Havana Syndrome: How the Biden Administration Is Driving Cubans Into Misery
Deconstructed
Deconstructed Podcast
Protesters have taken to the street on the island, decrying power blackouts and food shortages.

Chanting “power and food,” demonstrators have filled Cuba’s streets in recent days. This week on Deconstructed, Ryan Grim delves into the complexities of Cuba’s current economic crisis with Andrés Pertierra, a historian of Latin America and the Caribbean. They discuss the various factors deepening the crisis and driving people to the streets, from the half-century-long U.S. embargo on the island, its own economic policies, pandemic-related destabilization, and sanctions the Trump administration imposed and the Biden administration kept in place. Pertierra is in the fifth year of his Ph.D. program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and hosts “Orígenes: A Cuban History Podcast.”

[Deconstructed theme music.]

Ryan Grim: Hey, I’m Ryan Grim. Welcome to Deconstructed.

If you’re ever making a list of the top ten best Karl Marx riffs, one that’s always going to make it on there comes from the 18th Brumaire of Napoleon Bonaparte, when he said, “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”

It’s an important concept to remember, and one that Kamala Harris riffed on recently when she mused, “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of all in which you live, and what came before you.”

Now, Kamala’s father was a Marxist professor from Jamaica so, perhaps, he passed down to her his spin on that old idea. But, either way, it’s a concept I’ve been reflecting on as I think about the crisis in Cuba today. Protests have broken out recently as an economic catastrophe has gripped the island, with the Cuban people being slapped around by the dead hand of the Cold War.

On today’s show, to walk us through how we got to this point, and who today is doing the slapping, we’re joined from Havana by Andrés Pertierra, who’s a fifth-year PhD candidate in Latin American and Caribbean history at the University of Madison.

Andrés, thanks so much for joining me.

Andrés Pertierra: Thanks so much for having me on. I’m excited to be here.

RG: So, just for fun, for the audience — I don’t know about fun — actually, let’s talk a little bit about how tricky it was to get on here. What’s it like on a day-to-day basis engaging with people who are over here on the mainland in the U.S. through the embargo? What kind of obstacles does it throw up that you might not even think of?

AP: A lot of apps are blocked. And then, of course, the Cuban government blocks things online. But a lot of these things are blocked because they’re trying to avoid OFAC sanctions, the Treasury Department sanctions. So I can’t download a lot of apps, I have to have already have had the apps on my iPhone. I can’t just use the nifty new eSIM that I have. Only iPhone, because eSIM doesn’t work in Cuba, and carriers from the U.S. don’t really want to work with Cuba in a normal way. It’s expensive to do phone calls. I can’t get into my university accounts online because there’s a two-factor authentication system, and that app is apparently blocked in Cuba, as is another of the apps we tried to record on.

RG: And that’s one of the things that people don’t really understand about sanctions, is that the treasury department will sometimes say that these are narrowly targeted sanctions, and they’re aimed only at this particular thing. But the penalty for getting hit with them is so extreme that companies around the world are like, if we can even see the sanctions from where we are, we’re just going to get out of Dodge.

And so, yeah. You can’t use the app, can’t use this, can’t use your two-factor authentication, can’t get into your university email account from Cuba. What are you doing your dissertation on, specifically?

AP: In broad strokes, I’m doing a dissertation on Cuba after 1991. And there are historians who have done really great work on Cold War Cuba, but there’s not a ton on post-1991 by historians, because it’s seen as too recent. And that’s kind of let the space get flooded with cranks of one inclination or another.

And so, I’m trying to do a more serious study of Cuba after 1991, and how the system kind of survives losing 70 percent of its foreign trade, all this aid and credit, all of this overnight. Losing that, because the USSR fell, and somehow reconsolidating and, in the 2000s, into a very poor, very anemic, but still stable system, which is not at all what people predicted in the depths of the crisis of 1993 and 1994.

RG: There was a phrase, I remember, that Cubans used to describe that period that was very evocative, that kind of trough right after the Soviet Union collapse. What did they call that era?

AP: Special period in times of peace. Just “special period” for short is how they often call it. And it’s to refer to wartime shortages in times of peace, that’s why it’s the special period.

RG: And so, let’s start there. So, what economic reforms did Castro implement in the 90s to bear the brunt of this absolutely unimaginable shock. You know, you’ve got this superpower that’s basically subsidizing you, and then, overnight, it’s gone.

AP: Yeah. And I want listeners to understand, it’s not the just that Soviet subsidies were just in the form of military aid or general economic aid. Cuba was sucking up about a third of all Soviet aid per annum in the 1980s. It was massive. It was pissing off even the Soviets. They were like, look at Cuba, it’s taking up so much aid.

And then, they were also selling the oil for super cheap to the Cubans, and then buying sugar way above market price from the Cuban. So it was a lot of subsidies, billions and billions of dollars.

And, overnight, it loses that. But it’s worse than that, because Cuba was integrated into the socialist economic organization — the CAME — they were insulated from the embargo. And now, not only do they lose subsidies in the 90s, but the embargo was there, as ferocious as ever, and they even tighten it in the 1990s to make it even more aggressive, in the hopes that — kind of an accelerationist logic — that hopefully that makes the government fall.

The 90s were absolutely brutal. People who had been fat all of their lives become rail-thin. Even if you had money, there wasn’t necessarily anything for you to buy with it. People were going temporarily blind from vitamin deficiency. The infrastructure was absolutely falling apart. If you ask any Cuban for their horror stories about that period, every single person has their own personal hell from that era, and the response of the state was to do a couple of things.

Even though they had the clear counterexamples of Vietnam, and China — which had already begun serious market reforms, moving away from the Soviet model and working towards a kind of compromise with a socialism in politics, but quasi-capitalism or full capitalism in the economy — Fidel does not permit that at all. But he does open the door to a kind of hyper-state capitalism, as it were.

Tourism is what they turn to because, at this point, it’s not just that the Soviets aren’t buying sugar at subsidized prices, it’s that sugar is no longer a luxury commodity like in the 19th century. Sugar is dirt cheap. The only way you can really make money is value-added alcohol or something.

So, they shift to tourism hard — which is ironically already what Cuba was doing in the 1950s before the revolution — but they move to tourism hard and they start building all these hotels, many private public partnerships with Spanish hotel chains, which leads me to another big leap, which is: in addition to trying to capture as much tourism currency as they can — though mostly not American, because Americans can’t legally come — they also begin to reach out to diversify their economy.

The lesson of the 1990s was, we cannot bet on one patron. We’ve got to really diversify. And they start reaching out to all these different European countries, African countries, Latin American countries, anybody who will do business with them, they’ll do business with them. Except maybe, I think, Israel and South Korea, and maybe Taiwan. Maybe, with carveouts, it really starts to diversify its economy.

The key thing is that in agriculture, there’s a partial dismantling of the state collectivization of agriculture that has never worked in any of these socialist countries, but there’s not a full shift to markets like in Vietnam and China. And that’s a big mistake, and it’s a big problem that they’re kind of still trying to deal with today.

Fidel doesn’t allow capitalist reform in the countryside, but he does allow kind of like, state capitalism, and people to allow to rent out rooms in their houses, or open small cafeterias and restaurants in Havana, as a way to try and capture as much tourism capital as they can.

You also have, in the last couple of decades, the rise — it was already happening here, but it’s continued since — the use of doctors abroad. So, doctors, Cuba will kind of loan out its doctors to other countries who will pay money to the doctors, but also to the Cuban state. And it mostly goes to the Cuban state, and then the Cuban state then uses that money to reinvest, and all the rest.

So, it really tries to shift away from agro export, because sugar is a dead end, and that’s why Fidel ends up dismantling most of the sugar sector by 2005. Cuba actually imports sugar now, which is the crazy thing. So, it’s a big shift to tourism.

So, think of it as: the 90s, in short term, in a few words, is shifted to services. That’s basically Cuba’s business model now.

RG: How much does Venezuela help in the 2000s? With the rise of Hugo Chavez, and selling subsidized oil to Cuba, and the pink tide of the 2000s? Did that give Cuba a boost? Did they sort of hang on long enough to get a little lift there? Or were they already kind of making the corner?

