In January 2019, I visited Santiago, Cuba, on a study abroad program, with seven of my students. They wanted to see and experience the “mythic” land about which single-sided stories predominate: a litany of distorted accounts of a malfunctioning society; a country that hung on to communism, an obsolete ideology; hyperbolic tales of repression; hordes fleeing an ugly communist dictatorship; a country training terrorists to harm the rest of the world, etc. These narratives have prevailed since April 6, 1960, when Lester D. Mallory, deputy assistant secretary of state for inter-american affairs, wrote a memorandum to his boss stating that “the only foreseeable means of alienating internal support is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship.” The USA embargo aims at undermining the socialist experiment and making it a resounding failure that would discourage other countries of the Global South from embarking on similar paths.
In April 2024, I returned to Santiago for an academic conference. Traveling to Cuba is an obstacle course, as it has been since the 1960s. First, the laws and the bureaucracy in the USA itself. I easily obtained the certificate of compliance, a precondition to buying the air ticket. I could not use my credit card to reserve a room in a hotel run by the Cuban government and the military. Come the time of airport check-in, I had to fill out a Cuban government online form in Spanish. I did not know about it. I missed my flight and had to rebook. T-Mobile, the US phone company, allows me to roam around the world, but not in Cuba, and one minute of conversation costs two US dollars. On the internet, I occasionally came across this notice: “You are not authorized to access this site because you are located in a country subject to US trade restrictions.” In response to the harassment, the Cuban government and people have invented all sorts of survival strategies for the dollars they need.
On my way back to the USA, at the Miami airport, customs officials seized my two boxes of cigars and two bottles of alcohol, which demonstrated the pettiness and brutality of the law. Cuba cannot borrow money on a dollar-ruled international market, and has difficulty trading because non-US businesses could be sued and prevented from operating elsewhere. In an interview with Liz Oliva Fernández of the Belly of the Beast, Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs explains the far-reaching and damaging consequences of the embargo for the Cuban economy.
In 2014, the Obama administration initiated a thaw that eventually regulated immigration and started more “civilized” relations between the two countries. After Covid-19 devastated the Cuban tourist industry, and after the Trump administration reimposed harsher anti-Cuban laws, the major story has been the ailing economy and the hemorrhage of Cubans. Because the “wet foot, dry foot” policy changed in January 2017, another November 1999 Elián González saga could not occur anymore. According to Professor Helen Yaffe, the US embargo is the most important reason for this emigration. She explains that “until the United States alleviates the punishing blockade that is suffocating the Cuban people, economic hardship will continue to drive Cuban emigration.”
The Santiago I visited in April 2024 had lost part of its inhabitants and its enchantment. Demonstrators were demanding “comida,” “corriente,” and “agua.” A power outage could last 16 hours. Farmers’ markets had food but at exorbitant prices. Shortages were as acute as during my first visit in 2004, 13 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Scarcity, protest, and exodus now feed reports by the “international free press.” The state of affairs worsened on October 18, 2024, when the whole country was plunged into total blackout.
Little is said of the five anti-Covid vaccines Cuban scientists developed. Cuba refused vaccines from elsewhere and successfully vaccinated its people. In actuality, given the adverse circumstances Cuba has faced, its state-funded success in biotechnology is extraordinary. They have developed world-known vaccines, one of which is the renowned CIMAvax-EGF for lung cancer.
Many African countries, by comparison, have experienced decades-long scarcities of medicines, water, food, electricity, etc. With the late 1980s, structural adjustment programs (SAPs), long-established public markets like telecommunications, health institutions, state corporations, and big chunks of public assets and resources were ceded to local and foreign corporations for cheap, in the name of competition and efficiency.
The legendary Cuban spirit of resilience embodied in the popular daily phrases of “la lucha” and “resolver,” which find joie de vivre even in the toughest situations, is being seriously tested in Santiago. Beautiful murals have been washed out; begging has appeared in unfamiliar places; transportation can be hell; the quality of public services has deteriorated, materials are lacking in hospitals and elsewhere, but the principle of caring for basic needs for the majority has been upheld against all odds. As a Santiaguero friend told me, “There are a lot of bad things in Cuba, but there are a lot of good things also,” echoing what Fidel Castro told the nation the day after the take-over, that the Revolution “will do things that have never been done before.” It is remarkable that, despite the 1962 embargo and the lack of access to global financial markets, Cuba has maintained free education and health care, and has achieved a lot in sports and cultural products. Walking at night in Santiago is stress free. Mugging is not common, but now rising. The right to life has prevailed over the right to bear arms. In Santiago, an air of dignity still exists, based on the decades-long achievements of the Revolution, but also on the fact that revolutionary forces organized there in the Sierra Maestra, before dealing the final blow to the Batista dictatorship on January 1, 1959.
Cuba has made mistakes, such as eliminating all private businesses, but they started rectifying more than 25 years ago. The 2019 Constitution allowed private property rights and more access to international and national markets, but the lack of private and public investments, as well as excessive state control, have reduced the prospects of success for many. Since the demise of the Council of Mutual Economic Assistance, Cuban economists have pondered how to revitalize the economy. Levels of privatization have increased, but resulted in higher levels of inequality. It appears the Cuban government has resigned itself to allowing more social and economic gaps to save the Revolution. The Santiago I saw in April 2024 is a testimony to that. New forms of marginalization and racism have surfaced, but the dream of a good society based on the core principles of “buen vivir” for its people has not died. The Cuban people have faced enormous challenges since the first day of the revolution, even before the Revolution, when the USA used to supply weapons to Batista’s dictatorship. On November 2, 2023, at the United Nations, only the USA and Israel voted against lifting the embargo. Ukraine abstained. Only removing that anachronistic embargo or “bloqueo” as it is known in Cuba, would allow the world to have an objective measure of the success of the Cuban experiment in a world that is rapidly becoming multipolar.
