Havana is one fun city—that’s what I told a Cuban I had befriended during my four-day trip to Havana. With a wry, sad, warm smile, he replied, “You’re an American….” We were walking toward yet another Casa Del Habano cigar shop in yet another dated, though by post-revolution Cuban standards opulent, international hotel. He refused to let me buy him a drink, cigar, or meal, but he accompanied me into the bar.
Havana isn’t fun for everybody, and the reality of Fidel Castro’s brutal communist racket impinges on the enjoyment of even the most impressive shows and attractions the city has to offer. The terrace at Hotel Melia Cohiba in the Vedado neighborhood offers luxurious swimming, drinking, dining, and smoking. But the hotels, swimming pools, and fine dining that tourists from Europe, Russia, and the United States enjoy are practically, if not legally, off limits to Cubans. In four days, I visited the most famous cigar lounges, hotels, and bars in Cuba. The Cubans I met asked me to describe those places because in a lifetime on the island they had never been inside many of them.
Cubans don’t wear Che Guevara t-shirts. Propaganda like the ubiquitous “Che shirt” may appeal to useful idiots who champion tyrants, but that brand of perverse sentimentality holds no romantic sway over those whose lives and country communism has ruined. Instead, they wear American flags. Over my weekend trip, I saw dozens of Cubans sport Old Glory on their clothing, homes, and decades-old cars.
The number of refugees willing to risk life and limb for freedom in America more than doubled between fiscal years 2014 and 2016, as Barack Obama signaled that the United States would ease tensions with Cuba. Although his administration had promised to maintain the longstanding “wet foot, dry foot” policy that offered permanent residence to Cubans who arrived on American soil, President Obama broke that promise when he abruptly ended the policy this past January. Since then, Cuban immigration to the U.S. plummeted from over 56,000 in fiscal year 2016 to precisely zero in April 2017.
The permanent Cuban Revolution, ushered in by Fidel Castro’s 26th of July Movement, has now entered its sixty-forth year. If Castro’s revolution were an American citizen, it would qualify for Social Security. But six and a half decades have not sufficed for the communist regime’s planned economy to generate prosperity for anybody but the cronies who control it. After the Soviet Union, which had subsidized Castro’s regime since the beginning, collapsed in 1990, Cuba’s gross domestic product declined by a full third in just three years.
According to government records, the annual salary of the average Cuban is $300, although like all mob syndicates, shakedowns and off-the-books deals typify Cuba’s communist economy. One Cuban explained certain sectors of the economy to me as a protection racket in which the government demands a certain amount of money per month—more than he will be allowed to earn in a year—and in exchange offers him dubious benefits and a paltry percentage of the gross income. And that just describes the official relationship with the government. Unofficially, regime enforcers seek to supplement their own meager incomes by squeezing vulnerable individuals. Over the course of one weekend, I saw several Cubans shaken down by the police.
Even considering additional black market income, the majority of Cubans earn less than $1,200 per year, according to a survey by Rose Marketing. The firm explained, “Of course these income figures are relatively low in contrast to other nations, and the average Cuban still struggles to make ends meet…[but] Cubans receive free healthcare and education, as well as minimally subsidized living expenses.” It seems Rose Marketing has read a few too many Castro press releases.
I asked a handful of Cubans on the street about Cuba’s allegedly universal healthcare, for which filmmaker Michael Moore implicitly praised the Castro regime in his 2007 documentary Sicko. One Cuban I spoke with explained, “Anybody can go to the hospital, but there won’t be any medicine.” According to another, Cubans are forced to privately pay doctors on the black market to receive treatment for many illnesses.
Virtually every other good and service can be purchased off-the-books as well, although government officials can demand a cut. Private gas stations run by individuals who buy fuel at reduced cost or simply steal it from the government sell to drivers at lower prices than official vendors in Havana. Private apartments and houses called casas particulares offer higher quality lodging to tourists at a tenth the cost of government-run hotels. Since the relaxation of laws regarding private restaurants two decades ago, hundreds have sprung up throughout the city.