AP: Both. So, Cuba was already starting a very anemic recovery. It hits bottom. I think, ’93 or ’94 is the absolute worst moment of the special period. But by the late 90s it was starting to recover. Still lots of scarcity, still lots of problems, but it’s kind of OK.

And Fidel lucks out that Chávez, who he had invited to Cuba after Chavez’s failed 1993 coup, 1992 coup. He invites him to Havana and kind of mentors him. And Chavez wins the election in ’98, and starts sending an absolute ungodly amount of subsidies to Cuba; not as much as The Soviet Union, admittedly, it’s not that good of a patron, but it still was an absolutely, not disgusting, but just outrageous amount of subsidies, direct and indirect, which helps the Cuban economy get out of the worst period. And by the tail end of Fidel’s tenure, there was enough to do more harebrained schemes; like, classic Fidel.

Because old refrigerators use a lot of electricity, Fidel’s solution was to buy every family in the country a new refrigerator.

RG: Hey, I like it.

AP: Which they were supposed to pay back, and they never did. No one kept track, and blah-blah-blah. But then, of course, the newer refrigerators were kind of cheap, and they broke down, and so, a lot of people then returned to the old refrigerators, if they still had them.

But, instead of investing that in agriculture, right? Which is extremely decapitalized. That’s one of Cuba’s big problems. It’s gone back to oxen in agriculture, and so, you have very low ag productivity per person, and it’s a big reason why things are so expensive here, because the food is outrageous by Cuban income standards.

RG: And so, how did the great financial crisis 2007/2008/2009 impact Cuba?

AP: So, I was actually here for that. I was an undergrad. I arrived right before that. Actually, before the economic crisis, Cuba got hit by three hurricanes; one in the east, one in the center, and one in the west, because it’s hurricane season in the fall. And then the economic crisis happens. So, it was really bad.

Cuba had just imported a fleet of Yutong brand buses from China, but then, because of the financial crisis, they didn’t have the money to keep doing payments. And so, the buses started to break down, because they were being used so heavily, and it’s so hot here, and the Chinese wouldn’t send replacement parts, because the Cubans were behind on payments, on the principal.

It was really hard going, that first two years. Just shortages of everything, infrastructure was breaking down again, and then it starts to recover. And, in no small part, thanks to the fact that this is also the period when Raul comes into power.

Fidel gets sick in 2006, but only passes power formally to Raúl in 2008. And so, from 2008 to 2013 — that period when I was an undergrad — those first five years are when Raúl really starts to engage in more market-oriented reforms, especially in the cities, which help the economy come back to life after a long period of barely getting by.

RG: And so, the U.S. hope with these strangulation sanctions after the Soviet Union fell, like you said, was, they were going to heighten the contradictions and immiserate the population so savagely that they would rise up and demand freedom and liberty and democracy, and overthrow the government.

So, what was the protest movement like throughout the ’90s and 2000s? What did the U.S. achieve in generating? And it’s not just the U.S. driving it; when people are miserable, oftentimes they’re moved to protest those conditions.

AP: Right. I should stress that the embargo is explicitly about making people hungry and making them go into the streets. This is declassified State Department stuff. Like, that’s not a bug, that’s a feature, of what the embargo is supposed to do, and it’s been supposed to do for a long time.

Since the 1990s, the problem has actually been that even most of the State Department has come around to the idea that it’s a bad policy, because it just gives the Cuban government fodder for blaming everything on the embargo. And the real reason that it’s kind of still in play is that it’s not a national security priority, because the Soviet Union’s gone, and there’s no nukes in Cuba. So, a small national lobby, in a very strategic state that is Florida — the Cuban Americans — can basically have veto power over reforms on Cuba policy. That’s kind of why it stays in place. But, yeah. It is still meant to harm; the cruelty is the point.

And what happens? What happens in the 1990s and the 2000s with protests is— I mean, I’m sure there are more than the one famous one, right? Which is 1994, August of 1994, which is called the Maleconazo, which is a name that derives from the fact that it was along the Malecon, which is the seawall around Havana.

In Central Havana, which is a very working class neighborhood — people live cheek to jowl there — they were exhausted by the constant blackouts and shortages, and they take to the streets. And they make political demands and material demands, and they’re just like, yeah, we want change. And that was successfully diffused because it was a very spontaneous movement. There was no Twitter, no Facebook to kind of spread the news about what was happening or why. There were no leaders, no list of demands, specifically.

And so, when Fidel Castro leads a countermarch, people aren’t really sure what to do, and he’s able to— His gamble of leading a countermarch in person is able to diffuse things, along with, of course, police action. But those two things in combination are able to neutralize it and avoid a more Tiananmen-style response from China. Which, I think, no country — even Cuba — wants to do. So, that’s kind of what happens with the 1994 protest.

And it becomes the exception, rather than the rule. A lot of people at the time thought it would be the beginning of something, but it kind of dies on the vine. Part of that is also just technological; the state still has a monopoly on radio, television. You can’t protest, you can’t organize. You know, it’s hard to build consensus in that context, right?

There is kind of an incipient civil society movement with varying ties and sympathies to the U.S. oftentimes; not solely, but oftentimes. Partly because they can’t really make a living If they are antigovernment activists, and almost all the jobs are with the state, right? So they need foreign funding, and then that opens them up to accusations of being foreign agents. And some of them are, but it’s kind of a catch-22 for them.

And it starts to gain traction by the late 1990s and early 2000s, but then it’s kind of broken by 2003, which is called, in opposition circles, the Primavera Negra. Which is when — I think it’s 75 — activists were mass-arrested? There’s actually a kind of funny anecdote in Richard Gott’s book — he’s a journalist who writes about Cuba, and he wrote a book about Cuban history — and he says early on that when journalists went to the press event for the arrests in 2003, many of them were shocked, because they found out that the opposition activists that they’ve been talking to a week before turned out to be double agents for state security in high-up places.

RG: Oh, wow.

AP: So, it was kind of amusing, in that sense. Just how many people, and how many opposition leaders, ended up being state security aid plants.

There’s a movement that’s born of the 2003 arrests. which is the Damas de Blanco, which means “ladies in white,” and it’s a Catholic-centered movement of family members — women family members — of those who were arrested in 2003, and they do marches and things like that. And there was a lot of sympathy for them, especially with the state responses to them to try and suppress them but, at the same time, they never really become kind of a mass popular symbol, in the way that I think the opposition wanted them to.

There were other attempts as well to organize a constitutional reform to pluralize the society; that’s the Varela Amendment that they wanted to do. But that is stymied in committee, and then they added something else to the Constitution to prevent that exact strategy from happening again in the future. So, it basically stagnates.

RG: My guess would be that it also had something to do with Raúl’s economic reforms — you know, his opening up, his adopting a little bit more of the Vietnamese or Chinese model — working, and people seeing some improvement. Is that right? Not “working, ” in the sense that, all of a sudden, everybody’s wealthy. But if your life is improving, month to month, year to year, that might drain some of the energy. Just the same way that the State Department thinks that making people starve will bring them into the streets, feeding them, presumably, keeps them off the streets.

AP: I would say so. The Cuba that I lived in, during undergrad, 2008 to 2013, you had a block of people who were very strongly in support, a block of people who were very strongly against, and then a huge swath of the population — maybe even the majority at that point — who were not politically neutral, but just like, dude, let me live my life, take care of my children, take care of my parents, you know? Go out with my girlfriend occasionally. Just don’t bother me. And the reforms really do help that. A lot of people just kind of make peace with the system for a time.

The way I describe it to people is, Raúl Castro’s — and then Díaz-Canel’s —bargain was, if you leave politics to us, we will make slow but steady economic reforms that will improve your lives. A friend of mine actually mentioned once seeing a sign in Havana that said, “socialism and prosperity,” which is a very different kind of slogan, but it gives you an idea of that idea of, things are going to get better, just trust us, give us time, we’re moving in the right direction.

And then, of course, the last few years — the crisis, partly pandemic, partly sanctions, partly just all these different factors — has kind of nuked that bargain for the time being, and I think that’s where the crisis is coming from.

