On Friday, thousands of Cubans protested outside the US embassy in Havana demanding an end to sanctions, in an event sponsored by the Cuban regime. The demonstration follows a Dec. 4 blackout amid a broader humanitarian crisis on the island. Despite the one-sided claims on both sides of the conflict, the policies supported by expatriates in Miami and by the Cuban regime have combined to inflict maximum suffering on the Cuban people. Looking at the roots of Cuba’s crisis shows that these two enemies have more in common than either cares to recognize.
When I visited Cuba in July of this year, I was struck by how much worse things had become since my last visit in 2018. In Havana, vagrants can be seen scavenging through piles of uncollected garbage and beggars line the streets of the historic center. “This is worse than the special period,” one resident of the working-class neighborhood of Centro Habana told me, referring to the economic crisis that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Ask around in Miami’s Little Havana about the causes of the island’s downward spiral and you’ll be treated to a diatribe on the horrors of socialism. But while Marxist rule has imposed much suffering on Cuba, the proximate cause of the crisis has been a hardening of US sanctions. Just days before Donald Trump left office in 2021, his administration redesignated Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism. Practically overnight, dozens of international companies in vital industries pulled out.
If anything, President Biden has waged an even more brutal campaign of economic warfare on the Cuban people than his predecessor. In 2022, the Biden administration stipulated that travelers who have visited Cuba since 2011 would be barred from visa-free travel to the United States, a deterrent for many potential tourists. This in addition to Title III of the Helms-Burton Act, which allows companies that do business with Cuba to be sued.
All of this came at a time when tourism to the Caribbean surged after the pandemic, with around 32 million visitors in 2023. Yet, in Cuba, visitors totaled just 2 million in 2023 and 2024—a far cry from the more than 4 million in 2019. Given Cuba’s reliance on tourism, it is little surprise that the nation experienced about a 10 percent decline in GDP in 2020, and has had anemic growth since then.
Though sanctions have contributed to Cuba’s economic woes, they shouldn’t be used to absolve the Cuban Communist Party of responsibility. According to the party, the embargo has caused more than $150 billion in losses. Yet, the Soviet Union subsidized Cuba to the tune of $65 billion until 1990. Further, Cuba received approximately $122 billion in oil from Venezuela during the 2000s. Given that Cuba’s GDP is around $100 billion, the government clearly squandered substantial funds.
The island’s routine blackouts are a case in point. Cuba’s energy infrastructure consists of aging, oil-fired power plants reliant on imports from Russia, Venezuela, and Mexico. Had Havana invested the significant subsidies it received from the Soviet Union, and then from oil-rich Venezuela, in natural gas, renewables, or sugarcane ethanol, it likely would have avoided many of the current blackouts. Instead, the Castro brothers allowed Cuba’s sugar industry to decline amid windfalls from tourism and Venezuelan oil.
“Almost 60 percent of Cuba’s arable land is uncultivated.”
Today, almost 60 percent of Cuba’s arable land is uncultivated, leading to an overreliance on expensive food imports. As the economist and embargo critic Dr. Carmelo Mesa-Lago has noted, the regime could pursue market reforms to stimulate agricultural output. In nominally socialist China and Vietnam, a majority of agriculture is privately managed, and state firms compete with private, foreign, and even other state firms. By contrast, agriculture in Cuba is mostly state-run, and despite the current crisis, the regime is backtracking on previous reforms; on Dec. 5, the government mandated the cancellation of all commercial licenses granted to various wholesale small businesses.
When I asked Dr. Mesa-Lago why the regime remained so hostile to change, the nonagenarian put it succinctly: “They’re afraid. To them, reform entails a risk of collapse like the Soviet Union but this is the wrong lesson.” Indeed, the contrasting examples of China and the Soviet Union suggest that the latter was destabilized by allowing for increased political freedom—as opposed to just market reforms.
But the Cuban Communist Party is unwilling to make even these changes, which would at least help to relieve the material suffering of the Cuban people. In 2020, Cuban president Miguel Díaz-Canel stated: “Concerning the Chinese and Vietnamese economic models … neither of these countries were submitted to a 60-year embargo.”
Like his counterparts stateside, he misunderstands market socialism. In China, most companies are privately owned, but state firms comprise half the country’s market cap. Beijing likewise remains the underlying owner of all land. It is true that Washington’s trade embargoes against China and Vietnam were shorter and less severe than the one against Cuba. Yet, in Vietnam, market reform began eight years before the embargo ended in 1994. Evidently, reform is still possible under sanctions.
The Manichean visions of the Cuban regime and Miami hawks perpetuate the very evils each party denounces. This was the conclusion of Jordanis, a petrochemical engineer and part-time driver for tourists I spoke to in Havana. “They’re one and the same! The party bigwigs and the maniacs in Miami need each other to survive!” he told me. Referring to the popular Cuban-American YouTuber Alexander Otaola, Jordanis added, “Just look at the millions that Otaola makes on Youtube! He calls for more and more sanctions but he’d be a pauper without the regime. I guarantee you he’s on their payroll, papi.”
The shared interests of the regime and its critics are most obvious with regard to immigration. Since the 1960s, hawks have promoted a de facto open-border policy with Cuba under the pretext that fleeing communism is itself grounds for asylum. Dire as conditions in Cuba might be, asylum law—though currently abused—is categorical. Legal asylees must face a risk of persecution for racial, religious, political or other in-group reasons. A significant number of Cubans fit these categories, but the vast majority do not.
Preferential access to residency, welfare, and parole acts as a magnet for millions of Cubans and deters them from settling in other countries. According to the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act, virtually any Cuban is eligible for residency after one year of living in the United States. When I explained to Jordanis that the Mexican government had a program to hire migrants to work for the state-oil firm Pemex, the petrochemical engineer gave a glib answer: “That’s fine, but why live in narco Mexico when Uncle Sam gives Cubans everything for free?”
The results speak for themselves. Mass migration from Cuba serves as an escape valve with which the regime can ease pressure from domestic discontent. This in turn swells Republican voter rolls in Florida. To give an idea, the Cuban government estimates that around one million Cubans left the island between just 2022 and 2023 out of a total population of 11 million—half of which settled in South Florida. For all the talk of Democrats importing voters in order to win elections, Florida Republicans have a clear incentive in maintaining an open border with Cuba.
Resolving Cuba’s immediate crisis would require the country’s leadership to embrace market reforms such as allowing the private sector to more easily supply basic goods to Cuban citizens. Further afield, the regime could also solicit the expertise of its Chinese peers for the development of a market-socialist pharmaceutical sector, a realistic possibility considering that Havana developed not one but two Covid vaccines.
As for Washington, if Trump is truly serious about reducing immigration, he should overturn the Cuban Adjustment Act and ease the embargo. A pragmatic and rhetorically savvy Trump could put a capitalist spin on easing relations with Havana. He might, for instance, hold a rally in Miami and tell attendees: “It will be you and you and you who bring freedom to Cuba with your beautiful American dollars.” Unless he can force a major change of approach within his party—and as unlikely as that is, he is surely the only person who could manage it—the Cuban people will remain hostage to the zombie Cold War ideologies of Miami and Havana.