But Cuban leader Raul Castro’s relaxation of certain restrictions on private industry has met resistance from communist hard-liners. Marino Murillo, the government’s economic reform czar, has implemented modest policies to decentralize the economy, trim the state bureaucracy, and invite foreign investment since he was appointed in 2009. However, those reforms have come to a grinding halt, which Cuba watchers attribute primarily to questions over presidential succession and the relative power of orthodox apparatchiks. Murillo has not appeared in public for almost a year.
Sadly, Raul Castro’s much-hyped liberal reforms seem to have eluded most Cubans. When I asked a handful of Havana locals how Raul’s reign compares to that of his brother, they told me nothing has changed. To the average Cuban on the street, the situation seems as dismal today as it did over a decade ago when Fidel ran the racket. Nevertheless, certain high-level reforms are undeniable. In 2013, Castro informed Cuba’s parliament that he planned to step down as president on February 24, 2018. Communist party stalwart Miguel Diaz-Canel is expected to succeed him, marking the first time in more than forty years that a non-Castro will lead Cuba. Yet Raul’s silence on whether he will step down as chief of the Communist Party and the nation’s military raises questions about the significance of his retirement.
In 2013, Castro implemented a policy that, for the first time in five decades, allows most Cubans to leave the island—in theory. Almost 185,000 Cubans traveled overseas that year, although many of the 3,500 who returned home found themselves subject to illegal detentions, interrogations, and intimidation when they arrived. But while travel off the island is legally possible for many Cubans, it remains practically impossible for many more.
The communist regime may deny exit to any citizen deemed “necessary to the revolution.” Such irreplaceable professionals might include, among others, teachers, doctors, taxi drivers, and conveniently political dissidents. Those legally permitted to travel abroad must first obtain a passport, the cost of which has doubled to $100 every six years, plus a $20 extension fee every two years. The average Cuban must save four months’ wages to afford the expense, which means that the island remains a prison for the majority of Cubans. As the New York Sun observed, a comparable passport fee in the United States would cost $20,000 every six years with two additional $4,000 extensions.
The American tourist can feel schizophrenic in Cuba. The beauty of the island, the sweetness of the tobacco, and the pathos of the Cuban people evoke simultaneously deep pleasure and a profound hatred of Fidel Castro and the communist gangsters who have imprisoned and brutalized those people for sixty years. Money spent in Cuba, particularly in private transactions, will help the average Cuban; but the government will steal most of it. The hope of flooding the country with American dollars, people, and influence precludes the equally strong desire to punish the Castros.
Contrary to popular belief, the United States still maintains a trade embargo with Cuba. While President Obama reestablished diplomatic relations and eased travel restrictions, only Congress can repeal the embargo that has failed to liberalize the economy or effect regime change in Cuba since the Kennedy administration. The prospect of repealing that embargo in exchange for concessions from the Cuban government offers anew to an American president with moral clarity and political courage the opportunity to leverage American dollars for Cuban liberty, despite Barack Obama’s best efforts to squander it.
It took six years from President Nixon’s visit to China for that communist regime to implement even modest economic reform, which progressed from the de-collectivization of agriculture to the cultivation of foreign investment to the liberalization of industry. Despite the continued brutality of that government, the Chinese people are better off today than they were a generation ago, and the United States can exert greater influence on its trading partner than on a regime we refuse to use military force to remove.
Fidel Castro died wealthy, powerful, and naturally because despite the best intentions, efforts, and wisdom of the policy, the Cuban embargo at best failed to effect regime change and liberalization in Cuba and at worst handed the island’s slave masters a convenient excuse for the myriad failures of communism. Trade and travel have succeeded in the past at liberalizing thuggish regimes and planned economies. If past is precedent, a deal-maker in the White House could leverage the recent relaxation of travel and commerce restrictions to the benefit of both the American and Cuban people.
