The fact that the head of the CIA is in Havana meeting with senior government figures suggests that things could be about to move — and possibly break — very quickly.
Almost exactly 65 years after the Bay of Pigs debacle, the US is reportedly considering another military invasion of Cuba. President Trump has repeatedly mused about taking over Cuba, as his administration tightens its starvation siege of the island nation. Last Friday, he even suggested that an aircraft carrier returning to the US from Iran could be stationed offshore.
This, of course, presupposes that US aircraft carriers will be returning from the Persian Gulf any time soon, which perhaps smacks of wishful thinking. One thing that is apparently happening is that the US Air Force is intensifying its reconnaissance flights off Cuba’s coast, just as it did before the January 3 attack against Venezuela, reports Drop Site News:
The U.S. Navy and Air Force have conducted at least 25 intelligence-gathering flights off the coast of Cuba since February 4, most of them near Havana and Santiago de Cuba and some coming within 40 miles of the coast, a CNN analysis of publicly available aviation data showed—a sudden surge with no precedent in recent years.
The aircraft involved include P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol planes, RC-135V Rivet Joint signals intelligence aircraft, and MQ-4C Triton high-altitude drones—the same platforms that conducted surveillance ahead of U.S. special forces’ capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and ahead of joint U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran.
CNN noted that a similar pattern of escalating rhetoric coinciding with a visible uptick in surveillance flights preceded both of those operations, and that the aircraft are capable of masking their location beacons but have not done so, raising the question of whether the flights constitute a deliberate signal to Havana.
This intensification of military activity around Cuba coincides with the collapse of the Cuban economy brought about by the US’ near-total energy blockade. Since January, neither Venezuela or Mexico, the island’s two biggest energy providers have been able to send oil. The delivery of 730,000 barrels of crude oil by the Russian-flagged Anatoly Kolodkin in late March brought a brief respite, but that oil has been used up and there are no signs of replenishments.
🇨🇺 BREAKING: Cuba is completely out of diesel and fuel oil
Cuba has completely exhausted its diesel and fuel oil reserves, Energy Minister Vicente de la O Levy announced Wednesday on state media, prompting protests across the capital on Wednesday evening.
Some districts in the… https://t.co/VhA7UiM8XR
— Drop Site (@DropSiteNews) May 14, 2026
“We are going to continue providing support to Cuba,” said the Russian ambassador in Havana, Víctor Koronelli. However, support from other countries is desperately needed, he added: “It would be very important for other countries, countries that are friends of Cuba, to try to break this energy siege as Russia did. If we act in this way, united, that will yield results.”*
But time is running out. By Wednesday, Cuba had completely exhausted its diesel and fuel oil reserves. With blackouts dragging on for up to 22 hours per day in parts of Havana (imagine what the countryside is like!), protests have begun to break out as some of Cuba’s long-suffering residents lose their patience. From yesterday’s Financial Times:
Protests erupted overnight in Cuba after the government said it had completely run out of diesel and fuel oil, the energy supplies essential to its power generation.
Energy minister Vicente de la O Levy blamed US President Donald Trump’s near-total energy blockade of the communist island over the past four months for the crisis.
“We have absolutely no fuel [oil] and absolutely no diesel,” he said on Wednesday in remarks carried on state-run media. “We have no reserves.”
Cuba’s President Miguel Díaz-Canel called the country’s energy situation “particularly tense”, writing in a post on X that he blamed the “dramatic worsening” on the “genocidal US blockade”.
Images shared on social media showed protests had broken out overnight in parts of the capital, Havana, with residents banging pots and pans and burning blockades in the streets. There were reports of clashes with police.
Havana’s long reliance on Venezuelan oil supplies — which it traded for Cuban doctors and spies — was severed in January when US troops snatched hardline leader Nicolás Maduro.
Mexico delivered one oil cargo to Cuba on January 9 but then, under pressure from Trump, also halted shipments. In late January, Trump threatened tariffs on any country that supplied Cuba as the administration in Washington ratchets up pressure to try to bring about regime change.