RG: “Socialism prosperity” sounds very Chinese. You can imagine seeing it there.

So, I’m curious, did China warm up to Cuba over this time period? Are they seeing Cuba adopt some of their kind of socialism and prosperity ideology, and being impressed? And saying, “let us help out?” Or no, that’s too much trouble for them, because they’re over here? They don’t want to anger the angry tiger in the United States. What was and is the relationship between China and Cuba in that decade and a half?

AP: I can give my appreciation as someone who does not study China-Cuba specifically. But from everything that I’ve seen, China’s relationship is much more transactional than the Soviet Union. But the Soviet Union, the reason that they gave Cuba so much subsidies was that they were in an inter-power competition with China — Maoist China in particular — for the emerging third world and the decolonizing world. And Cuba was such an important symbol to the third world that having that feather in their cap was important for Soviet prestige abroad.

That’s not true of the Chinese. Cuba is still a symbol, but China doesn’t need that symbol in the same way that the U.S.S.R. did. This calculus may change. Especially one hypothetical scenario that I’ve given people is, for example: if things really heat up over Taiwan, I could see Cuba being used as kind of leverage to, the more you push us on Taiwan, the more we’ll get into Cuba. But as a rule, they’ve sent aid, they’ve sent credits, they’ve forgiven certain things. It’s not that it’s 100 percent transactional, but it’s not as obviously just huge tubes of money to Cuba in the same way that the Soviets did.

And we can see that the Chinese-Cuban relationship is strengthening by the fact that, last year — or it might have been just earlier this year, but I think it was last year — Cuba signed on to Belt and Road, so it is integrating into the Chinese sphere, and it’s aligned with China in many ways. But, so far, it has no signs of being the new patron in the way that the U.S.S.R. was, and Venezuela was a kind of poor imitation of, China does not seem, as of yet, interested in playing that role.

RG: So, everything that I’ve heard about the situation in Cuba now is that it’s just getting bleaker and bleaker. What are things like now, and why are we seeing this rapid kind of unraveling?

AP: Part of it is that tourism hasn’t come back. One of the gambles that the Cuban government made was, even in the middle of this crisis, we’re going to keep building hotels because, once the pandemic is over, we are going to be in serious need of foreign currencies. Cuban pesos is play money, basically, on the international, currency markets. We want hard currency. We want the dollar, the euro, right? We need it bad, and we’re going to build these hotels with an eye to that.

Tourism to Cuba has not recovered, so Cuba is short hard currency. Venezuela is another part of this equation. Venezuela, as I’m sure your listeners know, had a very profound economic crisis of its own in the 2010s because they thought that high oil prices were going to reign forever, and they mismanaged the oil sector. And it’s not just a question of oil prices, but they mismanaged the oil sector so [badly] that they are still recovering production capacity for their oil sector.

So, there’s less for them and, of course, there’s less to send to Cuba. Because the trade was, they sent it to Cuba at very subsidized prices, Cuba uses it for its own needs, and then refines it and re-exports it for cash, right? That was part of the way that Venezuela subsidized Cuba. But that, especially in the last couple of years has been greatly diminished, and Venezuela’s had issues keeping up it’s part of the bargain.

The U.S. has tightened sanctions. Trump went full maximum-pressure sanctions, not just in terms of putting Cuba back on the international list, the list of state sponsors of terrorism, which was an entirely, nakedly, disgustingly clear case of politics. They did it right before they left office as a way to impede the Democrats from being able to return to kind of like an Obama-era policy. It was a very finger-in-their-eye kind of thing. It was politics.

But it’s also the fact that Trump had activated Title III of Helms-Burton. Helms-Burton is this law that was passed in the 1990s that really strengthened the embargo, and gave the U.S. government the capacity to really go after foreign companies that trade with Cuba but also trade with the U.S., and sanction them. And, among other things, it had a section which is called Title III, which had never until Trump been activated, even under Bush. Even under Bush, with Bolton there, the most hawkish guy you can imagine, even they never activated Title III. Title III allows U.S. citizens to sue people who trade or benefit from their assets that were nationalized in Cuba.

So, for example, if you have a cruise ship, and it docks in the port, and the heir to that dock is still alive, and he’s a U.S. citizen, guess what? You’re about to get a lawsuit in the millions and millions of dollars by a very litigious, very angry, and very well-funded Cuban American with the full backing of the U.S. government behind him if he wins.

RG: Some of these judgments have reached into the billions of dollars, and they’re seizing Cuban assets all over the world. What’s been the economic impact of that?

AP: Well, I mean, there’s no more cruise ships, among other things.

When I left Cuba in 2013, cruise ships hadn’t become big yet. When I visited again in 2018, I knew multiple people who are making a living off of very short term cruise ship tourism. The Americans, or the Italians, or whatever, would be let out at the port, and every day there was a new ship, a new ship, a new ship. And it wouldn’t spend a ton of money individually, but collectively, a lot of people were able to work the tourism trade by serving as guides, whatever.

And then, of course, they took that money and then they consumed, and they made jobs for other people. So, that was a huge influx of cash for the country, and cruise ships are dead.

The hotels, at night, you’ll see one or two rooms in use, but they’re mostly empty, in what’s supposed to be part of the high season. It’s been devastating. And, because that’s a source of key foreign currency, and Cuba imports 60 to 80 percent of all of the food it consumes, that’s bad.

RG: And so, the Trump administration did this maliciously on the way out, trying to reverse the Obama administration’s policy. And I’ve done some reporting on this particular piece. The Biden administration indicated to Democrats in Congress that they were reviewing whether Cuba actually belonged on this state sponsor of terror list that the Trump administration put them on right before they left.

Not that long ago, in a private meeting, the State Department informed some members of Congress [that], oh, actually, that review hasn’t even started.

AP: Oh Jesus.

RG: Which just absolutely shocked everybody in the room. Because once it starts, then other things kick in. Statutorily, it has to take six months, and you’ve got to do this, that, and the other thing.

So, by saying that that it hadn’t even started, the Democrats were just reeling. Having heard that, I asked the State Department about that, and they more or less confirmed it in their answer, without confirming it.

But do you have any sense of why Biden would continue this malicious policy? Given the impossibility of him winning Florida — he’ll be lucky to come within ten points in Florida — so it’s hard to say that the Miami Cubans down there are so essential to his political strategy that he has to just drive this country into the ground for them.

What is your sense as the Cuba watcher, of why Biden just has refused to buck Trump on this? Just jealousy of Obama or something?

AP: I don’t think that anyone has a clear cut answer just yet. I can give my theory, but I do think this is a case where we need a Bob Woodward-style deep dive into the deep politics of it, because I’m sure it’s a very complicated story.

But my big theories on this are, number one, the curse of Cuba since 1991: it doesn’t matter enough. It doesn’t matter enough for Biden to use his precious political capital, time and energy, and also potentially risk turning Florida even more red to do it. I don’t think he cares enough, is number one.

He’s got domestic and foreign issues that are far higher on his list. And that’s not unique to Biden; it’s something that has kind of plagued Cuba since 1991 because, like I said to your listeners, after 1991, Cuba gets off the front burner, gets on the back burner, and that’s why Florida has such a lock on it, because not enough people care to reverse the policy, even if most people, even in the State Department, know that, as a policy, it doesn’t make much sense.

Number two, it was only a few months into Biden being in office when July 11th happened — the protests, the massive protests, and the state response to them — and that made Cuba radioactive for a while because, if he starts to do a reform in the middle of that context, he could be seen as being soft on communism or whatever. And so, it looks bad, and Cuba was already not a priority, so they just put it into not a priority, but even lower on the list.

I think that that’s kind of started to change. Sometimes [there have] been movements here and there to slowly bring back some stuff from the Obama era, but I think it’s been much more transactional. I think part of it is the fact that Cuba has had allowed a large number of people to migrate through Nicaragua to the U.S. via Mexico, to the point that the traditional triangle of immigrants, which is Mexico and Central America, or whatever, were displaced at one point — I’m not sure if it’s still true — but were displaced at one point by Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Cuba.

