The joy and despair of Cuba
I went back to Cuba last month for the first time in nearly 5 years. It was the biggest gap in my Cuba travels since I first visited the island in 2003. It was an amazing trip — mostly spent with family, though we also did some sight-seeing because my dad came with us and it was his first trip to Cuba. I was reacquainted with the extraordinary beauty of the island — and got to visit places in the eastern Cuban countryside I’d never been to, like Gran Piedra, near Santiago.
And Segundo Frente, which takes you deep into the Santiago province.
I’m so happy my dad able to meet my mother-in-law and spend time with our Cuban family. It was also such a relief to take a break from social media and all the terrible news in the U.S. and around the world. Internet access is fairly widespread on the island, now that people can purchase data plans on their phones, but I took advantage of the relative lack of wifi to take an internet break. It always feels so good to get offline and just spend time with people face-to-face. There’s always a lot of hanging out and joking around when we’re in Cuba, and although the economic situation is quite dire for the vast majority of Cubans, they never lose their sense of humor. Everyone was in good spirits.
Whenever I spend time in Cuba I think deeply about how fucked up the way we raise our kids here in the U.S. is. Apart from school and expensive, overly structured extracurricular activities, our kids don’t get to spend time just hanging out with each other. Yet in Santiago, my 11-year-old was out in the street hanging out with other kid for 12 hours a day. My mother-in-law lives on a dead end street so it’s safe for even younger kids to play outside without adult supervision. Here at home, once Julian gets inside the house he’s mostly on the screen, not interacting with his peers. And this is how American kids grow up now. Everything is supervised, adults are always hovering close by, and most are irrationally worried about their kids’ safety, not allowing kids to go to the park or walk places by themselves.
As for my 5-year-old, in Cuba there are always plenty of relatives and other adults around to watch them or play with them. She really loved all the attention she got from all her tíos y primos — which is a vast contrast to when we’re at home, and she’s always pleading for us to play with her. Even if you have to ask someone to watch your younger child, it’s never a big deal. Raising kids in Cuba really is like having a village — it’s nothing like the isolating experience of parenting here in the U.S., where parents often feel like we have no support or that it’s a huge imposition to ask a friend or relative to babysit. I long to raise my kids in a more community-minded society that gives kids more autonomy and doesn’t expect parents to be constantly engaged with our kids or lay guilt trips on us for not doing that. Cuba is a more holistic society that recognizes not only the need for interdependence for survival, but the benefits of it as well. I’m sorry to have to say it, but Americans as a population group (and obv there are exceptions) live in a selfish, anti-social society and it’s no wonder everyone is so lonely, depressed and anxious.
I also feel very lucky that I really like spending time with my in-laws — I mean, I can crack jokes with my 81-year-old mother-in-law, who’s a real character. New Year’s Eve is a big family event in Cuba, with a big feast, plenty of drinking, music/dancing and playing dominos. I can’t remember the last time I rang in the New Year with such a feeling of warmth, family and community.
I’ve been fantasizing about moving abroad since the pandemic began — and each mass shooting makes me want to do it even more. But I always felt like Cuba wasn’t really an option for long-term residence because of the many economic problems, the lack of access to many commodities most Americans can’t live without, the crumbling infrastructure and awful bureaucracy. But on this trip I really started questioning that assumption, especially because I feel such despair at the state of the U.S. right now. It’s true that I wouldn’t be able to find all the food items I like having access to, but I would get used to it. The only thing that really gives me pause is the climate, the many months of staggering heat and humidity in Cuba. I’m not sure I could handle living there in the middle of the year. The last time I was there in the summer, it was pretty miserable — and of course the heat is only getting worse as climate change accelerates. As with most places, in Cuba if you have enough money, you can solve most of your problems, and you can get air-conditioning in your home. But blackouts are frequent as well and Cuba is in the middle of a longterm energy crisis.
Despite what a wonderful trip we had, I never lost sight of the fact that most Cubans are suffering badly right now. Inflation is off the charts and the national healthcare system — held up for so long as the crowning jewel of the Cuban Revolution — has imploded. People with diabetes, hypertension and a host of other chronic conditions no longer have regular access to their medications. Many clinics and hospitals lack the most basic of supplies, like syringes and clean bed sheets for patients.
Americans think we have it bad with inflation, but really we have no idea what truly crippling inflation is. In 2021 the government (after many years of putting it off) finally decided to unify Cuba’s dual currencies — since the 1990s Cuba had been operating as a dual currency economy, theoretically one currency for Cubans and the other for tourists, though in practice it was a lot messier. Since currency unification, inflation has skyrocketed. It was the absolute worst time for the government to do this, and to devalue the Cuban peso (which would inevitably happen with currency unification), as the pandemic meant that very few tourist dollars were coming in. Tourism has not rebounded yet either — especially in Santiago, we saw very few foreigners.
