been in place effectively for over 60 years? >> They've become much tougher, which means now the US threatens with punishment, with coercive measures or sanctions countries and their companies that engage commercially with Cuba. The streets are dark in old Havana where it used to be glittering and light at night. People tell me on the street that they are hungry. There are bread lines.

Does it feel like this country is falling apart? >> It's not falling apart, but it's suffering the pain. >> Made worse by the loss of its powerful benefactors. First, it was the Soviet Union, then Venezuela. When the US captured Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro, Cuba lost its main oil supplier and the crisis was desperate inside the country's hospitals. Long a point of pride here. On the day we visited the William Solair Hospital, we saw this infant being rushed into the intensive care unit. Dehydrated and suffering from malnutrition, he was barely responsive. >> What is the prognosis for this baby? Right now, his prognosis is critical. That means his life is in immediate danger. He could die at any moment. >> Do you have everything you need here? >> Dr. Alejandro Chong is the head of the ICU.

>> He and his team cleared the baby's airway and just in case he stopped breathing, prepared a ventilator. The infant was about 2 months old. He weighed less than 5 lb. He had no name and no family. >> We were told he was abandoned and brought in by [music] protective services. That little shriek was a positive sign, but stabilizing him was only the first step. >> After this, he'll need nutritional support, which is where things get more difficult for us. In other parts of the world, patients like this are given specialized formulas, many of which come from the United States. We have to make do with formulas made from malanga, a starchy root vegetable, and chicken. >> Doctors in Cuba make compromises like that on every shift. Just 90 m from the US, Cuba has always imported much of what it needs. Now, the US restrictions are making it harder to import food and medical supplies.

Washington says it does not intend to restrict those goods, but many foreign companies fearful of US penalties won't sell them to Cuba. Cuba's problems long predate the Trump administration's new sanctions. For decades, the US says the regime mismanaged Cuba's economy and let its infrastructure crumble. But since early January, Cuban officials say only a single tanker of oil has reached the island, crippling the country's electrical grid. We're in the pediatric ER right now and as so often happens here in Cuba now the electricity just turned off and this is that interim period between when the electricity turns off and the generator turns on. These are the critical moments here. >> Those few seconds might seem insignificant to someone outside the medical field, but they're precious seconds when you're dealing with a patient under general anesthesia or a patient on a ventilator in the intensive care unit.

And when the generators fail, doctors told us they've had to finish surgeries using the light from their cell phones. If ventilators stop working, they pump oxygen for critical patients by hand. Because it's exhausting and poorly paid work, a huge number of doctors have left the profession or the country. Many who've stayed have taken second jobs just to get by. >> Dr. Chong owns this food stand and he makes more money there than he does running the intensive care unit. >> Dr. Lauren Rodriguez, a secondyear resident in pediatric surgery, supports herself by working as a radio host. >> There are fewer personnel, fewer resources, and it makes all the work we're doing much more difficult. >> Doctors told us cancer drugs, anesthetics, lab equipment are all in critically short supply. You're the one standing in front of the patient face to face. You're the one who has to look at them and tell them you can't solve their problem.

>> How hard is that to tell a patient to tell a parent who brought in a child who's sick or injured that you can't help them? >> Yes, we have to tell people that constantly. >> For this toddler, the missing item was a part for an artificial lung machine critical to her surgery. Normally, it would have been here in 2 days. When we met her, she had been waiting for 68 days. >> So, she's been waiting a big chunk of her life for this component, the surgery >> just to be able to get. >> Paloma Blanco, a dancer with the National Ballet of Cuba, is 8 months pregnant with her first baby. Are you concerned about giving birth at this moment in time here in Cuba? >> I am nervous. But I trust in the doctors. >> It's not the doctors, but lack of supplies that keeps her up at night. She has already asked friends in the US to send her surgical supplies just in case she needs a C-section.