My first assumption on hearing this news was that CIA assets would be well represented at said protests. Hours later, the following news alert appeared on my Twitter feed:
Cuba says CIA Director John Ratcliffe quietly met with officials in Havana, as it deals with an energy sector collapse and rising tensions with the US.https://t.co/b4FuzpMgPL
— CNN (@CNN) May 14, 2026
So, for the first time ever, a director of the CIA — the same organisation that tried to kill Fidel Castro dozens, if not hundreds of times — is meeting with senior representatives of Cuba’s communist government — something that would have been unimaginable just months ago. From the CNN article:
CIA Director John Ratcliffe led a US delegation to Havana to meet with Cuban government officials on Thursday as the island deals with a collapse of its energy sector amid rising tensions with the US, according to the Cuban government.
“Following the request submitted by the US government that a delegation presided over by the CIA Director John Ratcliffe be received in Havana, the Revolutionary Directorate approved the realization of this visit and the meeting with its counterpart from the Ministry of the Interior,” the statement read.
Havana said its officials stressed in the meeting that Cuba “does not constitute a threat to the national security of the US” and that there are no “legitimate reasons” to include it on the US’s list of State Sponsors of Terrorism, as it has been under the Trump administration. They also insisted the country does not harbor, support or fund terrorists – something the US has long accused it of doing – and denied hosting foreign military or intelligence bases.
The energy blockade is just one aspect of the Trump administration’s total economic siege against Cuba. The targets of that siege have even included the island’s international medical missions. As we reported in a previous post, this measure has not only deprived Havana of one of its most important sources of foreign currency; it has also deprived dozens of countries in the “Global South” of the vital medical care provided by Cuban doctors.
We will probably never know how many people have died, needlessly, as a result of these sanctions. According to a paper published last year in Lancet (which we covered here), US-led sanctions have led to around 564,000 deaths annually since 1970 — a mortality burden similar to or even higher than total direct deaths from armed conflicts.
In the clip below, Cuba’s Foreign Minister Bruno Eduardo Rodríguez Parrilla describes the US blockade as “an act of genocide and collective punishment”. Infant mortality, he says, has doubled, and 12,000 children are awaiting surgery.
🇨🇺 Canciller cubano:
"Es un acto de genocidio y castigo colectivo… la mortalidad infantil se ha duplicado, 12.000 niños esperan cirugías… la asfixia total siempre ha sido el verdadero objetivo de la política de EE.UU. hacia Cuba." pic.twitter.com/xjCud7D6wW— Tere Felipe (@_TereFelipe_) May 14, 2026
"From 2018 to 2025, as U.S. sanctions grew more punitive, Cuba’s once-impressive infant mortality rate skyrocketed by 148 percent," @RepJayapal and @rep_jackson write in @nytopinion, citing a recently released CEPR report. pic.twitter.com/5oWf3uVcQF
— CEPR (@ceprdc) May 12, 2026
As Fidel Castro once said, one of the reasons why Washington so despises Cuba is that it constantly casts the US model in a bad light. The fact that Cuba has (or at least had until Washington escalated its siege) similar life expectancy to the US, lower infant mortality, better primary care coverage (at a fraction of the cost) and a higher literacy rate despite decades of US sanctions is (or at least should be) the ultimate badge of shame for Washington.
Fidel Castro explains why the US despises Cuba and is desperate to destroy it: "Our country does not drop bombs on other people, nor does it send thousands of planes to bomb cities. Instead our country sends doctors to those most lost corners of the world." pic.twitter.com/qrTUMgWSEC
— ☀️👀 (@zei_squirrel) January 30, 2026
In recent weeks, the US has continued to tighten the screw on Cuba’s suffocating economy. On May 1, the Trump administration authorised sweeping restrictions against any foreign individual or entity that US State Department deems to have operated in priority areas of the Cuban economy.
Days later, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued crippling secondary sanctions against Cuba’s military-run business conglomerate GAESA, its director Ania Guilermina Lastres Morera, and a Canadian-Cuban joint mining venture, Moa Nickel SA, which is co-owned by one of Cuba’s largest foreign investors, Sherritt International.