So, immigration has kind of pulled Biden back to the table, and that was, I think, part of the intent of that strategy on the part of the Cuban government. And it’s an older strategy; we will collaborate with you on immigration, on drug stuff, on this, and that, and another thing, as long as you’re reasonable with us. And if you guys aren’t reasonable with us, we have no reason to help you out on your priorities either, right?

This brings me to point three, which is, I don’t think Biden sees this as part of his legacy. He seems to treat it as, that’s Obama’s legacy, right? And it’s kind of come to become a problem, so he’s trying to kind of distance himself from it and be very transactional, but I don’t think he sees it either as a priority, or as something he really needs to or wants to burn political capital on since it can be reversed again in the future. And it becomes a cycle of two different people sharing a wheel, and they drive right and they drive left, and nothing gets done, so it’s kind of back to the backburner, I guess.

RG: So, we set up all the conditions. What triggered this recent round of protests?

AP: The most recent protests —I’ve seen videos, we’re still getting a clear picture of it, because it’s still a developing story — broke out in the eastern provinces, in particular in Santiago, which is the second biggest city in Cuba, Bayamo, which is a smaller city, but it’s also very symbolically important. The national anthem is called “La Bayamesa,” “the woman from Bayamo.” And El Cobre, which is also very symbolically important, because of La Virgen del Cobre. It’s kind of like the La Virgen de Guadalupe, the Virgin of Guadalupe, but for Cuba, La Virgen del Cobre.

So, there’s one really big city plus two very symbolic cities, and they have these protests. People were complaining about corriente y comida, which means electricity and food. And you also had political slogans like “libertad,” which means freedom. You also had other political slogans there.

So it’s, again, a mix of material problems, electricity, food. We’re in the middle of a major inflationary crisis here, and that’s combined with politics and political discontent. And the government’s response to that has been to basically say, we know things are really bad right now, we’re not blind, we understand things are bad. But the government’s position is that the anger is misplaced, and that it should be fundamentally put on the shoulders of the U.S., due to the fact that, even as bad as things are in Cuba right now and have been, the U.S. is still maintaining a pretty, If not maximum pressure, really high-pressure sanctions strategy against Cuba.

I think that the embargo is completely wrongheaded. I don’t think it’s justifiable, either morally or practically. It’s a mess. And sanctions against Russia for invading Ukraine makes sense, because it’s a war of aggression, Russians are going to get hurt by the sanctions, but Ukrainians are important too, right? You can justify it.

But Cuba’s not invading anybody. And all the sanctions do is, they make the government kind of hold up and get down into the trenches, and fortify themselves, because they feel like this northern superpower is trying to overthrow them and impose a puppet regime. And so, as a nationalist government, first and foremost, they cannot allow what they see as foreign intervention in Cuban affairs.

So, it’s counterproductive, on top of just being flatly unethical, because of the fact that the burden is almost exclusively being felt by everyday Cubans who are just trying to live their lives.

RG: And no government is perfect, I’m sure the current Cuban government could make some different decisions, but how much room do they have? What could they do differently, within the context of these lawsuits by Americans around the world? The state sponsor of terror designation, the treasury sanctions, the embargo. What policy room for maneuver do they have that they’re not using?

AP: There are very clear reforms that they could do here that I think that would make life better. One of them is they really just need to give up on the ag model, the agricultural model that they’ve been using for years. It doesn’t work. They really have to shift to something like the Vietnamese or Chinese models, or adapt it to Cuban conditions, but do it.

And they’ve been doing experiments for years on a more market-oriented economy, and don’t just have this system where you have to produce so much, and everything above this quota can sell for the market, but everything under this quota you have to sell to us at a price we determine. That model just does not work, flat out.

And you’ve got to liberalize the agriculture, you’ve got to shift to a small farmer model where people own the land again, and then can invest in it, and then can import directly, not having to depend on the state and its institutions’ fuel, tractors, inputs, that kind of thing, that they can potentially also export and get hard currency for that. I think that that would be a huge help, because Cuba is an extremely agriculturally-rich island. 70 percent of it is arable, 90 percent of it in a pinch. That is an insane surface-area-to-arable ratio. And there is no good reason why Cuba needs to be importing 60 to 80 percent of its food, especially when it doesn’t even export sugar anymore.

Now, with all that said, I think that’s a clear example of a domestic reform that they need to do. But on the other end, part of the problem, I think, is, there’s a lot of reforms that would have been extremely delicate, and extremely difficult, even under the best circumstances, like political reforms. And they were put off, and they were put off, and they were put off. And now, to do them under these circumstances, might be seen as a repeat of what happened in the U.S.S.R., right?

What is the lesson a lot of these socialist countries drew from Gorbachev? Gorbachev reformed the economy and politics at the same time. He also mismanaged the economic reforms. People were very miserable, they were discontented, blah-blah-blah. But if you first reform the economy, maybe then you can reform the political system with people who are, by and large, if not in love with the system, at the very least, they’re like, I can work with this. I don’t want change because change can be scary, this is the devil I know, whatever, right?

But now, how do you do those really deep political reforms, or seemingly potentially dangerous economic reforms in ways that don’t just fuel the fire? That is, I think, the kind of the catch-22 that they’re in right now.

RG: And the Soviet leadership also thought that If they surrendered in the Cold War, and did these reforms that the West wanted, that the West would embrace them, and lavish a new Marshall Plan, basically, on the post-Soviet world, which was just a fundamental misreading of the West’s posture toward Russia. We were not going to suddenly turn them into friends; it was much more intractable. You know, they believe that it was ideological, and it was obviously partly ideological, but it was also just geopolitical and imperial.

And so, I would imagine that the Cuban leadership understands the same thing, that just giving up is going to lead to probably the same looting that you saw post-Soviet collapse.

AP: And when they talk to people— Elián González said, Cuba won’t become a Costa Rica or something, it’ll become a Haiti. Like, I’m not saying he’s right or wrong, I’m just saying this is kind of—

RG: Elián González? The Elián González?

AP: The Elian Gonzalez.

RG: Oh. Look at that.

AP: Yeah. He was at my house before he left in the U.S.

RG: No way.

AP: Yeah, yeah. My dad helped work on his case.

Yeah, Elián González made that comparison. I’ve also seen people say we’re going to be like the D.R. or something, and there’s going to be a lot of violence and instability. In addition to, the Americans are going to come, blah-blah-blah. So, that’s kind of the government’s mindset.

And one thing that I’ve told people is like an analogy for this is, maximum-pressure U.S. sanctions, and political pressure, economic pressure, are kind of like a Chinese finger trap with Cuba. By trying to tear the government apart, it actually consolidates the government’s argument that they are besieged and, because they are besieged, they cannot allow the kind of liberalization, be it political or economic, that many people, even within the government, would like to see.

And so, it’s actually counterproductive. But because you have this very staunch lobby in Florida, the cruelty is the point, it’s to make everyday people hurt. Because it’s not that, especially with the older exiles — who didn’t live their whole lives under Fidel and just happened to come in the last few years — for these people, they don’t just hate the government. Many of them have a lot of frustration and anger at everyday Cubans, because they’re like, you guys are traitors, because you guys let Fidel into power, you kept him in power, you supported him. And then things got bad, and now you turn to us. Like, screw you.

And so, it is emotional. It isn’t realpolitik. This is, in many ways, a revanchist policy.

RG: Right. They’re going to make them pay.

AP: Exactly.

RG: Well, this has all been very depressing, but I very much appreciate you joining me anyway. Thank you so much.

AP: Thanks for having me on. Anytime.

Deconstructed is a production of The Intercept. This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. The show is mixed by William Stanton. Legal review by Shawn Musgrave and Elizabeth Sanchez. Leonardo Faierman transcribed this episode. Our theme music was composed by Bart Warshaw.

If you’d like to support our work, go to theintercept.com/give. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to the show so you can hear it every week. And please go and leave us a rating or review. It helps people find the show.

If you want to give us additional feedback, email us at podcasts@theintercept.com, and put “Deconstructed” in the subject line. Otherwise I might miss your message. And, Andrés, what’s your Twitter handle? Because that’s where I see a lot of your work, and I’ve found you to be a really great one to follow on that terrible platform.

AP: Thanks so much. It’s @ASPertierra. I’m also only one of only two Andrés Pertierras on Twitter, so you should find me that way as well.

