The Cuban economy is on its knees.

As President Trump tightens the screw with a strict oil embargo, it could very soon collapse altogether, bringing down with it the hardline communist gerontocracy whose dictatorship, over the past seven decades, has steadily impoverished the Caribbean's biggest island nation.

Matters are fast coming to a head. People are starving. Seven out of ten endure days when they don't have even one meal. Nine out of ten now live in extreme poverty. Babies are going without milk. Daily power cuts are common, often lasting 20 hours, with disastrous results for sanitation and medical care.

With no electricity to power household fans in the tropical heat at night, people have taken to sleeping outside. With power cuts disrupting water supplies, they have no water to wash the dishes or flush the loos. Rubbish is piled up in backyards and on streets now largely bereft of cars but home to scavengers. Even Havana's main arteries are deserted (no petrol).

No surprise, then, that mosquito-borne diseases are spreading fast – and no wonder at least two million Cubans have fled their homeland in this decade alone. That's more than 20 per cent of the population and, inevitably, mainly the young, educated and ambitious: Cuba's best and brightest hollowed out in the island's worst and most prolonged economic crisis.

Under its sunny, azure-blue Caribbean carapace, Cuba is a living hellhole – and it's about to get worse.

Cuba needs at least 100,000 barrels per day (bpd) of oil to supply even the barest of power to industry and homes. Until recently, around 40 per cent of that came from Venezuela. But since Trump removed Nicolas Maduro and replaced him with his more compliant deputy dictator in Caracas, that source has dried up entirely.

Mexico was also a major oil supplier. But Trump leaned on President Claudia Sheinbaum, a Left-winger with a soft spot for Cuban communism, to cut off exports to Cuba, threatening tariffs if she did not comply. She eventually agreed, as her own state oil company was struggling to meet production targets. Hence that source has gone, too.

Cuba's allies in the axis of autocrats – Russia, China and Iran – have shown no appetite to make up the shortfall. Leaving Cuba with just 40,000 bpd from its own domestic oil supplies which, like everything else in communist Cuba, are not always reliable. That's not enough to keep industry or society going. The country will effectively run out of power before Easter.

Workers are already being laid off or put on three or four-day weeks, with proportionate cuts to their already miserly wages. Many have no means of getting to work anyway. Airlines have stopped flying to Havana because there is no aviation fuel for the return journey, hastening the demise of a once-lucrative tourist industry.

The Cuban economy is 15 per cent smaller than it was in 2018 — and cumulative inflation has been 450 per cent since then. One government worker explained to a US newspaper what it means at a personal level. Her salary is 4,000 pesos a month (a mere £123 at the current exchange rate).

A litre of milk costs 1,600 pesos, a box of chicken drumsticks 2,000 pesos. So on these two items alone her monthly salary is all but gone. Next month she won't even be able to afford these purchases: her monthly salary is being cut to 2,400 pesos. Not exactly the communist paradise the Left used to depict.

Cuba has been on the road to ruin for decades. There was a time after Fidel Castro and his communist revolutionaries overthrew the corrupt Batista dictatorship 67 years ago when the island was the poster child of the Left, which talked up the progress it was making, especially in education and healthcare, and even encouraged it to spread its revolutionary fervour into Latin America and Africa.

But as the decades rolled by, the dead hand of Stalinist dictatorship took its toll. Even when China and then the Soviet Union gave up on old-fashioned communist economics, Cuba doubled down.

The private sector remained minuscule, the one-party state omnipresent. It guarded its power and privilege with one of the most extensive secret police operations in the world. Every bloc, every street, every field had its agents ready to arrest anyone seen to deviate from Castro's Stalinist orthodoxy.

No opposition was allowed to take root, no civil society to develop. Cuban communism enveloped every element of life and the economy. Hence the long years of economic decline – but also a remarkably quiescent people despite the increasing hardship. In almost 70 years, there have only been two periods of protest (1994 and 2021), both modest, both easily snuffed out.

This is President Trump's problem. The current regime may be on its last legs but how will it be deposed and what would replace it? There is no opposition waiting in the wings, at home or in exile. No fresh cause or figure to rally round.

Not even any visible agitation to remove the current president, Miguel Diaz-Canel, an unpopular 65-year-old party apparatchik who rules at the pleasure of Castro's 94-year-old brother, Raul, who broods over the country like a Red Ayatollah.

'Cuba looks ready to fall,' opined Trump last month, urging the regime to talk before it was too late. 'Come to us and make a deal,' he declared this week.

His administration is secretly searching for someone inside the regime who might be prepared to do that. Diaz-Canel says he's prepared to talk with no pre-conditions but also regularly utters 'no surrender' and moots 'creative resistance' to America, whatever that means.

What Trump means by a deal is also something of a mystery, as is usually the case with him in such circumstances. But perhaps his handling of Venezuela gives us a clue: slow-motion regime change. Trump's got the oil, and the grip of the dictatorship is slowly – very slowly – being loosened. It could be a template for Cuba.

The island, of course, has no oil worth speaking of. But it does have another asset of which Trump is fond: lots of beachfront real estate. I can see a scenario in which the regime in Havana agrees to the gradual but steady introduction of market-economy reforms and opens up to American business and private investment – in return for Trump lifting the oil embargo and US sanctions in tandem.

The President is in no doubt about the historic prize within his grasp. Cuba has been the bane of US governments since the days of John F. Kennedy in the early Sixties: bungled US-backed invasions (including the Bay of Pigs fiasco), attempted assassinations (the CIA concocted multiple schemes to kill Castro, including one involving an exploding cigar) and decades of sanctions which hurt Cubans but never brought down the regime.

Plus, of course, the world coming its closest ever to nuclear holocaust in the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962. I was only 13 at the time. But I can still remember going out into the school playground during the morning interval with my pals to search the sky for Soviet missiles (we were only 20-odd miles from America's Polaris nuclear base).

For Trump to be able to say he had achieved what every president since JFK had aimed for but failed – the dismantling of Cuban communism – would be an enormous feather in his cap.

It might mean little to younger Americans in a country with a short historic memory. But to Republicans (and even Democrats) of a certain age – and above all to the almost three million Cuban-Americans whose parents fled Castro's communism – it would be rightly seen as a historic achievement.

And who knows? During the second term of this most unpredictable of presidents, it might even be about to happen.