When asked about the sanctions, Rubio claimed that GAESA is “a company that basically is taking anything that makes money in Cuba and illegally putting it into the pockets of a few regime insiders.” However, as Arturo Dominguez notes, Rubio is conveniently ignoring the fact that GAESA, like any large state-owned company, has a huge economic footprint:
“[H]e’s ignoring that millions of Cubans work for state-run companies that operate under GAESA. Like most other unilateral economic sanctions imposed by the United States, these directly impact the Cuban people and result in suffering and death, particularly for the most vulnerable Cubans.
In anticipation of the Treasury Department designation, Sherritt, which also produces Cuban natural gas for electricity generation and is Cuba’s largest foreign investor, announced that its senior leadership had resigned as the company and its employees begin packing their bags after more than three decades of operating in Cuba.
As Lee Schlenker writes for Responsible Statecraft, the third-party sanctions have put foreign hotel operators, financial institutions, and energy companies operating in Cuba — particularly the Spanish hotel chains Meliá and Iberostar, both of which also manage U.S. properties — on high alert:
The administration has only given foreign firms a tight four-week window to wind down transactions with any GAESA-owned entities before their U.S. assets are blocked.
A source with knowledge of companies’ operations tells RS that financial institutions, particularly across Canada, the European Union and Latin America, have initiated a de facto boycott of all transactions involving Cuba given their potential exposure to costly Treasury Department enforcement actions. “Additional designations can be expected in the following days and weeks,” [US Secretary of State Marco] Rubio said Thursday.
As conditions deteriorate in Cuba as a result of the US’ starvation siege, Rubio is barely able to contain his glee. Like other Cuban-American politicians, he has built his career on vilifying the Cuban Revolution and trying to economically strangle and starve into submission the people of his parents’ homeland.
“What is happening in Cuba is unacceptable,” said Rubio (in Spanish) while traveling to China aboard Air Force One. “And having a failed state just 90 miles off our coast is a threat to the United States. It is a state that is not functioning worse than ever, with a regime that not only does not allow open political activity but is also economically destroying the lives of Cubans.”
The fact that Rubio can say those last six words with a straight face while imposing the harshest economic siege on his parents’ native country, a siege that is literally killing people right now, illustrates why Rubio is such a dangerous and clearly sociopathic US secretary of state — not only for Cuba but the entire Latin American region, for which he has such apparent disdain.
Rubio even offered Cuba $100 million dollar in humanitarian aid, to be distributed through branches of the Catholic Church. That works out at roughly $10 per Cuban man, women and child — an amount that pales in comparison with the amount of damage the US has wrought, not just in recent months but over the course of sixty-six and a half years.
The original intent of US sanctions on Cuba, initiated in the early 1960s by the Kennedy administration, was to economically asphyxiate the Cuban Revolution, punish the Castro government for nationalizing US assets, and provoke enough hunger and desperation to overthrow Fidel Castro’s communist regime.
That goal may soon be in reach, though Fidel has long departed the scene. The fact that the head of the CIA is in Havana meeting with senior government figures, including Raúl Rodríguez Castro, äka “Raulito”, Raúl Castro’s grandson and right-hand man, as well as with the Cuban Minister of the Interior, Lázaro Álvarez Casas, and the head of the Cuban spy services., suggests things could be about to move — and possibly break — very quickly.
The matters under discussion apparently included intelligence cooperation, economic stability, and security, on the basic proviso that Cuba can no longer be a safe haven for adversaries in the Western Hemisphere. Also on the negotiating table were issues such as the release of political prisoners, the installation of Starlink satellite services in Cuba, the possibility of dismantling Cuba’s six-decade economic embargo the need for greater political freedoms.
Conspicuously not mentioned are the inevitable land and property claims the Cuban exiles and US companies will be bringing with them if the Cuban government agrees to offer compensation for property seized following the revolution.
🇺🇸🇨🇺CIA official: “Today, Director Ratcliffe met with Cuban officials, including Raulito Rodriguez Castro, Minister of Interior Lazaro Alvarez Casas, and the head of Cuban intelligence services in Havana to personally deliver President Trump’s message that the United States is…
— Barak Ravid (@BarakRavid) May 14, 2026
This is all happening just days before Cuban Independence Day (May 20), which marks the end of the US’ de facto occupation of the island in the decades prior to the Cuban Revolution. After his disastrous war of choice in Iran, Trump desperately needs a quick and easy foreign policy win. The question is: will Cuba provide it?
