“Cuba’s Economic Crisis Deepens: A Closer Look at the Pandemic, Blockade and Mass Emigration”

HAVANA (Dagbladet): Queues in front of shops, where the shelves are half empty. Queuing and waiting for a bus that may or may not come. Hours of searching for necessary food, medicine or toilet paper. A currency reform introduced during the pandemic has resulted in galloping price increases, record inflation and a chaotic monetary system with multiple exchange rates. Lack of money. Kilometer-long queues in front of petrol stations, in some cases going on both night and day. Is there any fuel left when it’s my turn today or tomorrow? When will the next oil tanker arrive from Venezuela or Russia?

Those who have money and perhaps private small businesses buy up large quantities and sell on at high prices. Black markets and informal markets and networks work. Those who have money get most of it. The struggle for existence takes time anyway. Those who had little before have it bad now.

This was important

“Everyone leaves”, alle drar, was the title of a novel critical of the regime written by the Cuban author Wendy Guerra in 2006. Opposition members have regularly left the country since the revolution in 1959. Getting away from Cuba has in recent years been a future project for many young Cubans. But now the title is more apt than ever. According to US migration authorities, around 320,000 Cubans crossed the border from Mexico to Cuba last year. People who have houses, cars or other things to sell sell away to finance emigration, to the USA, Spain or Mexico.

“It’s something everyone’s talking about,” we’re told. Go or stay. It is primarily the young people, the future, who leave. The adults, who experienced the building of a welfare state in the 70s and 80s and saw the “special period” after the collapse of the socialist bloc and the collapse of the Cuban economy, say it was worse in the 90s. Then people were starving, and there were several hours of power outages a day. It’s not so bad now. But it is not far away. Many who have patiently waited for better times have lost faith.

The economic reforms which Raúl Castro started and which was consolidated at the Communist Party Congress in 2011, opened up more private business, initially in craft services, restaurants, nightlife and room rental. Cubans with money, either in Cuba or in exile, invested. The normalization between the US and Cuba under Barack Obama and Raúl Castro created optimism.

– We have come here to bury the last vestige of the Cold War in America, Obama said in his historic speech in Havana in 2016. He stated that the US’s Cuba policy was not working and was an “outdated burden” for the Cuban people. Obama did what he could within his presidential powers to limit the economic blockade that the United States has faced since 1960 and strengthened several times. Cruise ships docked at Cuban ports, American tourists and business people flocked to the island.

A forewarned street fight

But the reform process in Cuba stagnated, although it is now open to small and medium-sized businesses, and then came Donald Trump. The economic sanctions were sharply tightened, and Cuba was again put on the list of countries that support terrorism. Biden has made it easier to send money from the United States to families in Cuba. But there are no plans to remove Cuba from the terrorist list. The fact that the Democrats have a hawk in their own ranks, Bob Menéndez, hardly contributes to Cuba policy getting higher on Biden’s agenda.

In contrast, the United States, as a contribution to resolving the migration chaos and the pressure on the American border in the south, has entered into an agreement with Nicaragua, Venezuela, Haiti and Cuba to accept 30,000 migrants a month from these countries. The prerequisite is an economic guarantor in the United States that provides housing and subsistence until the immigrants can feed themselves. This scheme, Parole, has of course created a new craving. Those who have family or friends in the US who can provide bank guarantees and invite are striking while the iron is hot.

It’s already being talked about about brain drain, about the lack of professionals and key people in all sectors.

– It is a “brain robbery” and a policy to weaken Cuba, warn the critics in Cuba.

Cuba has an aging population. Low birth rates and record emigration among young and working people reinforce a negative demographic trend.

There are several reasons for the acute crisis Cuba is in: For a country where tourism is one of the biggest sources of income, the pandemic and the closure of the country was of course an economic disaster. The tourists have started to return, but the hotels are still closed or half full.

Can become a leader in a few years

Then there is the American blockade, which the Cuban regime itself chooses as its main explanation. It is a policy that is condemned annually in the UN General Assembly, against the votes of the USA and Israel. It is obvious that Cuba is deprived of enormous sums through lost trade and lost investments as a result of the US’s punitive measures.

But just as important: The United States’ penal policy contributes to maintaining the notion that Cuba is fighting for national independence. The fight against the US’s economic punitive measures will once again be a main slogan in the 1 May celebrations. In this way, the blockade helps to cover up the regime’s own political and economic mismanagement. The blockade has neither contributed to more welfare nor democracy in Cuba so far, on the contrary. It has only increased the distress and misery of most Cubans.