Cuba weathers Venezuela’s storm, but future uncertain
Island nation suffering shortages, but not so hard as post-Soviet era.
HAVANA — Refineries have gone da rk . Gas r a t i o ns have b e e n slashed for hundreds of thousands of state workers. Construction materials are nearly impossible to find.
But Cuba’s hotels and restaurants are packed, major U.S. airlines are adding flights, and government stores are full of frozen American chicken and U.S.-made candy. So far, Cuba is weathering the storm as Venezuela’s economy craters and protesters fill its streets to denounce Cuba’s greatest socialist ally.
A much-feared return to Cuba’s post-Soviet “Special Period” of food shortages and blackouts has yet to materialize as energy conservation and a boom in tourism and overseas remittances cushion the blow of a roughly 50 percent cut in Venezuelan oil aid worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Interminable bus lines and long hunts for products such as milk, paint and cement seem manageable by comparison with the hunger and hardship of the early 1990s that followed the drastic loss of Soviet bloc aid and subsidies that had propped up Cuba’s economy for decades.
The boom set off by the re-establishment of diplomatic relations with the United States in 2015 shows no signs of slacking: About 285,000 American tour- ists visited in 2016, up 76 percent from 2015, and the Cuban government says U.S. visitors increased 125 percent in January. The number of visitors from all countries topped a record 4 million last year and appears on track to top that in 2017.
“So far we aren’t living in the Special Period again and I don’t think we will be,” said Ramon Santana, a 52-year-old bicycle taxi driver. “Before, we depended on a single country but now we’re trading with many. Before, the Soviet Union fell and everyone thought we would die. But we didn’t die. We’re still here.”
Still, Cubans are nervously watching Venezuela for signs of a deeper cut in oil shipments, which are paid for with the services of Cuban state doctors on “missions” in poor Venezuelan neighborhoods. So far, the Cuban government has funneled nearly all the cuts into the state sector, cutting air conditioning and summer work hours at government offices and, most recently, eliminating the supply of higher-octane “special” gasoline for state employees.
High-ranking Cuban public officials often get both government cars and a monthly gasoline ration; their pay of $30 to $40 a month makes it impossible otherwise to afford gas that costs more than $4 a gallon.
As in virtually every aspect of the Cuban economy, special gas cards provided to state employees to buy the fuel fed a thriving black market. Throughout the day, st ate offic ials c an be seen filling the tanks of their government car, then popping the pump nozzle into a used 2-liter soft drink bottle and filling it with gas to be sold at a discount to other drivers.