To me, this signals that the Pirate State could be planning another kidnapping operation against Cuba like they did in Venezuela. This is the lawless behavior they want to normalize around the world. https://t.co/RV3JZgBQeQ
— Richard Medhurst (@richimedhurst) May 15, 2026
“There’s definitely a sense of expectation and anxiety in Miami and Cuba”, Sebastian Arcos, Interim Director for the Institute for Cuban Studies at Florida International University, told Axios:
[He] believes intervention was possible shortly after Trump declared Cuba an imminent threat to U.S. security in January, but then the Iran War shifted military assets to the Middle East.
“Everything was put on the back burner. Now that we see that the Iran war is sort of in limbo … I can see a sort of a refocusing on Cuba, not just in the [surveillance] flights, but also the statements from the President to Marco Rubio, and the sanctions that were just announced.”
Arcos added that he doesn’t believe Trump will put boots on the ground, but that he might pursue an “off distance military action” similar to what happened in Iran that will “shock the regime, crack the leadership and perhaps create an opportunity for new leadership to rise.”
What Arcos doesn’t mention is that while new leadership has indeed risen in Iran, its leadership structures are much more dispersed and it is, if anything, even more opposed to US and Israel’s imperial designs on Iran. What could happen if the US were to attack Cuba is difficult to say.
Cuba’s President Miguel Díaz-Canal insists that the people of Cuba are willing and ready to fight off any US invasion, just as Castro’s forces did in the Bay of Pigs debacle. Cuba, lest we forget, has resisted colonisation by the US for sixty-six and a half years. But decades of sanctions and blockades have taken their toll, and Díaz Canal is not a statesman like Fidel. Nor does he enjoy the levels of support Fidel once commanded.
That all being said, Cuba is not Venezuela. In an interview with Russian state television Rossiya 24 in February, Russia’s ambassador to the UN, Vasili Nebenzya, said the US would not be able to repeat its January 3 coup against Maduro. In the case of Venezuela, he said, internal fractures and betrayals in the upper echelons of power facilitated the coup. In the case of Cuba, the political system is more more cohesive and monolithic.
Interestingly, UN Secretary General António Guterres made a similar point this week, warning that there is no military solution to the current impasse in Cuba and calling for “constructive dialogue” instead. He also reiterated that the US’ blockade and sanctions on Cuba violate international law:
In Venezuela, honestly, we saw a military operation against Maduro, but I have the impression that there was great complicity within the Venezuelan political system. Therefore, comparing Venezuela with Cuba seems to me an unfair comparison.
One thing that is clear is that any military operation against the Caribbean’s largest island, which is already in the grip of a US-made humanitarian crisis, will create significant destabilisation in the region, including waves of migration to the US. If the war in Iran has taught us anything, it is that Trump 2.0 does not excel when it comes to contingency planning for the second and third order effects of its ill-thought military actions.
* Russia had promised to send more shipments of oil and there were even reports roughly a week ago of a sanctioned Russian tanker, the Universal, coming close to the island before ultimately changing course. As readers may recall, the Russian deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov paid an official visit to Cuba in early April, where he met with President Canel and discussed the possibility of strengthening Russia’s economic ties with Cuba. There was even discussion of Russian companies taking control of parts of Cuban industry. Those plans are presumably now on ice.
I find it very symbolic that the head of the *CIA* would be sent to Cuba to negotiate its surrender. It has been sitting 90 miles off our coast as a reminder of that organization’s longest-running failure for over six decades. How often is the CIA Director sent on such a “diplomatic” mission? I don’t think sending Ratcliffe was an accident.
Unlike in Venezuela, I doubt that the USA can find treacherous accomplices, much less that a decapitation strike can make a difference. The USA would need to actually invade Cuba inch by inch to succeed.
Said that, I feel that Cuba should have developed a biofuel energy system (Brazil-style) based on its massive sugarcane production. Autarchy is not ideal but for a besieged country like them, it is a necessity.
What should happen is that on his way out of Cuba, Ratcliffe is arrested for crimes against humanity and sent post haste to the Hague. Throw in some Cuban charges, which would have more validity than the charges against Maduro.