>> Is that something that a lot of expecting mothers do? They actually go to the hospital when they're ready to give birth with >> C-section kits. sometimes when when you have the possibility. >> Since Fidel Castro seized power in 1959, nearly every American administration has tried to force change in Havana, going back to President Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis. >> Now, further action is required and it is underway and these actions may only be the beginning. >> In his second term, President Trump has turned up the rhetoric. Actually, what we're going to do with Cuba is we're going to come back from Iran, those beautiful ships. We'll pass Cuba. We'll have one of them stop about 50 yards off the coast. They'll raise up their hands and then we're going to send Marco Rubio in to finish up the deal. >> Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants, has made regime change in Cuba the signature issue of his career and as Secretary of State turned it into one of the administration's priorities.

>> Biggest problem Cuba has is that their regime is a disaster. their economic model doesn't work and the people who run the country don't know what the hell they're doing. Uh all they're most interested in is holding on to power. >> Earlier this year, negotiations between the US and Cuba stalled. >> Every time you interrupt me, I'm just going to keep explaining how corrupt this regime is. And last week, during a speech by Mike Waltz, the US ambassador to the UN, those tensions exploded into public view. >> This is the United Nations. This isn't your communist dictatorship. >> Cuban officials confronted him. >> Back up, ambassador. Back away. This isn't Havana. >> I'm suspending the meeting. >> One of those Cuban diplomats was expelled from the US. >> What do you think the US wants from Cuba politically? The US has spoken of taking control of Cuba and has spoken of making political changes of it of their liking, not the ones chosen by the people of Cuba.

>> Can you give me a ballpark figure of when the last time was that you actually had a face-to-face interaction with the US official? >> In the past months, >> months. >> We prefer to be discreet about it. Secretary Rubio declined our request for an interview, but in a statement, a spokesman said, "The failing Cuban regime continues to blame the US and everyone else for their own incompetence and corruption. They hide billions in overseas bank accounts instead of investing in electricity, infrastructure, and the daily needs of its people. You blame the United States, but it is your government that built the power plants, that set the wages, that let the infrastructure here crumble. How much responsibility does your government bear here? >> Every government has responsibility for other people in the US. How much responsibility does a government have for the standard of living, for the affordability of people, for crime in the cities, for drugs? Every government has responsibility. What responsibility does your government bear?

>> The unique position of Cuba is that in addition to whatever responsibility the government has, it has an external very powerful factor having an influence in the reality of the population. But our government has a lot of responsibility because there could be decisions that could have been better. >> This year, Cuba made the biggest economic reforms in more than six decades, including dropping its monopolies on fuel, banking, andies. US companies have started exporting fuel to Cuba's private sector, but it's prohibitively expensive. >> For most Cubans, staples are further out of reach. The carton of eggs can cost more than a month's salary. >> That reality has forced people to find their own solutions. >> Half milligram. >> At this street market, we found medicine for sale, part of a thriving black market. Cuba enacted just this past summer 176 economic reforms. You yourself have said that this has revolutionized the economy here in Cuba.

>> Correct. >> Why not go for political reforms as well? >> Well, I believe that rather than in Cuba, it is in the US where it should be political reform. Cuba does not threaten the US or any country. When it comes to its own country, Cuba has cracked down on dissident and almost no one we met was willing to openly criticize the Cuban government. >> How do you see this impass ending? >> With a change of attitude from the United States. >> Do you think that's going to happen? >> We hope so. We see we see every reason for that to occur. What we see no reason is for the US government to continue to punish the whole population of a country. How long is that sustainable? How acceptable is that? Just because power exists in the hands of the United States, does everybody have to bend to that? >> Back at William Solera Hospital, >> that two-month-old baby who desperately needed formula, he did make it out of the ICU, but this weekend we checked in with Dr. Chong. He told us the baby had suffered respiratory complications and was readmitted to the ICU where he died on Thursday. Do you feel that you owe it to the parents of the children we saw suffering in those hospitals to make some sort of change that would appease the United States?

>> We owe it to them to do as much as we can to ease the situation that the population faces to ensure that they continue to live in a sovereign nation and we owe it to them to protect them from being overtaken by a superpower whose interest is not their livelihoods. It is our responsibility to protect our people from that and to do as much as possible to improve their welfare.