Life inside the bursting Cuban bubble

The economy is collapsing and anyone without US dollars is unable to buy basic goods. For thousands, the only option is to flee abroad

Lillian Perlmutter 28 March 2024 • 2:14pm

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Cuba, Caribbean

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A Cuban man pushes a wheelbarrow of waste on a street in Havana

The quality of daily life has deteriorated for many Cubans Credit: YAMIL LAGE/AFP

Yaquelin has thousands of US dollars hidden in a box in her house.

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 told The Telegraph 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 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 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 that does not have family living abroad who could fill a card was then forced to buy a significant portion of their food and basic household supplies from neighbours who had an MLC 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 wider economic malaise not seen on the island since the revolution.

The crisis has become so acute it threatens the very future of Cuba, 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, 450 miles away from Havana, swelled into 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 of the government was a simple one, to have access to food, and to be able to turn on their stoves to cook it.

Elizabeth Leon, 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 during recent 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 Diaz-Canel, the Cuban president, claimed the protesters were hired and trained by the United States government, an allegation the US embassy refuted.

Cubans in Miami protest against the deteriorating situation at home

Cubans in Miami protest against the deteriorating situation at home

The protests faded, but for Elizabeth, and for many others on the island, they summoned memories of a different day, two and a half years ago.

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".

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They overturned police cars in Havana and set them on fire, engaged in stick and rock fights with state police that left numerous participants injured and one dead, and threw fruit at Mr 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 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 of those arrested claimed they were peaceful protesters and bystanders, but were sentenced to decades in prison. Two of Leon's sons, both around 30 years old, threw stones in their Havana neighbourhood that day, and now will not watch their children grow up.

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 autumn 2021 and throughout 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.

Elderly people queue to buy bread at a bakery in Havana amid a shortage of food

Elderly people queue to buy bread at a bakery in Havana amid a shortage of food Credit: YAMIL LAGE/AFP

Amelia Calzadilla, a mother of three from Havana who became an activist, said criticising the government in a public setting such as a protest was a brave act in 2021, but would be multiple times braver now in the aftermath, now that she and many other activists have watched their lives unravel.

In 2022, Ms Calzadilla made a video asking the government to run a gas line near her home, a spur-of-the-moment decision that transformed her life after it went viral. A year and a half later, she fled to Spain with her family. "We had to leave - they threatened us with jail time," she said.

Since 2021, waves of protests have continued in Cuba, but after the warning set by the aftermath of July 11, 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.

For thousands to take to the streets again, the quality of daily life must have deteriorated from bad to dire, because, as Ms Calzadilla said, only anger supersedes fear. "Once again, they ate their fear", Yoani Sanchez, a prominent Cuban writer and activist, wrote about Sunday's events.

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.

Miguel Diaz-Canel, Cuba's president

Miguel Diaz-Canel, Cuba's president, claims protesters were hired and trained by the United States government Credit: Lucanus Ollivierre/AP

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 was left unable to procure adequate oil and food to satiate the needs of the people.

"There are shortages of every type," Ms Calzadilla, who used to work in the Cuban ministry of tourism, said. "But the most affected sectors are public health, which has deteriorated, both in the availability of medicines and care and the conditions of the hospitals, and the agricultural sector, which has been devastated."

"We're now in a situation where people are worried about getting enough calories," Mr Isacson said.

The primary reason Cuba's economic woes have outlasted those of other tourism-dependent, Caribbean nations is due to the embargo imposed by the United States.

The embargo was put in place 60 years ago with the intention of keeping the Cuban economy, an experiment in Marxist, central planning, on its knees. The hope was that Cubans would grow so listless and hungry they would overthrow their government and install a US-friendly regime within a few years.

Now, many decades later, a small coalition of American politicians have begun to publicly question whether the embargo holds any benefit to the Cuban people or the interests of the United States. The embargo forbids any company, whether US-based or foreign, from operating both in the United States and in Cuba. Because the United States is a more attractive market for the vast majority of international corporations, Cuba is left isolated from the rest of the world.

For most legislators, though, Mr Isacson said US sanctions were not acknowledged to the same degree as the Cuban government's own failures in economic structuring. "It's a question of weighing variables — like how much worse did [the embargo] make it?"

The Cuban currency has lost value at a rapid slump

The Cuban currency has lost value at a rapid slump Credit: Alexandre Meneghini/REUTERS

"The shortages have created all types of wars, and in the end the economic conditions are objective conditions that shape the people's subjective opinion," Ms Calzadilla said. "We're living through a Great Depression."

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 in Cuba remained stagnant. 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.

Mr Isacson, who tracks migration numbers out of Cuba and the rest of Latin America, said he expected there to be another wave within next few months. "It's going to be a really bad year in the Caribbean," he said.

Yaquelin, from her home in Matanzas, 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 in bewilderment.

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."