Thank you for this important reporting. So sad to read the horrible AC of the empire in yet another sphere
The fact that the entire US establishment sits back and says nothing in the face of these atrocities just shows that it’s something they all wanted to happen. And somehow Narco Rubio is considered a top candidate for POTUS in 2028 after presiding over all this. Jesus wept.
Great reporting as always, but depressing.
I don’t think it all compares to Venezuela as V. had/has a robust urban population that much like the US is all about the benjamins. More fodder for discontent.
At the same time V. confuses me while Cuba is just like a life long malady that one has become accustomed to.
What a vicious bully of a country we are! I feel so ashamed to be an American. Trump and Rubio are horrible people but this has gone on for decades and has included so many administrations. Only Carter, Obama and Biden have made efforts to even talk to the Cubans and establish some kind of diplomacy. All that foreign aid – all those billions – we are throwing at Israel that they use to harrass and kill mostly innocent people – even a portion of it – could have been used to help Cuba and the Cuban people. But no, like every playground bully, we beat up on the weakest kid who just won’t cower. And where are the American people? Other than those rich ex-Cubans living in Florida who are obsessed with crushing an enemy that doesn’t even exist any more, only Code Pink seems to be doing anything.
I see deliberate and pointless cruelty by the United States. A 66 year vendetta in pursuit of what exactly? Those USSR missiles have been gone for 63 years. Cuba is not and has not been a threat to the United States. Sorry about those mines and plantations and such. Nothing that happens vis a vis Cuba is going to make you president Marco. Sure, Donnie can have another of his empty wins. Does he care about death and misery to others? Guess not. Didn’t he say something about not thinking about the American people before heading to China with his gaggle of billionaires. He calls reporters, especially but not exclusively female, horrible people. I look at Donnie and the sycophantic mob around him and I see horrible people too self-involved to give a damn. They cannot go away soon enough.
It is the dysfunction of UN, BRICS and all other global orders that enable the outlaw US Empire to starve and bomb peoples into submission. 🤡🌎
The guys at The Duran blame the Cuban leadership for this mess saying that they bet the house on their relations with Venezuela while rebuffing help from both Russia and China over the years. I think that the Russian have written them off by now. True, they sent a tanker of oil to give them a breather but the Russians will only commit major resources if they are convinced that a country will fight for itself. As there are no more tankers forthcoming, the Russians must figure that the Cuban leadership will bend the knee. Ratcliffe delivered ‘Trump’s message that the United States is prepared to seriously engage on economic and security issues, but only if Cuba makes fundamental changes.’ I take that to mean that they must subordinate themselves to the US or else no oil, medical supplies or food. But will the people themselves accept an invasion of Florida-Cubans with land claims fresh from a printing press?
The Duran guys, Mercouris especially as the other Alex has soured somewhat on Putin, is practically Russia worshiping. It’s St. Putin over there.
I’ve finally stopped listening. Mercouris was saying the same thing about Iran before the war as he’s been saying about Cuba. If only they’d begged harder for Russia to save them! And now, by the way, that the Iranians have humiliated the US and also embarrassed Russia by their decisiveness, Mercouris ascribes Iranian success to secret super-duper Russian help.
It’s frank orientalism. Similar to the common refrain against Soviet WWII victory: “lend lease!!!”
Couldn’t it be that the Iranians chartered the right course in not getting too close to notoriously cautious, vacillating, and gullible Putin? Perish the thought.
Maybe. Maybe the Cuban government is just cautious. Look what happened to them when they last aligned themselves with Russia in the 1960s. And Venezuela DID seem like a reliable ally and is a close neighbour compared to Russia. I hope Russia will send more diesel and I wish China would find some excuse to make a business alliance with Cuba and send some help. I am utterly sickened by my country’s treatment of a small nation that has done absolutely NOTHING to us in over fifty years – yet, we are willing to help monsters like Abu Mohammad al-Julani and of course, help out our good friend, Israel with aid and weapons.
Sixty-six years ago Cuba threw off 450 years of colonial rule. Since then I’ve expected the government to fall many times, but it didn’t. Blockade, Bay of Pigs invasion, fall of the Soviet Union, the “Brothers to the Rescue” crisis, the Helms-Burton Act — Cuba survived them all. So I’m not giving up on Cuba. The island is under a US blockade that is keeping oil out, but Cuba still has plenty of gas in its resiliency tank. Cuba isn’t going to go back under colonial rule without a fight. I expect if Trump wants to defeat Cuba he will have to send in an invasion force. That way it will be clear to the Cuban people and the world that if Cuba is defeated the reason will be US military supremacy and not the Cuban government falling apart.
