Exodus grows as bubble bursts
Yaquelin has thousands of United States dollars hidden in a box in her house 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 says from her home in the city of Matanzas, 80km from the capital Havana.
Yaquelin, a government worker, will travel with her husband, but will leave behind her ageing mother and two brothers, without any idea when she’ll see them again.
An estimated 3% 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 a US embargo – to make the journey is not unusual. Cubans such as 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 its currency losing value at a rapid slump, the Cuban government needed to find a way to collect as many dollars and euros as it could, so it began requiring a special card to shop at supermarkets.
These “MLC” cards can only be filled with foreign money. The majority of the population who do not have family living abroad who could fill a card were then forced to buy a significant portion of their food and basic household supplies from neighbours who had a card, a policy that created a two-tier system in what was originally intended to be a classless society.
The desperate need for dollars is a symptom of a wider economic malaise not seen on the island since the revolution of the 1950s. The crisis has become so acute that it threatens the very future of Cuba as a communist dictatorship, leading to some speculating whether the country is on the brink of collapse.
Earlier this month, thousands of people in eastern Cuba, including in the country’s second-largest city, Santiago de Cuba, poured into the streets in a rare public protest. Though internet connections across the island were promptly cut off, several videos slipped through on to social media of hundreds of grainy figures in motion, shouting in unison, “Comida y corriente!” – food and electricity.
Elizabeth Leon, a grandmother and seamstress who has participated in several protests since 2021, said shortages of food, medicine and electricity formed 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.”
On July 11, 2021, tens of thousands of people participated in an hours-long uproarious display of rebellion that most would have thought inconceivable in years past. Protesters in dozens of cities and towns across the island demanded access to food and electricity, but some went so far as to chant “Down with the dictatorship”. They overturned police cars in Havana and set them on fire, engaged in fights with state police that left numerous participants injured and one dead, and threw fruit at Diaz-Canel when he walked the streets of a Havana neighbourhood in an attempt to calm his citizens’ minds.
In the weeks following that day, which many describe as a sort of dream, thousands of people, most of them young men from poor neighbourhoods in Havana and other large cities, were arrested and charged with sedition. Many were sentenced to decades in prison.
Adam Isacson, director of defence oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America, said government repression in the wake of the July 2021 protests was likely to have contributed to a marked increase in people fleeing the island in late 2021 and throughout 2022, and after the latest protests, he expected a similar trend.
Recent protests 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 Covid-19 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 to the island has peaked at just two-thirds of the government’s original predictions. Tourists on the island now face the same shortages as residents, with some spending hours searching for petrol for rental cars.
Tobacco and sugar cane, Cuba’s other primary industries, have struggled as well, as climate change and natural disasters threaten weather norms in the Caribbean. Its investments failing, the Cuban government has been left unable to procure adequate oil and food to satiate the needs of the people.
Seeing no future on the island, over half a million Cubans have decided to abandon ship and migrate 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.
Isacson, who tracks migration numbers out of Cuba and the rest of Latin America, said he expected another wave within the next few months.