The Root Causes of Cuban Poverty

The only blockade is the one imposed by Havana. Regime elites oppose competition.

 By Mary Anastasia O'Grady. Excerpts:

"Debunking the Marxist myth that sanctions impede Cuban development would be a good place to start. For decades, Cuba has blamed what it calls the U.S. “blockade” for island privation. Regime talking points have been repeated ad nauseam in U.S. media and beyond. If Mr. Biden wants to police speech, he might ask Facebook to start fact-checking these claims. (Sarcasm alert.)"

"There is no gasoline or diesel for ambulances when Cubans contract the virus because scarce resources are needed to enable regime repression. Military vehicles and secret-police cars are always ready to go. Nurturing the island’s nomenklatura also takes real money, as does caring for the children of elite kleptocrats who display their obscene wealth—like car collections, thoroughbred horses and luxurious travel—on social media."

"According to the U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council, U.S. exports to Cuba of “food products and agricultural commodities” totaled almost $28.5 million in March 2021, compared with $16 million in March 2020 and $41 million in March 2019. The total value of U.S.-authorized exports to Cuba in 2019 (pre-pandemic) was more than $257 million. In other words, the U.S. is a major supplier of food to Cuba.

Havana is sore because it doesn’t qualify for credit from the U.S. But Cuba is a proven deadbeat, having defaulted on hundreds of millions of dollars in debt to Russia, Europe, Latin America and Japan. The despots are pouting too because they can’t stick their snouts in troughs at the International Monetary Fund and World Bank.

The $1 billion reconstruction of the Port of Mariel, underwritten by Brazil, was supposed to “lure foreign investment” according to the BBC in 2014. But regime elites don’t want competition. British citizen Stephen Purvis learned that the hard way. He was enjoying success as a partner of the totalitarians until they decided his company was gaining too much power. That’s when he was thrown in prison for 18 months. Cuba’s practice of arbitrarily locking up foreign investors is one more example of how the country blockades itself.

U.S. sanctions prohibit tourism to the island because the armed forces run the entire tourism industry and use the proceeds of their businesses to maintain the dictatorship. Many Americans, though, go around the rules by entering the country from Canada or Mexico, and the rest of the world can take holidays in Cuba. “Out of the 193 members of the United Nations, Cuba is free to trade with 192,” the Cato Institute’s Marian Tupy wrote on Friday."