Something I’m curious about is where is Alejandro Castro-Espin and what is he doing. He is the son of two heroes of the Revolution, a military hero himself wounded in action fighting in the anti-apartheid war in southern Africa in the 1980s, and an experienced negotiator who has been used several times in negotiations with the USA. If anyone could rally the country against the USers, he could. His time to lead may come after a US invasion, but he will certainly be a major target for the US to eliminate.
This makes me sick. There is no reason in the world for Cuba to be considered an enemy of the United States. Now what we can expect is American-style healthcare and other industrialization. A re-colonialization, as it were. Maybe they can build strip malls with Walmarts and Home Depots. I’m sure they will be so much happier.
i am disgusted by all this, as well.
happening across Granma on the shortwave dad gave me in mid-late 70s is what started me on my liberation. Fidel’s 4 hour speeches, with translations by a chick half the time, enthralled me….since confirmed by events and exposures and the wild west days of the web.
so Cuba has a soft place in my heart.
its sad as hell that my people are the most propagandized people on the planet.
if and when the truth that we’ve been lied to…about just about everything…for 80 years finally breaks through, theres gonna be hell to pay.
> its sad as hell that my people are the most propagandized people on the planet.
> if and when the truth that we’ve been lied to…about just about everything…for 80 years
> finally breaks through, theres gonna be hell to pay.
Too right, hippie. Your people. Our people. I clipped this from somewhere online (maybe even here at NC):
“When the truth comes out, do not ask me how I knew. Ask yourself why you didn’t.”
— “The Researcher” on X
Thanks for the detailed overview. There have been articles suggesting that Little Marco has been involved with shady characters in the past to add to his self licking claims about Cuban failure.
But then that latter is American policy in general. They make a desert and then call for R2P.
The Venezuelan situation is not final.
Very true, Charles. The ending has not been written by any means.
I really hope so. This is the most depressing news in a week. Long live Cuba.
The USA has the ability to make Cuban’s life miserable while killing a lot of innocent people, because markets.
It does not have the ability to invade and conquer Cuba Militarily, the US Military is in very poor shape when it comes to logistic capacity and particularly Morale.
US Military “Leadership” is a sick joke as the Joint Chiefs made clear when none of the eight resigned over the blatantly illegal orders to attack Iran. Morale is in the shitter, stuck there in the case of the Gerald R Ford.
The VA has been gutted and now the grunts are being handed a “New, Improved” rifle that is totally unsuitable for modern combat because second careers are sweet.
If the USA manages a regime change in Havana, what happens then?
Yes, there be turncoats and opportunists, but how does the majority of the population feel?
I doubt there will be many who are saying the equivalent of: “Thank you for blockading and my country and starving my children, so that I could see the errors of my ways!”
It’s likely, in my opinion, that after an initial transfer of power there will be guerilla warfare by the general populace, but more intractable and perhaps more intense than Afghanistan!
Remember how well the USA did there, and that was mountainous high desert. Now it would be a repeat of Vietnam!
I’m not sure our military is hot for this, not to mention maintains the capacity for a prolonged Insurgency.
The only good thing for the military is that Cuba is an island and difficult for the guerrillas to be resupplied by their friends and allies.
I want to thank Mr. Nick Corbishley and NC for the articles about Cuba and Latin America, which regularly present a perspective that is more balanced and well-informed than what can be found in most of the USA and Western media.
Speaking as someone who is very familiar with Cuba and the current situation there: I highly doubt that the Cuban military could offer any meaningful resistance to a military action of any kind coming from the USA. Of course, I don’t know with any certainty what the resources and capacity of the Cuban Armed Forces are today, but it is clear that today’s army isn’t even the shadow of what the Cuban military was during the 70s and 80s, at the peak of its power, when it was involved in Angola and Ethiopia and won battles, fighting on the Angolan side, against South Africa and Savimbi’s UNITA.