RG: And the one who’s often giving good book recommendations, that’s the right Andrés.

AP: Thanks.

RG: All right, everybody. Thank you for listening, and I’ll see you soon.
Protesters have taken to the street on the island, decrying power blackouts and food shortages.
Chanting “power and food,” demonstrators have filled Cuba’s streets in recent days. This week on Deconstructed, Ryan Grim delves into the complexities of Cuba’s current economic crisis with Andrés Pertierra, a historian of Latin America and the Caribbean. They discuss the various factors deepening the crisis and driving people to the streets, from the half-century-long U.S. embargo on the island, its own economic policies, pandemic-related destabilization, and sanctions the Trump administration imposed and the Biden administration kept in place. Pertierra is in the fifth year of his Ph.D. program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and hosts “Orígenes: A Cuban History Podcast.” [Deconstructed theme music.] Ryan Grim: Hey, I’m Ryan Grim. Welcome to Deconstructed. If you’re ever making a list of the top ten best Karl Marx riffs, one that’s always going to make it on there comes from the 18th Brumaire of Napoleon Bonaparte, when he said, “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” It’s an important concept to remember, and one that Kamala Harris riffed on recently when she mused, “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of all in which you live, and what came before you.” Now, Kamala’s father was a Marxist professor from Jamaica so, perhaps, he passed down to her his spin on that old idea. But, either way, it’s a concept I’ve been reflecting on as I think about the crisis in Cuba today. Protests have broken out recently as an economic catastrophe has gripped the island, with the Cuban people being slapped around by the dead hand of the Cold War. On today’s show, to walk us through how we got to this point, and who today is doing the slapping, we’re joined from Havana by Andrés Pertierra, who’s a fifth-year PhD candidate in Latin American and Caribbean history at the University of Madison. Andrés, thanks so much for joining me. Andrés Pertierra: Thanks so much for having me on. I’m excited to be here. RG: So, just for fun, for the audience — I don’t know about fun — actually, let’s talk a little bit about how tricky it was to get on here. What’s it like on a day-to-day basis engaging with people who are over here on the mainland in the U.S. through the embargo? What kind of obstacles does it throw up that you might not even think of? AP: A lot of apps are blocked. And then, of course, the Cuban government blocks things online. But a lot of these things are blocked because they’re trying to avoid OFAC sanctions, the Treasury Department sanctions. So I can’t download a lot of apps, I have to have already have had the apps on my iPhone. I can’t just use the nifty new eSIM that I have. Only iPhone, because eSIM doesn’t work in Cuba, and carriers from the U.S. don’t really want to work with Cuba in a normal way. It’s expensive to do phone calls. I can’t get into my university accounts online because there’s a two-factor authentication system, and that app is apparently blocked in Cuba, as is another of the apps we tried to record on. RG: And that’s one of the things that people don’t really understand about sanctions, is that the treasury department will sometimes say that these are narrowly targeted sanctions, and they’re aimed only at this particular thing. But the penalty for getting hit with them is so extreme that companies around the world are like, if we can even see the sanctions from where we are, we’re just going to get out of Dodge. And so, yeah. You can’t use the app, can’t use this, can’t use your two-factor authentication, can’t get into your university email account from Cuba. What are you doing your dissertation on, specifically? AP: In broad strokes, I’m doing a dissertation on Cuba after 1991. And there are historians who have done really great work on Cold War Cuba, but there’s not a ton on post-1991 by historians, because it’s seen as too recent. And that’s kind of let the space get flooded with cranks of one inclination or another. And so, I’m trying to do a more serious study of Cuba after 1991, and how the system kind of survives losing 70 percent of its foreign trade, all this aid and credit, all of this overnight. Losing that, because the USSR fell, and somehow reconsolidating and, in the 2000s, into a very poor, very anemic, but still stable system, which is not at all what people predicted in the depths of the crisis of 1993 and 1994. RG: There was a phrase, I remember, that Cubans used to describe that period that was very evocative, that kind of trough right after the Soviet Union collapse. What did they call that era? AP: Special period in times of peace. Just “special period” for short is how they often call it. And it’s to refer to wartime shortages in times of peace, that’s why it’s the special period. RG: And so, let’s start there. So, what economic reforms did Castro implement in the 90s to bear the brunt of this absolutely unimaginable shock. You know, you’ve got this superpower that’s basically subsidizing you, and then, overnight, it’s gone. AP: Yeah. And I want listeners to understand, it’s not the just that Soviet subsidies were just in the form of military aid or general economic aid. Cuba was sucking up about a third of all Soviet aid per annum in the 1980s. It was massive. It was pissing off even the Soviets. They were like, look at Cuba, it’s taking up so much aid. And then, they were also selling the oil for super cheap to the Cubans, and then buying sugar way above market price from the Cuban. So it was a lot of subsidies, billions and billions of dollars. And, overnight, it loses that. But it’s worse than that, because Cuba was integrated into the socialist economic organization — the CAME — they were insulated from the embargo. And now, not only do they lose subsidies in the 90s, but the embargo was there, as ferocious as ever, and they even tighten it in the 1990s to make it even more aggressive, in the hopes that — kind of an accelerationist logic — that hopefully that makes the government fall. The 90s were absolutely brutal. People who had been fat all of their lives become rail-thin. Even if you had money, there wasn’t necessarily anything for you to buy with it. People were going temporarily blind from vitamin deficiency. The infrastructure was absolutely falling apart. If you ask any Cuban for their horror stories about that period, every single person has their own personal hell from that era, and the response of the state was to do a couple of things. Even though they had the clear counterexamples of Vietnam, and China — which had already begun serious market reforms, moving away from the Soviet model and working towards a kind of compromise with a socialism in politics, but quasi-capitalism or full capitalism in the economy — Fidel does not permit that at all. But he does open the door to a kind of hyper-state capitalism, as it were. Tourism is what they turn to because, at this point, it’s not just that the Soviets aren’t buying sugar at subsidized prices, it’s that sugar is no longer a luxury commodity like in the 19th century. Sugar is dirt cheap. The only way you can really make money is value-added alcohol or something. So, they shift to tourism hard — which is ironically already what Cuba was doing in the 1950s before the revolution — but they move to tourism hard and they start building all these hotels, many private public partnerships with Spanish hotel chains, which leads me to another big leap, which is: in addition to trying to capture as much tourism currency as they can — though mostly not American, because Americans can’t legally come — they also begin to reach out to diversify their economy. The lesson of the 1990s was, we cannot bet on one patron. We’ve got to really diversify. And they start reaching out to all these different European countries, African countries, Latin American countries, anybody who will do business with them, they’ll do business with them. Except maybe, I think, Israel and South Korea, and maybe Taiwan. Maybe, with carveouts, it really starts to diversify its economy. The key thing is that in agriculture, there’s a partial dismantling of the state collectivization of agriculture that has never worked in any of these socialist countries, but there’s not a full shift to markets like in Vietnam and China. And that’s a big mistake, and it’s a big problem that they’re kind of still trying to deal with today. Fidel doesn’t allow capitalist reform in the countryside, but he does allow kind of like, state capitalism, and people to allow to rent out rooms in their houses, or open small cafeterias and restaurants in Havana, as a way to try and capture as much tourism capital as they can. You also have, in the last couple of decades, the rise — it was already happening here, but it’s continued since — the use of doctors abroad. So, doctors, Cuba will kind of loan out its doctors to other countries who will pay money to the doctors, but also to the Cuban state. And it mostly goes to the Cuban state, and then the Cuban state then uses that money to reinvest, and all the rest. So, it really tries to shift away from agro export, because sugar is a dead end, and that’s why Fidel ends up dismantling most of the sugar sector by 2005. Cuba actually imports sugar now, which is the crazy thing. So, it’s a big shift to tourism. So, think of it as: the 90s, in short term, in a few words, is shifted to services. That’s basically Cuba’s business model now. RG: How much does Venezuela help in the 2000s? With the rise of Hugo Chavez, and selling subsidized oil to Cuba, and the pink tide of the 2000s? Did that give Cuba a boost? Did they sort of hang on long enough to get a little lift there? Or were they already kind of making the corner? AP: Both. So, Cuba was already starting a very anemic recovery. It hits bottom. I think, ’93 or ’94 is the absolute worst moment of the special