Before 2021, the USD was equal to about 25 Cuban pesos. Now $1 = 250 Cuban pesos. Government salaries were raised substantially in preparation for currency unification, but average salaries are now around 4000 pesos/month, the equivalent of $16. At the same time, food prices are now on par with the prices we see in American grocery stores — imagine how far $16 would go for even your weekly grocery bill. A pound of pork used to cost 30 pesos — now it’s 300 pesos. As for the famed food ration system, where the government provided basic food stuffs to citizens at a heavily subsidized price, there are huge shortages. So we’re not talking about 20–30% inflation like we’ve seen in the U.S. In Cuba inflation is roughly 1000%.
The single biggest illustration for me of how corrupt and unresponsive to its citizens the Cuban regime has become in recent years is the fact that it has been making historic investments in tourism infrastructure on the island, all while allowing the healthcare and educational systems to implode. Tourism is not rebounding quickly since the pandemic, and yet the government has built and continues to build huge, fancy hotels all around the island whose rooms sit mainly empty. We walked by the new highest building on the island, a skyscraper hotel called Torre K that has now eclipsed the famed Habana Libre.
In the meantime, all throughout Havana, there are literal mountains of garbage piling up. Supposedly the government doesn’t pick up the garbage more often because of the chronic gasoline/petroleum shortages — and yet it privileges the building of these massive hotels for tourists that don’t seem to be coming. Apparently there are dozens of similar hotels still in the works/being built — all while Cubans suffer through possibly the worst economic crisis since the triumph of the Revolution in 1959. Many would consider the Special Period crisis of the early-to-mid 1990s to be the worst, but I spoke to some who thought this one was worse, because economic inequality in Cuba has become such a huge factor since the Special Period. The Special Period hit ALL Cubans hard, but since then there have been three decades of increasing wealth inequality.
It’s widely known that government officials aren’t suffering like regular Cubans are — they and their children are the ones who own many of the new small businesses (called MIPYMEs) that have exploded across the island to fill the demand for food, clothing, and other consumer products that the government no longer provides to citizens. I’ve written before about the sort of Wild West-style capitalism that began to develop on the island with the introduction of private enterprise in the 1990s. Now, the wealth gap is exponentially worse, as the government provides less and less of a safety net for Cubans and the price of everything is sky high. Cubans in the diaspora have been propping up the country’s economy for decades, and that has only gotten more pronounced. Those who don’t have any family abroad or access to capital to start small businesses are going hungry and likely many are dying because of their lack of access to medicine and healthcare.
Nationalist and socialist propaganda is still fully on display on signs across the island, but what is going on in Cuba today makes a mockery of the ideals upon which the Cuban Revolution was founded — sovereignty, equality, self-determination, national pride, universal healthcare/nutrition/education. The propaganda has never rung so hollow for Cubans — and I have never seen them express such despair and hopelessness.
In recent months I’ve thought about some parallels between the situations in Cuba and in Palestine, in that I believe citizens in both countries are caught between two evils. Although I am far from an expert on the subject, it seems to me Palestinians are sandwiched between the imperialist designs of Israel, whose military campaign has gone far beyond “revenge” and into the realm of ethnic cleansing (read this Michelle Goldberg column), and Hamas — a terrorist organization that while in power, has done very little to ease Gazans’ daily suffering and that was willing to sacrifice thousands of lives to start a war with Israel (because you can’t convince me Hamas didn’t know Israel would respond with disproportionate destruction).
Similarly, Cubans have always been pawns in the ideological war between the U.S. and Cuban governments. The embargo has never been effective in promoting regime change in Cuba — it has only created suffering for Cubans, and in fact it has strengthened the regime, by providing the Castros and now Miguel Díaz-Canel with a convenient scapegoat for all of the island’s problems. If the U.S. lifted the embargo, this excuse would no longer exist, and the incompetence and corruption of the Cuban government would be laid bare for all to see. Cubans are beyond tired of the embargo excuse — and no one except the most dogmatic leftists (primarily those who aren’t Cuban and who have no idea what daily life is like on the island) believes the propaganda anymore. They blame an authoritarian government that represses their freedom of expression, can’t even provide basic nutrition and healthcare to the population anymore, and that invests far more in tourism infrastructure than the famed Cuban healthcare and education systems.
In short, the Cuban government has lost all moral authority. And that’s why over 400,000 Cubans have left the island in the past two years, most of whom are relatively young and see no future for themselves and their families on the island. In fact, Cubans have been one of the largest groups seeking asylum at the southern border in recent years — and unlike in the past, they no longer get special treatment and an automatic green card.
I don’t know what Cuba’s political future holds. Hell, I don’t even know what the U.S.’s political future holds — if Trump gets reelected, nothing we take for granted about our political system is safe. I just know that even amidst a vast economic crisis and widespread despair and disgust with the country’s leadership, Cubans continue to be the funniest and most loving, generous, musical, family- and community-minded, resourceful and talented people on this earth. They deserve so much better.
