Ask the island’s rulers and they’ll say the revolutionary dream lives on. But to ordinary Cubans stricken by rocketing food prices, it has never felt further away
The road turns into a dirt track entering the town of San Felipe, home to those who can’t leave. In the main square, the only people around are a woman sitting on a bench in the shade of the ruined church and a group of five men hunkered down in the porch of a once-great mansion, trying to fix a bicycle with a hammer.
Sixty-six years after rebels led by Fidel Castro overthrew the brutal government of Fulgencio Batista, many Cubans say their lives are worse than ever, and that the island’s Communist rulers are growing ever more paranoid and repressive.
San San Felipe
This time the threat to the Cuban revolution is not a US-backed invasion or the collapse of the Soviet Union, but a slow gutting of Cuba’s future as young people give up on its prospects. For decades, Cubans needed to apply for permission to leave the island, but since 2013 those restrictions have been lifted.
Between 2022 and 2023, one in ten Cubans — nearly a million people — left the island, mostly for the United States. In small towns such as San Felipe, an hour and a half from Havana, with a pre-pandemic population of 2,000, the only ones left are the very poor, the infirm, the elderly and the especially patriotic.
The exodus is primarily due to an economic crisis that has driven prices to impossible levels — a 5lb bag of pork now costs $16, as much as a junior doctor’s monthly wage — while incomes remain incredibly low. Institutions including Cuba’s once-famous health and education systems are imploding under the burden of international sanctions and endemic state mismanagement. The island’s jails hold hundreds of political prisoners. Anyone publicly criticizing the government, including on social media, risks joining them.
“The Cuban revolution has completely failed,” said Yunior Garcia, a dissident leader who was forced to flee the country in 2021. “And the only way they can stay in power is through the use of force.”
Living standards in Cuba have long lagged behind those of other countries in the region, but this is a disaster that in many ways dwarfs what came before.
“In the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was at least hope it would all get better,” said Omar Everleny Pérez Villanueva, a Cuban economy professor, sitting in a café in Havana. “Now we don’t have that. We didn’t recover. There has been a crisis for years.”
Omar Everleny Pérez Villanueva - JORGE RICARDO FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES
Cuba’s government still tries to project to the outside world a sanitized image of a socialist paradise, a place where the derelict mansions of Havana are a shabby-chic backdrop for tourists’ Instagram posts rather than a sign of desperate poverty, and where the revolutionary slogans painted on walls are inspiring, rather than the hollow exhortations of an ossified regime.
In reality, though, this is a country where people are going hungry. Where pharmacy shelves are empty and doctors have little choice but to tell their patients to buy medicine on the black market at prices few can afford. Where surgeons work in corner shops because they make more money there than on the wards. Where retired diplomats and professors rely on their children living abroad to send money so they can eat.
Pensioners who can’t survive on their monthly 1,500 pesos— just under $5 at the black market rate — sit on the street in Old Havana begging from the dwindling numbers of tourists, their empty ration books in their pockets. Children are sent home from school because there aren’t enough teachers (state wages, even for university lecturers, are about $10 a month). And at the weekend there are fewer parties than there used to be because the young are leaving.
“People are thinking more about eating than having fun,” said Yasel Berroa, 34, an Afrohouse DJ, standing outside the near-empty block of flats in Havana where he grew up. While almost all his friends have gone to the US, because of President Trump’s new restrictions on the border he is going to try to make it to Dubai instead.
Yasel Berroa outside the block of flats in Havana where he grew up - JORGE RICARDO FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES
Unlike his parents’ generation, who were raised supporting the revolution, younger people in Cuba wanted more, he said.
“It’s ironic, because so many of those who fought for and defended this [country], they have so many medals but their freezers are empty,” Berroa said. “Here even the people my age who support the government, they realize at some point that they can’t take out their girlfriends, that they have no money to do anything.”
The economic downturn of the past few years came out of a “polycrisis” caused by inflation, the pandemic (which cut desperately needed tourist dollars) and badly thought-through attempts to reform the economy to allow some private enterprise, along with the effects of the existing US economic blockade, which prevents US businesses from engaging in commerce with Cuba.