period. But by the late 90s it was starting to recover. Still lots of scarcity, still lots of problems, but it’s kind of OK. And Fidel lucks out that Chávez, who he had invited to Cuba after Chavez’s failed 1993 coup, 1992 coup. He invites him to Havana and kind of mentors him. And Chavez wins the election in ’98, and starts sending an absolute ungodly amount of subsidies to Cuba; not as much as The Soviet Union, admittedly, it’s not that good of a patron, but it still was an absolutely, not disgusting, but just outrageous amount of subsidies, direct and indirect, which helps the Cuban economy get out of the worst period. And by the tail end of Fidel’s tenure, there was enough to do more harebrained schemes; like, classic Fidel. Because old refrigerators use a lot of electricity, Fidel’s solution was to buy every family in the country a new refrigerator. RG: Hey, I like it. AP: Which they were supposed to pay back, and they never did. No one kept track, and blah-blah-blah. But then, of course, the newer refrigerators were kind of cheap, and they broke down, and so, a lot of people then returned to the old refrigerators, if they still had them. But, instead of investing that in agriculture, right? Which is extremely decapitalized. That’s one of Cuba’s big problems. It’s gone back to oxen in agriculture, and so, you have very low ag productivity per person, and it’s a big reason why things are so expensive here, because the food is outrageous by Cuban income standards. RG: And so, how did the great financial crisis 2007/2008/2009 impact Cuba? AP: So, I was actually here for that. I was an undergrad. I arrived right before that. Actually, before the economic crisis, Cuba got hit by three hurricanes; one in the east, one in the center, and one in the west, because it’s hurricane season in the fall. And then the economic crisis happens. So, it was really bad. Cuba had just imported a fleet of Yutong brand buses from China, but then, because of the financial crisis, they didn’t have the money to keep doing payments. And so, the buses started to break down, because they were being used so heavily, and it’s so hot here, and the Chinese wouldn’t send replacement parts, because the Cubans were behind on payments, on the principal. It was really hard going, that first two years. Just shortages of everything, infrastructure was breaking down again, and then it starts to recover. And, in no small part, thanks to the fact that this is also the period when Raul comes into power. Fidel gets sick in 2006, but only passes power formally to Raúl in 2008. And so, from 2008 to 2013 — that period when I was an undergrad — those first five years are when Raúl really starts to engage in more market-oriented reforms, especially in the cities, which help the economy come back to life after a long period of barely getting by. RG: And so, the U.S. hope with these strangulation sanctions after the Soviet Union fell, like you said, was, they were going to heighten the contradictions and immiserate the population so savagely that they would rise up and demand freedom and liberty and democracy, and overthrow the government. So, what was the protest movement like throughout the ’90s and 2000s? What did the U.S. achieve in generating? And it’s not just the U.S. driving it; when people are miserable, oftentimes they’re moved to protest those conditions. AP: Right. I should stress that the embargo is explicitly about making people hungry and making them go into the streets. This is declassified State Department stuff. Like, that’s not a bug, that’s a feature, of what the embargo is supposed to do, and it’s been supposed to do for a long time. Since the 1990s, the problem has actually been that even most of the State Department has come around to the idea that it’s a bad policy, because it just gives the Cuban government fodder for blaming everything on the embargo. And the real reason that it’s kind of still in play is that it’s not a national security priority, because the Soviet Union’s gone, and there’s no nukes in Cuba. So, a small national lobby, in a very strategic state that is Florida — the Cuban Americans — can basically have veto power over reforms on Cuba policy. That’s kind of why it stays in place. But, yeah. It is still meant to harm; the cruelty is the point. And what happens? What happens in the 1990s and the 2000s with protests is— I mean, I’m sure there are more than the one famous one, right? Which is 1994, August of 1994, which is called the Maleconazo, which is a name that derives from the fact that it was along the Malecon, which is the seawall around Havana. In Central Havana, which is a very working class neighborhood — people live cheek to jowl there — they were exhausted by the constant blackouts and shortages, and they take to the streets. And they make political demands and material demands, and they’re just like, yeah, we want change. And that was successfully diffused because it was a very spontaneous movement. There was no Twitter, no Facebook to kind of spread the news about what was happening or why. There were no leaders, no list of demands, specifically. And so, when Fidel Castro leads a countermarch, people aren’t really sure what to do, and he’s able to— His gamble of leading a countermarch in person is able to diffuse things, along with, of course, police action. But those two things in combination are able to neutralize it and avoid a more Tiananmen-style response from China. Which, I think, no country — even Cuba — wants to do. So, that’s kind of what happens with the 1994 protest. And it becomes the exception, rather than the rule. A lot of people at the time thought it would be the beginning of something, but it kind of dies on the vine. Part of that is also just technological; the state still has a monopoly on radio, television. You can’t protest, you can’t organize. You know, it’s hard to build consensus in that context, right? There is kind of an incipient civil society movement with varying ties and sympathies to the U.S. oftentimes; not solely, but oftentimes. Partly because they can’t really make a living If they are antigovernment activists, and almost all the jobs are with the state, right? So they need foreign funding, and then that opens them up to accusations of being foreign agents. And some of them are, but it’s kind of a catch-22 for them. And it starts to gain traction by the late 1990s and early 2000s, but then it’s kind of broken by 2003, which is called, in opposition circles, the Primavera Negra. Which is when — I think it’s 75 — activists were mass-arrested? There’s actually a kind of funny anecdote in Richard Gott’s book — he’s a journalist who writes about Cuba, and he wrote a book about Cuban history — and he says early on that when journalists went to the press event for the arrests in 2003, many of them were shocked, because they found out that the opposition activists that they’ve been talking to a week before turned out to be double agents for state security in high-up places. RG: Oh, wow. AP: So, it was kind of amusing, in that sense. Just how many people, and how many opposition leaders, ended up being state security aid plants. There’s a movement that’s born of the 2003 arrests. which is the Damas de Blanco, which means “ladies in white,” and it’s a Catholic-centered movement of family members — women family members — of those who were arrested in 2003, and they do marches and things like that. And there was a lot of sympathy for them, especially with the state responses to them to try and suppress them but, at the same time, they never really become kind of a mass popular symbol, in the way that I think the opposition wanted them to. There were other attempts as well to organize a constitutional reform to pluralize the society; that’s the Varela Amendment that they wanted to do. But that is stymied in committee, and then they added something else to the Constitution to prevent that exact strategy from happening again in the future. So, it basically stagnates. RG: My guess would be that it also had something to do with Raúl’s economic reforms — you know, his opening up, his adopting a little bit more of the Vietnamese or Chinese model — working, and people seeing some improvement. Is that right? Not “working, ” in the sense that, all of a sudden, everybody’s wealthy. But if your life is improving, month to month, year to year, that might drain some of the energy. Just the same way that the State Department thinks that making people starve will bring them into the streets, feeding them, presumably, keeps them off the streets. AP: I would say so. The Cuba that I lived in, during undergrad, 2008 to 2013, you had a block of people who were very strongly in support, a block of people who were very strongly against, and then a huge swath of the population — maybe even the majority at that point — who were not politically neutral, but just like, dude, let me live my life, take care of my children, take care of my parents, you know? Go out with my girlfriend occasionally. Just don’t bother me. And the reforms really do help that. A lot of people just kind of make peace with the system for a time. The way I describe it to people is, Raúl Castro’s — and then Díaz-Canel’s —bargain was, if you leave politics to us, we will make slow but steady economic reforms that will improve your lives. A friend of mine actually mentioned once seeing a sign in Havana that said, “socialism and prosperity,” which is a very different kind of slogan, but it gives you an idea of that idea of, things are going to get better, just trust us, give us time, we’re moving in the right direction. And then, of course, the last few years — the crisis, partly pandemic, partly sanctions, partly just all these different factors — has kind of nuked that bargain for the time being, and I think that’s where the crisis is coming from. RG: “Socialism prosperity” sounds very Chinese. You can imagine seeing it there. So, I’m curious, did China warm up to Cuba over this time period? Are they seeing Cuba adopt some of their kind of socialism and prosperity ideology, and