Where will the island’s crisis end?
www.foreignaffairs.com
“… In the last five years, well over a million people—more than one in every ten Cubans—have fled the country, mostly for the United States.
Today, under President Miguel Díaz-Canel, the island is enduring its worst economic crisis since the collapse of the Soviet Union. GDP has declined 11 percent since 2020. The electric grid is falling apart. Security forces harshly repress antigovernment protests. In October, Hurricane Melissa devastated the island’s east, damaging or destroying some 90,000 homes and 250,000 acres of farmland.
Now, an outbreak of dengue and other mosquito-borne viruses has reached epidemic proportions.
Cuba’s unfolding tragedy is partly the result of external shocks, such as U.S. President Donald Trump’s 2016 election. After taking office, Trump reinstated many of the sanctions his predecessor had lifted. Between 2019 and 2020, for instance, he sharply restricted flights, remittances, and travel to the island, and in 2021, he redesignated Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism, mainly for harboring a handful of fugitives from U.S. justice.
U.S. President Joe Biden only partially loosened these restrictions, and Trump has reinstated some of them in his second term. Meanwhile, the COVID-19 pandemic shattered the island’s tourism industry.
And with the second Trump administration mounting an increasingly aggressive pressure campaign to oust Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, an already sharp reduction in oil aid from Caracas to Havana in recent years threatens to get worse, and Cuba risks losing its most important economic and geopolitical partner.
But the current emergency is also a mess of the Cuban government’s making. Despite Raúl’s reforms, authorities have been unwilling to break decisively from the country’s sclerotic central planning model. Additional private-sector expansions have been fitful, and bad monetary policy has contributed to severe inflation. The government has, likewise, been averse to any meaningful change to the island’s one-party system.
As a result, the island’s economy remains fragile and unresponsive, and past excitement in Washington for greater engagement with Havana has been replaced by skepticism, hostility, or disinterest.…”
apnews.com
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