It was magnified by geopolitics. For decades after the revolution, Cuba’s economy was kept afloat by aid from USSR-aligned countries. In the early 2000s, Castro cut a deal with socialist Venezuela to import its oil in exchange for Cuban doctors (whose wages would largely go to state coffers). Now Venezuela is in its own economic crisis, Russia is at war in Ukraine and Cuba has been left essentially alone.
Blackouts plague the country: last year the entire country was plunged into darkness over several days after Cuba’s largest power plant went offline. Queues for petrol stretch for hours. Buses, already wildly unreliable due to a lack of spare parts, have become an increasingly rare sight.
A few years ago, it was sometimes almost impossible to find certain types of food — eggs, milk, flour — even if you had money. Now, shops opened as part of a recent loosening of restrictions on private enterprise stock basic products, but the prices are out of reach for most Cubans. At one shop in Old Havana last week, a bar of chocolate cost 700 pesos ($2), half the monthly pension for someone who has worked for the state for decades.
Chart: The Times and The Sunday Times Source: Trading Economics
As a result, Cuba has been divided into two classes. One is composed of people who receive money from abroad or who have successful businesses on the island (lobby groups in the US say some have links to the regime). These people can afford to buy food at vastly inflated prices.
Then there are those who work for the state and try to live on ration books, sticking to the socialist ideals of the revolution they were raised with. They can’t afford to eat.
Ten years ago it was different. Amid a wave of hope, the presidents of the US and Cuba, Barack Obama and Raúl Castro, Fidel’s brother, announced plans to restore diplomatic relations. Soon, the US had loosened decades-old restrictions on its own citizens traveling to Cuba and US companies doing business there (although Congress prevented Obama from ending the 1962 US economic embargo).
American tourists flocked to Havana, lavishing dollar tips for overpriced daiquiris at the Floridita, a bar where Ernest Hemingway once drank. Europeans came even faster, spurred by a fear that hulking US hotel conglomerates would soon colonize the island, robbing it of its “character”.
Then, in 2017, Trump came to power, backed by Cuban-American anti-Castro voters in Florida. He reinstated travel and trade restrictions — later labeling Cuba a state sponsor of terrorism — and limited the amount of money that could be sent to the island, in what officials said was an effort to stop money flowing into state coffers.
Joe Biden removed some of these restrictions when he won the White House, though he repealed the terrorism designation only in his last week in office. Having returned to power for a second term in January, Trump immediately reinstated it, and is seeking to roll back the protections given to Cubans seeking asylum in the US.
Now, “character” is about the only thing Cuba has left. For months, powerful Cuban-American lobbyists have petitioned Trump and his allies to stop daily commercial flights to the island and to further reduce the remittances that can be sent from the US to Cuba.
This would cut off a lifeline for Cuban families, leaving untold thousands destitute. The island’s regime might denounce the US as an imperialist force, but American money — sent from Miami or New York to grandparents, mothers and cousins on the island — is keeping the country on life support.
About 2.3 million people of Cuban origin live in the US and at least a third of people in Cuba have close family living abroad. Overseas remittances regularly hit $3 billion a year, and are thought to be among the country’s biggest earners of foreign currency after tourism.
María Antonio Martínez, 70, says she is one of the lucky ones. Her son in the US sends her money to supplement her meager pension. Without that, she would have no money for food.
María Antonio Martínez - JORGE RICARDO FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES
“Of course younger people are having a really tough time here, and they want to leave,” she said. “And I understand them. I know people who don’t have the money to eat anything in the morning. They just make a kind of infusion from leaves. Cubans are overwhelmed by the need to survive, there’s nothing else.”
For those who don’t have family money coming from abroad, hunger is ever present. Arbela Ramos Gonzalez, 81, a retired accountant, and her daughter, Alegna Martínez Ramos, 59, a retired teacher, live on their combined pensions of 3,200 pesos a month — about $10.