being impressed? And saying, “let us help out?” Or no, that’s too much trouble for them, because they’re over here? They don’t want to anger the angry tiger in the United States. What was and is the relationship between China and Cuba in that decade and a half? AP: I can give my appreciation as someone who does not study China-Cuba specifically. But from everything that I’ve seen, China’s relationship is much more transactional than the Soviet Union. But the Soviet Union, the reason that they gave Cuba so much subsidies was that they were in an inter-power competition with China — Maoist China in particular — for the emerging third world and the decolonizing world. And Cuba was such an important symbol to the third world that having that feather in their cap was important for Soviet prestige abroad. That’s not true of the Chinese. Cuba is still a symbol, but China doesn’t need that symbol in the same way that the U.S.S.R. did. This calculus may change. Especially one hypothetical scenario that I’ve given people is, for example: if things really heat up over Taiwan, I could see Cuba being used as kind of leverage to, the more you push us on Taiwan, the more we’ll get into Cuba. But as a rule, they’ve sent aid, they’ve sent credits, they’ve forgiven certain things. It’s not that it’s 100 percent transactional, but it’s not as obviously just huge tubes of money to Cuba in the same way that the Soviets did. And we can see that the Chinese-Cuban relationship is strengthening by the fact that, last year — or it might have been just earlier this year, but I think it was last year — Cuba signed on to Belt and Road, so it is integrating into the Chinese sphere, and it’s aligned with China in many ways. But, so far, it has no signs of being the new patron in the way that the U.S.S.R. was, and Venezuela was a kind of poor imitation of, China does not seem, as of yet, interested in playing that role. RG: So, everything that I’ve heard about the situation in Cuba now is that it’s just getting bleaker and bleaker. What are things like now, and why are we seeing this rapid kind of unraveling? AP: Part of it is that tourism hasn’t come back. One of the gambles that the Cuban government made was, even in the middle of this crisis, we’re going to keep building hotels because, once the pandemic is over, we are going to be in serious need of foreign currencies. Cuban pesos is play money, basically, on the international, currency markets. We want hard currency. We want the dollar, the euro, right? We need it bad, and we’re going to build these hotels with an eye to that. Tourism to Cuba has not recovered, so Cuba is short hard currency. Venezuela is another part of this equation. Venezuela, as I’m sure your listeners know, had a very profound economic crisis of its own in the 2010s because they thought that high oil prices were going to reign forever, and they mismanaged the oil sector. And it’s not just a question of oil prices, but they mismanaged the oil sector so [badly] that they are still recovering production capacity for their oil sector. So, there’s less for them and, of course, there’s less to send to Cuba. Because the trade was, they sent it to Cuba at very subsidized prices, Cuba uses it for its own needs, and then refines it and re-exports it for cash, right? That was part of the way that Venezuela subsidized Cuba. But that, especially in the last couple of years has been greatly diminished, and Venezuela’s had issues keeping up it’s part of the bargain. The U.S. has tightened sanctions. Trump went full maximum-pressure sanctions, not just in terms of putting Cuba back on the international list, the list of state sponsors of terrorism, which was an entirely, nakedly, disgustingly clear case of politics. They did it right before they left office as a way to impede the Democrats from being able to return to kind of like an Obama-era policy. It was a very finger-in-their-eye kind of thing. It was politics. But it’s also the fact that Trump had activated Title III of Helms-Burton. Helms-Burton is this law that was passed in the 1990s that really strengthened the embargo, and gave the U.S. government the capacity to really go after foreign companies that trade with Cuba but also trade with the U.S., and sanction them. And, among other things, it had a section which is called Title III, which had never until Trump been activated, even under Bush. Even under Bush, with Bolton there, the most hawkish guy you can imagine, even they never activated Title III. Title III allows U.S. citizens to sue people who trade or benefit from their assets that were nationalized in Cuba. So, for example, if you have a cruise ship, and it docks in the port, and the heir to that dock is still alive, and he’s a U.S. citizen, guess what? You’re about to get a lawsuit in the millions and millions of dollars by a very litigious, very angry, and very well-funded Cuban American with the full backing of the U.S. government behind him if he wins. RG: Some of these judgments have reached into the billions of dollars, and they’re seizing Cuban assets all over the world. What’s been the economic impact of that? AP: Well, I mean, there’s no more cruise ships, among other things. When I left Cuba in 2013, cruise ships hadn’t become big yet. When I visited again in 2018, I knew multiple people who are making a living off of very short term cruise ship tourism. The Americans, or the Italians, or whatever, would be let out at the port, and every day there was a new ship, a new ship, a new ship. And it wouldn’t spend a ton of money individually, but collectively, a lot of people were able to work the tourism trade by serving as guides, whatever. And then, of course, they took that money and then they consumed, and they made jobs for other people. So, that was a huge influx of cash for the country, and cruise ships are dead. The hotels, at night, you’ll see one or two rooms in use, but they’re mostly empty, in what’s supposed to be part of the high season. It’s been devastating. And, because that’s a source of key foreign currency, and Cuba imports 60 to 80 percent of all of the food it consumes, that’s bad. RG: And so, the Trump administration did this maliciously on the way out, trying to reverse the Obama administration’s policy. And I’ve done some reporting on this particular piece. The Biden administration indicated to Democrats in Congress that they were reviewing whether Cuba actually belonged on this state sponsor of terror list that the Trump administration put them on right before they left. Not that long ago, in a private meeting, the State Department informed some members of Congress [that], oh, actually, that review hasn’t even started. AP: Oh Jesus. RG: Which just absolutely shocked everybody in the room. Because once it starts, then other things kick in. Statutorily, it has to take six months, and you’ve got to do this, that, and the other thing. So, by saying that that it hadn’t even started, the Democrats were just reeling. Having heard that, I asked the State Department about that, and they more or less confirmed it in their answer, without confirming it. But do you have any sense of why Biden would continue this malicious policy? Given the impossibility of him winning Florida — he’ll be lucky to come within ten points in Florida — so it’s hard to say that the Miami Cubans down there are so essential to his political strategy that he has to just drive this country into the ground for them. What is your sense as the Cuba watcher, of why Biden just has refused to buck Trump on this? Just jealousy of Obama or something? AP: I don’t think that anyone has a clear cut answer just yet. I can give my theory, but I do think this is a case where we need a Bob Woodward-style deep dive into the deep politics of it, because I’m sure it’s a very complicated story. But my big theories on this are, number one, the curse of Cuba since 1991: it doesn’t matter enough. It doesn’t matter enough for Biden to use his precious political capital, time and energy, and also potentially risk turning Florida even more red to do it. I don’t think he cares enough, is number one. He’s got domestic and foreign issues that are far higher on his list. And that’s not unique to Biden; it’s something that has kind of plagued Cuba since 1991 because, like I said to your listeners, after 1991, Cuba gets off the front burner, gets on the back burner, and that’s why Florida has such a lock on it, because not enough people care to reverse the policy, even if most people, even in the State Department, know that, as a policy, it doesn’t make much sense. Number two, it was only a few months into Biden being in office when July 11th happened — the protests, the massive protests, and the state response to them — and that made Cuba radioactive for a while because, if he starts to do a reform in the middle of that context, he could be seen as being soft on communism or whatever. And so, it looks bad, and Cuba was already not a priority, so they just put it into not a priority, but even lower on the list. I think that that’s kind of started to change. Sometimes [there have] been movements here and there to slowly bring back some stuff from the Obama era, but I think it’s been much more transactional. I think part of it is the fact that Cuba has had allowed a large number of people to migrate through Nicaragua to the U.S. via Mexico, to the point that the traditional triangle of immigrants, which is Mexico and Central America, or whatever, were displaced at one point — I’m not sure if it’s still true — but were displaced at one point by Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Cuba. So, immigration has kind of pulled Biden back to the table, and that was, I think, part of the intent of that strategy on the part of the Cuban government. And it’s an older strategy; we will collaborate with you on immigration, on drug stuff, on this, and that, and another thing, as long as you’re reasonable with us. And if you guys aren’t reasonable with us, we have no reason to help you out on your priorities either, right? This brings