Cubans leave in droves as communist dream implodes
‘After lunch, the kids ask for more, and we have to tell them there isn’t any more to give’
YAQUELIN has thousands of US dollars hidden in a box in her house deep in communist Cuba.
One day soon, she will pack them with whatever else she can carry and join the exodus.
“We don’t know when we’re going, but we’re ready,” she said from her home in the city of Matanzas, 50 miles from Havana.
Yaquelin, a government worker, will travel with her husband, but will leave behind her ageing mother and two brothers, without any idea of when she’ll see them again.
An estimated 3 per cent of Cuba’s population is leaving every year to escape blackouts and chronic food and medicine shortages that have triggered rare public protests in recent weeks.
That Yaquelin has so many dollars – in a country still under US embargo – to make the journey is not unusual.
Cubans like her have been forced to import US currency to get by under a new hierarchical system that has undermined the very principles of socialism.
In 2020, unable to trade in the manner most countries do, and the currency losing value in a rapid slump, the government needed to find a way to collect as many dollars and euros as they could, so they began requiring a special card to shop at supermarkets.
These “MLC” cards can only be filled with foreign money. The majority of the population does not have family living abroad who can charge a card so they are forced to buy much of their food and basic household supplies from neighbours who have one. It has created a two-tier system in what was intended to be a classless society.
The desperate need for dollars is a symptom of a wider economic malaise not seen since the revolution.
The crisis has become so acute that it threatens the very future of Cuba as a communist dictatorship, leading some to speculate whether the country is on the brink of collapse.
Earlier this month, thousands of people in eastern Cuba flooded the streets in a rare public protest.
Though internet connection across the island was promptly cut off for much of the afternoon and evening, several videos slipped through on to social media of hundreds of grainy figures in motion, shouting in unison, “comida y corriente”, food and electricity. Their demand was simple: to have access to food, and to be able to turn on their stoves to cook it.
Elizabeth León, a grandmother and seamstress who has participated in several protests since 2021, said shortages of food, medicine and electricity form the core of Cubans’ despair. “We’re eating rice, beans and hot dogs,” she said. “After lunch, the kids ask for more, and we have to tell them there isn’t any more to give.”
The assembly in the streets lasted into the night, when people emerged banging pots and pans in unison, a tradition on the island in recent years during electricity blackouts – a loud, rhythmic, usually futile plea to turn the lights back on. The protests were not planned, but a moment of spontaneous, collective anger – thousands of exasperated responses to a blackout that lasted over a day.
On national television on Monday, Miguel Díaz-canel, the Cuban president, claimed the protesters were hired and trained by the US government, an allegation the American embassy refuted.
Adam Isacson, director of defence oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America, said government repression in the wake of the July 2021 protests probably contributed to a marked increase in people fleeing the island in autumn 2021 and through 2022, and after this week’s protests, he expects a similar trend. “If you’re really unhappy about your economic situation and you feel like there’s no hope, and you’ll be imprisoned if you act up, leaving the country is going to be your escape,” he said.
Since 2021, waves of protests have continued, but recent demonstrations have been small, lower-energy affairs, limited to one street corner, highway or park, and often led by groups of mothers with young children.
Cuba’s recent economic collapse was in large part a result of the pandemic. In the 2010s, the government invested all it could in tourism while allowing citizens limited opportunities to open private businesses, many of which were tourist-facing.
Since 2020, tourism has peaked at just two thirds of the government’s original predictions. Foreign visitors face the same shortages as residents, with some spending hours searching for petrol for rental cars.
Tobacco and sugarcane, Cuba’s other primary industries, have struggled as well, as climate change and threatens weather norms in the
Caribbean. Its investments failing, the government has been left unable to procure adequate oil and food.
“We’re now in a situation where people are worried about getting enough calories,” Isacson said.
The primary reason the economic woes have outlasted those of other tourism-dependent Caribbean nations is the embargo imposed by the US.
It was instated 60 years ago with the intention of keeping the Cuban economy, an experiment in Marxist central planning, on its knees. The hope was that the people would grow so listless and hungry, they would overthrow their government and install a Us-friendly regime.
Now, decades later, a small coalition of American politicians is questioning publicly whether the embargo holds any benefit to the Cuban people or US interests. It forbids any company, American or foreign, from operating both in the US and in Cuba. Because America is a more attractive market for most international corporations, Cuba is left isolated from the world.
In four years, in street trades, the value of the Cuban peso fell from 25 pesos to the dollar to over 300 pesos to the dollar, while the average salary remained stagnant. Seeing no future on the island, over half a million Cubans have migrated to the US over the past three years, most of them flying to Nicaragua or Panama and trekking up to the Us-mexico border, where they turn themselves in to US officials and submit a plea for asylum.
Yaquelin is leaving because the financial arithmetic of daily life no longer makes sense.
“There’s so much necessity, they’re asking for 300 pesos [a tenth of an average monthly salary] for a bag of rice. Even the MLC stores are completely empty now,” she said.
When asked how she’s surviving, she laughs. “You just have to put things together. You have to make things work in any way that you can.”