“This is the absolute worst it’s been,” said Gonzalez. “The worst.”
Rations of basic goods such as rice, beans, oil and sugar are supposed to be provided at state-run bodegas on the first of every month. But it’s been years since the system worked properly. This January, according to Gonzalez’s ration book, she received only 2lb of sugar: nothing else.
“There’s no rice, no protein,” she said. “We have infinite problems with the transport. It’s a good thing I can still walk or I wouldn’t be able to get around.”
Like many others, she blames the US for restricting the supply of goods into Cuba.
There are widespread fears that under Trump, and particularly his secretary of state, Marco Rubio, who has Cuban roots and is highly critical of the regime, the US embargo that was designed to crush the revolution will now get tighter.
“We’re in a very tense situation. We’re expecting that Mr Trump will be unleashed at any point against us. And we don’t know what kind of measures they’re going to take,” said Carlos Alzugaray Treto, a former diplomat and university professor who is critical of both the Cuban government and the embargo.
Carlos Alzugaray Treto - JORGE RICARDO FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES
“It is really very stupid to say that the measures the US government takes is only against the Cuban government. Come on, let’s be serious. You’re making life difficult for Cubans so that they overthrow their government. That’s the whole point. And of course it’s false, because we’re not stupid. Why should we overthrow the people you want us to overthrow when you’re punishing us?”
Yet the general consensus, gleaned from a week of interviews in Cuba with leading economists, diplomats and historians, is that while the US trade war has for decades strangled the island’s economic development, at this point government mismanagement is at least as much to blame. Though many predict tough times ahead, no one we spoke to believes the regime will collapse: after decades of survival under isolation and pressure, the Cuban system is tenacious.
As Cuba has crumbled, so have its most vaunted institutions. Cuban doctors, and the country’s medical system, were for decades considered among the best in the region. Today, some of the most basic medicines are available only on the black market (either smuggled in from abroad or stolen from hospitals and resold on social media for hugely inflated prices). People going in for major surgery must bring their own needles, suture thread, cotton and surgical masks.
One doctor, who asked not to be named, started to cry as she explained how she couldn’t leave the country because of her ageing parents. She makes 5,500 pesos (about $16) a month working full-time at a clinic in Havana, and knows she cannot give her young daughter a life here.
“It’s so hard,” she said. “You tell your patients that they need medicine, but that they have to find it on [the black market via] social media. And you know they can’t afford it. Even me, when I need medicine for myself, I have to buy it on social media.”
Anger has boiled over. In 2021, during the pandemic, thousands of protesters took to the streets across the country, calling for better living conditions. The government response was immediate, and harsh. Hundreds were arrested and the rebellion quashed.
Garcia, the dissident living in exile, said that repression had increased in recent years, partly due to the fact the regime had “lost control of information” through the late arrival of the internet on the island and the proliferation of social media, which made it easier for civil society to organize.
“The government … has been incapable of reinventing itself and sustaining a coherent narrative,” he said. “The arrival to power of a generation of bureaucrats without charisma, the increase in corruption in the highest spheres of the single party, the worsening of the economic crisis, the mass exodus of professionals, as well as the obsolescence of political discourse, demonstrate that the Cuban revolution has completely failed.”
There is no free press in Cuba and the handful of independent journalists who exist are often harassed by the government. Public displays of protest against the regime are banned, all forms of political dissent suppressed.
However, the government can’t hide the low quality of life here from its citizens, who are linked up via their smartphones with relatives spread from Miami to Spain. The young people of Cuba have seen what is out there and are voting with their feet: leaving on flights to Nicaragua or Uruguay, from where they begin the long journey north to the US, or waking up before dawn to take an (illegal) fast boat to Florida, 90 miles away.
“I think for my parents’ generation, there was a sense of duty to the revolution,” said one young artist, who didn’t want to be named. “Like they’d been through so much, and they were committed to it. Now we don’t have that. We just want to live like everyone else.”
(Source:
The Times - UK Edition)