The situation in Cuba today is the result of a gradual process of decay and erosion of the economy, institutions (and that includes the army), and societal cohesion. We could take the beginning of that process to the early 90s, to the moment when the disappearance of the USSR and the Communist Bloc became a fact. However, I believe that everything got worse once Fidel Castro had to leave, due to illness, his leadership position and his brother Raul became the one in charge.
Yes, undoubtedly the US embargo has been a key factor in this process of erosion, and the damage it has caused should be never underestimated. And let’s not forget that Trump made the embargo and all related sanctions way more tighter during his first administration, and then Biden left things pretty much exactly where Trump had taken them. Cubans had the hope that Biden would reverse to the slight but significant and positive changes, for the Cuban economy, that took place under Obama, but Biden was actually a continuation of Trump regarding Cuba.
But things have been made immensely worse because of the erratic and counterproductive behaviour of the government under Raul Castro, particularly with regards to the economic policies and strategies. A number of measures were applied that can only be described as highly unpopular, in particular the “reunification of the currency” and the elimination of the Cuban Convertible Peso, which took away the relatively stable (although always fluctuating, on the black market) exchange rate and value of the Cuban Peso versus the US Dollar and the Euro. This was a measure that devaluated the Cuban Peso, and has been a factor (not the only one, for sure) in the astronomical level of inflation suffered by the population. Also, as another example of unpopular measures, the government has pushed during the last few years for moving bank transactions to electronic banking (with the aim, perhaps of limiting the circulation of cash and battling inflation) but the banking infrastructure is in shambles, and the result has been enormous frustration among the people, because it is tremendously hard for the population to have access to their cash –something aggravated by the regular malfunction of ATM machines, the terrible internet connectivity, and the long power outages.
Another key issue that has made things more difficult than they should be has been the misallocation of resources, and the stubbornness from the government side, when it comes to keep investing in tourism and building gigantic, flashy hotels that have been sitting mostly empty for years, while the basic infrastructure of the country continued its downward spiral. A few of the billions spent on building those hotels could have been used to improve the national electric grid, or could have gone to refurbish hospitals and schools, or to investments in agriculture. A number of the decisions when it comes to prioritize investment have favoured the projects (as in tourism) preferred by GAESA, the economic and financial conglomerate that controls large and strategic chunks of the Cuban economy.
It is important to underline that the almost unlimited power that GAESA has accumulated in terms of the Cuban economy can be also attributable to Raul Castro. Today they control pretty much every aspect of it that could produce any revenue, particularly any area involving foreign investment and partnerships. The fact that GAESA was created by the Army Ministry (Ministerio de las Fuerzas Armadas) under Raul Castro’s supervision, when he was the minister, and the fact that it is controlled by the military, and its books are closed to any outsiders, and can’t be reviewed even by the General Comptroller of the Republic, has turned this powerful conglomerate into a black hole in the finances of the Cuban state, one surrounded by secrecy and therefore ripe for corruption and nepotism.
The Cuban people are exhausted, in poor health and angry. The nutritional situation is probably worse than we can imagine, particularly among children and the elderly. Food is extremely expensive and inflation keeps going higher by the week, making staples unaffordable. The last couple of years have been terrible when it comes to public health, with repeated epidemics of the Dengue and Chikungunya viruses. The government has proven unable to control these epidemics anymore, and they have just tried to manage them with minimal resources. The healthcare system and the educational system are in a ruinous state. The Cuban people blame the government for the crisis, and they aren’t totally wrong about that. Of course the US embargo is designed to create these conditions, and it has been very successful in damaging the country. But he Cuban government could have been way more creative, flexible and open minded when addressing the economic and social maladies affecting the nation. With Trump and Rubio in positions of power in the US, it seems that time is running out for the people in power in Cuba.
Thank you, Henriux, for your kind compliment as well as the added detail, some of which chimes with comments I’ve heard from Cuban expats I know here in Barcelona.
Thanks to you again, Nick, for all the good work!!! I wish Cuba the best but we should be prepared for less than that…
“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters,” Hard to find a bigger monster that Marco Rubio.
a loose translation – attributed to Gransci
Thank you, Nick and NC, for covering this important story that is mostly ignored by the MSM and the American people.