Cuba faces its worst crisis since Fidel Castro took power 66 years ago

Not long ago, Havana’s Plaza de la Revolución was packed with American tourists clacking their sticks together. selfie as they took photos of the iconic image of revolutionary Che Guevara and attempted a spin in a candy red 1952 Chevrolet Bel-Air.

Today, the sleek 1950s American convertibles that symbolized quintessential Cuba are empty and the tourists they carried have disappeared.

Drivers spend their lives like most Cubans: enduring prolonged power outages, standing in line at poorly stocked supermarkets and watching their friends, family and neighbors – fed up with all the hardships – pack their bags and leave.

10 years ago, the president Barack Obama surprised the world by reestablishing diplomatic relations with Cuba, ending more than 50 years of Cold War estrangement between the United States and a country with which it was once on the brink of nuclear war.

For two and a half years, Cuba brimmed with enthusiasm in the midst of a notable wave of investments and tourism, driven by agreements signed by large American companies such as Google, AT&T and Major League Baseball.

But a financial implosion caused by a cascade of factors – the tightening of US policies by the Donald Trump administration, the mismanagement of the Cuban economy, the crushing effect of the COVID19 pandemic – has kept visitors away and launched a migratory exodus of epic proportions.

Tourism, once a vital element of Cuba’s economy, has plummeted, with a drop of almost 50% since 2017, and new US visa regulations make it more difficult even for Europeans to travel to the island.

“The comparison is like night and day,” said Luis Manuel Pérez, who works as a driver.

A former engineering professor, Pérez, 57, once had a stream of clients who paid $40 an hour to get into a classic car. Now you’re lucky to get one a day.

Many of the thousands of private businesses that the Cuban government allowed to open in recent years are trying to stay afloat after losing so many workers to emigration. The streets are full of garbage, since the fuel shortage prevents picking it up.

Many Cubans put it succinctly: 10 years ago, there was hope. Now, there is desperation.

“You go out into the street and the Cuban’s smile fades,” illustrated Adriana Heredia Sánchez, owner of a clothing store in Old Havana.

He deterioration of Cuba underlines the oversized role of the United States in the country, and comes as Donald Trump is about to return to the White House: he has proposed Marco Rubio, Republican senator from Florida and supporter of a hard line with Cuba, as secretary of state .

In many ways, the island is suffering its worst crisis since Fidel Castro took power 66 years ago, surpassing even that of the early 1990s, when the dissolution of the Soviet Union left Cuba without its main lifeline.

Cuba has suffered three nationwide blackouts since October. Official figures show that the population has dropped by at least a million people, 10 percent, since the pandemic. More than 675,000 of those Cubans moved to the United States.

Even the infant mortality rate, which the communist rulers had so proudly brought to levels below those of the United States, has been rising.

Cuba was one of the few Latin American countries promoted for eliminating child malnutrition. But today their milk rations for children, as well as basic foodstuffs such as rice and beans, often arrive late in state stores, if they arrive at all.

The sense of misery is a far cry from the excitement felt the week in 2016 when Obama attended a Tampa Bay Rays baseball game in Havana with Cuban President Raúl Castro.

“If Obama had run for president, he would have been elected,” laughed Jaime Morales, a tour guide in Havana.

Obama also softened U.S. policy toward the island, allowing U.S. cruise ships to dock in Cuba, more U.S. airlines to fly there, and more Americans to visit.

Then the president Trump backed down. In 2018, after American embassy employees suffered mysterious illnesses, which some believed were an attack from a hostile country, he sent so many workers home that he closed the embassy for all intents and purposes. Joe Biden’s government reopened it in 2023.

In his last days in office, Trump also put Cuba back on a list of state sponsors of terrorisma designation that severely limits their ability to do business globally and that President Biden maintained.

Ricardo Zúniga, one of Obama’s top advisers who led the secret negotiations to restore diplomatic ties, acknowledged that the government did not calculate how strongly allies loyal to Fidel Castro would oppose the US measures after the former leader spoke publicly. against them.

Although there was never an official quid pro quo for the lifting of travel and trade restrictions, Cuba freed political prisoners and generally agreed to increase internet access and allow more private companies.

But the government was slow to authorize contracts with American companies, while small businesses faced numerous bureaucratic hurdles.

Fidel Castro knew that greater access to the internet and economic freedoms would lead more people to question the lack of basic rights in Cuba and could undermine the regime, Zúniga said. The revolutionary leader saw the measures as a Trojan horse from the United States, and “that’s one hundred percent what it was,” he said.

“My biggest conclusion is that the leadership of the Cuban government never took advantage of opportunities to allow gradual change in response to popular will,” he explained. “So now they are caught in social collapse.”

Ben Rhodes, another former Obama adviser who worked on the negotiations, told The New York Times that Biden’s decision to largely maintain Trump’s policies was particularly damaging. “What interests of the United States are protected by trying to turn a country 90 miles from Florida into a failed state with a hungry population?” he said.

Two senior Biden administration officials defended the Democrat’s Cuba policy, noting that it reversed some restrictions. He lifted a limit on the amount of money Cubans in the United States could send home, increased flights and created more banking opportunities for Cuban businesspeople.

Cuba’s harsh suppression of a popular uprising in 2021 left hundreds of people in prison, making it harder for Biden to justify easing restrictions, the official said.

Several Cuban-American congressmen who favored the restrictions also had considerable influence, and critics said the White House was worried about the political landscape ahead of the November elections.

The Cuban government recently said that Obama’s brief rapprochement was positive for the country, but that it was followed by eight years of aggression. On Friday, state officials held a large protest outside the US embassy.

José Ramón Cabañas Rodríguez, Cuba’s first ambassador to Washington when the embassies reopened in July 2015, said the United States was to blame for Cuba’s woes.

The Trump administration helped trigger mass arrivals at the southern border by shutting down visa operations, forcing Cubans to take irregular paths to the United States, he said. Justifications for cutting diplomatic relations, such as accusing Cuba of sending troops to Venezuela or making embassy employees sick, were absurd, he said. “They just lied,” he said.

Cuba’s inability to maintain its power grid is directly related to U.S. sanctions cutting into the country’s revenue, he said.

“We are concerned that the population’s standard of living will deteriorate, which is a fact and is tangible,” said Cabañas, who is now director of the government’s International Policy Research Center.

“But at the same time this has not been a country of folding our hands and waiting for someone to bring a solution,” he added. “We have lived through previous cycles, where there is an impact on the standard of living, which is often linked to the hostile policy of the United States.”

Many Cubans have grown tired of their government blaming Washington, said Arianna Delgado, a makeup artist who left Cuba this year for Miami.

“Let’s be clear: Cuba has always been bad, but now the situation is not that there is less, now it is that there is nothing,” he said through tears. “Cuba is a concentration camp. “The whole world has to know.”

Rubén Salazar, 58, says people cook with charcoal because there is not enough gas.

“There is no life here,” he said, “the Cuban has no future.”

A pharmacy in the Vedado neighborhood of Havana distributes 200 numbered tickets the day before the medications are delivered. As a result, people have to queue for hours, twice.

“Sometimes there are medicines that run out before reaching 200,” says Maritza González, 54, a teacher’s aide, who needed an asthma inhaler. He’s only found one once this year. “Sometimes they run out before they reach 50.” That day, it was number 136.