me to point three, which is, I don’t think Biden sees this as part of his legacy. He seems to treat it as, that’s Obama’s legacy, right? And it’s kind of come to become a problem, so he’s trying to kind of distance himself from it and be very transactional, but I don’t think he sees it either as a priority, or as something he really needs to or wants to burn political capital on since it can be reversed again in the future. And it becomes a cycle of two different people sharing a wheel, and they drive right and they drive left, and nothing gets done, so it’s kind of back to the backburner, I guess. RG: So, we set up all the conditions. What triggered this recent round of protests? AP: The most recent protests —I’ve seen videos, we’re still getting a clear picture of it, because it’s still a developing story — broke out in the eastern provinces, in particular in Santiago, which is the second biggest city in Cuba, Bayamo, which is a smaller city, but it’s also very symbolically important. The national anthem is called “La Bayamesa,” “the woman from Bayamo.” And El Cobre, which is also very symbolically important, because of La Virgen del Cobre. It’s kind of like the La Virgen de Guadalupe, the Virgin of Guadalupe, but for Cuba, La Virgen del Cobre. So, there’s one really big city plus two very symbolic cities, and they have these protests. People were complaining about corriente y comida, which means electricity and food. And you also had political slogans like “libertad,” which means freedom. You also had other political slogans there. So it’s, again, a mix of material problems, electricity, food. We’re in the middle of a major inflationary crisis here, and that’s combined with politics and political discontent. And the government’s response to that has been to basically say, we know things are really bad right now, we’re not blind, we understand things are bad. But the government’s position is that the anger is misplaced, and that it should be fundamentally put on the shoulders of the U.S., due to the fact that, even as bad as things are in Cuba right now and have been, the U.S. is still maintaining a pretty, If not maximum pressure, really high-pressure sanctions strategy against Cuba. I think that the embargo is completely wrongheaded. I don’t think it’s justifiable, either morally or practically. It’s a mess. And sanctions against Russia for invading Ukraine makes sense, because it’s a war of aggression, Russians are going to get hurt by the sanctions, but Ukrainians are important too, right? You can justify it. But Cuba’s not invading anybody. And all the sanctions do is, they make the government kind of hold up and get down into the trenches, and fortify themselves, because they feel like this northern superpower is trying to overthrow them and impose a puppet regime. And so, as a nationalist government, first and foremost, they cannot allow what they see as foreign intervention in Cuban affairs. So, it’s counterproductive, on top of just being flatly unethical, because of the fact that the burden is almost exclusively being felt by everyday Cubans who are just trying to live their lives. RG: And no government is perfect, I’m sure the current Cuban government could make some different decisions, but how much room do they have? What could they do differently, within the context of these lawsuits by Americans around the world? The state sponsor of terror designation, the treasury sanctions, the embargo. What policy room for maneuver do they have that they’re not using? AP: There are very clear reforms that they could do here that I think that would make life better. One of them is they really just need to give up on the ag model, the agricultural model that they’ve been using for years. It doesn’t work. They really have to shift to something like the Vietnamese or Chinese models, or adapt it to Cuban conditions, but do it. And they’ve been doing experiments for years on a more market-oriented economy, and don’t just have this system where you have to produce so much, and everything above this quota can sell for the market, but everything under this quota you have to sell to us at a price we determine. That model just does not work, flat out. And you’ve got to liberalize the agriculture, you’ve got to shift to a small farmer model where people own the land again, and then can invest in it, and then can import directly, not having to depend on the state and its institutions’ fuel, tractors, inputs, that kind of thing, that they can potentially also export and get hard currency for that. I think that that would be a huge help, because Cuba is an extremely agriculturally-rich island. 70 percent of it is arable, 90 percent of it in a pinch. That is an insane surface-area-to-arable ratio. And there is no good reason why Cuba needs to be importing 60 to 80 percent of its food, especially when it doesn’t even export sugar anymore. Now, with all that said, I think that’s a clear example of a domestic reform that they need to do. But on the other end, part of the problem, I think, is, there’s a lot of reforms that would have been extremely delicate, and extremely difficult, even under the best circumstances, like political reforms. And they were put off, and they were put off, and they were put off. And now, to do them under these circumstances, might be seen as a repeat of what happened in the U.S.S.R., right? What is the lesson a lot of these socialist countries drew from Gorbachev? Gorbachev reformed the economy and politics at the same time. He also mismanaged the economic reforms. People were very miserable, they were discontented, blah-blah-blah. But if you first reform the economy, maybe then you can reform the political system with people who are, by and large, if not in love with the system, at the very least, they’re like, I can work with this. I don’t want change because change can be scary, this is the devil I know, whatever, right? But now, how do you do those really deep political reforms, or seemingly potentially dangerous economic reforms in ways that don’t just fuel the fire? That is, I think, the kind of the catch-22 that they’re in right now. RG: And the Soviet leadership also thought that If they surrendered in the Cold War, and did these reforms that the West wanted, that the West would embrace them, and lavish a new Marshall Plan, basically, on the post-Soviet world, which was just a fundamental misreading of the West’s posture toward Russia. We were not going to suddenly turn them into friends; it was much more intractable. You know, they believe that it was ideological, and it was obviously partly ideological, but it was also just geopolitical and imperial. And so, I would imagine that the Cuban leadership understands the same thing, that just giving up is going to lead to probably the same looting that you saw post-Soviet collapse. AP: And when they talk to people— Elián González said, Cuba won’t become a Costa Rica or something, it’ll become a Haiti. Like, I’m not saying he’s right or wrong, I’m just saying this is kind of— RG: Elián González? The Elián González? AP: The Elian Gonzalez. RG: Oh. Look at that. AP: Yeah. He was at my house before he left in the U.S. RG: No way. AP: Yeah, yeah. My dad helped work on his case. Yeah, Elián González made that comparison. I’ve also seen people say we’re going to be like the D.R. or something, and there’s going to be a lot of violence and instability. In addition to, the Americans are going to come, blah-blah-blah. So, that’s kind of the government’s mindset. And one thing that I’ve told people is like an analogy for this is, maximum-pressure U.S. sanctions, and political pressure, economic pressure, are kind of like a Chinese finger trap with Cuba. By trying to tear the government apart, it actually consolidates the government’s argument that they are besieged and, because they are besieged, they cannot allow the kind of liberalization, be it political or economic, that many people, even within the government, would like to see. And so, it’s actually counterproductive. But because you have this very staunch lobby in Florida, the cruelty is the point, it’s to make everyday people hurt. Because it’s not that, especially with the older exiles — who didn’t live their whole lives under Fidel and just happened to come in the last few years — for these people, they don’t just hate the government. Many of them have a lot of frustration and anger at everyday Cubans, because they’re like, you guys are traitors, because you guys let Fidel into power, you kept him in power, you supported him. And then things got bad, and now you turn to us. Like, screw you. And so, it is emotional. It isn’t realpolitik. This is, in many ways, a revanchist policy. RG: Right. They’re going to make them pay. AP: Exactly. RG: Well, this has all been very depressing, but I very much appreciate you joining me anyway. Thank you so much. AP: Thanks for having me on. Anytime. Deconstructed is a production of The Intercept. This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. The show is mixed by William Stanton. Legal review by Shawn Musgrave and Elizabeth Sanchez. Leonardo Faierman transcribed this episode. Our theme music was composed by Bart Warshaw. If you’d like to support our work, go to theintercept.com/give. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to the show so you can hear it every week. And please go and leave us a rating or review. It helps people find the show. If you want to give us additional feedback, email us at podcasts@theintercept.com, and put “Deconstructed” in the subject line. Otherwise I might miss your message. And, Andrés, what’s your Twitter handle? Because that’s where I see a lot of your work, and I’ve found you to be a really great one to follow on that terrible platform. AP: Thanks so much. It’s @ASPertierra. I’m also only one of only two Andrés Pertierras on Twitter, so you should find me that way as well. RG: And the one who’s often giving good book recommendations, that’s the right Andrés. AP: Thanks. RG: All right, everybody. Thank you for listening, and I’ll see you soon.