Why is Cuba in crisis?

Cuba is on the brink of collapse – a scenario that 13 U. S. presidents have tried to engineer with no success. Today on the show, the making of the Cuban crisis and what might come next. Guests: Eloy Viera, lawyer and journalist for El Toque Lillian Guerra, Cuban-American history professor at the University of Florida Maria De Los Angeles Torres, professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois in Chicago To access bonus episodes and listen to Throughline sponsor-free, subscribe to Throughline+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/throughline. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:23Speaker 01

  Among Cuban Americans in South Florida, expectations are high that after Venezuela and now Iran, Cuba might be next on President Trump's list for regime change.

• 0:33Speaker 02

  You know, all my life, I've been hearing about the United States and Cuba. When will the United States do it? I do believe I'll be the honor of having the honor of taking Cuba. That'd be good. That's a big honor.

• 0:47Speaker 03

  Taking Cuba.

• 0:48Speaker 02

  Taking Cuba in some form, yeah. Taking Cuba. I mean, whether I free it, take it, I think I could do anything I want with it. You want to know the truth. They're a very weakened nation.

• 0:59Rund Abdelfatah?

  For 64 years, the US has had an economic embargo on Cuba in hopes that its communist government would fall. But that hasn't happened. The current situation, though, could be different. In January, after the US capture of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, the Trump administration blocked Venezuelan oil from going to Cuba. And they made it very costly for any other country to step in to help.

• 1:28Speaker 05

  President Trump says Venezuela will no longer send support to Cuba. No oil, no money.

• 1:33Speaker 06

  And it has also promised tariffs on any country that breaks the blockade.

• 1:37Speaker 07

  Cuba is suffering its greatest economic crisis in decades, with the island experiencing blackouts, food shortages, and long gas lines. It relies heavily on Venezuelan oil, and without it, experts warn the economy could collapse, leading to widespread suffering and social unrest.

• 1:59Speaker 08

  I have aunties in Cienfuegos. I have cousins in Cienfuegos. My mother-in-law lives in Cienfuegos. And there, the situation is worse, much more worse.

• 2:12Rund Abdelfatah?

  This is Eloy Viera. He's a Cuban lawyer and journalist from Cienfuegos, Cuba, now based in Canada. He writes for El Toque, an independent news outlet that's been critical of the Cuban regime. Eloy left Cuba in 2019 after multiple detentions. Many of his friends and family are still there. We spoke to Eloy in February, before the US began partially lifting its blockade of Venezuelan oil and allowing limited humanitarian oil shipments back into Cuba.

• 2:44Speaker 08

  Life is really bad right now, really bad. Because, of course, when you don't have electricity, you don't have water. You don't have a way to cook your food. There are many people using charcoal for to cook their food. But at the same point, charcoal is also a limited resource. A big bag of charcoal right now in the informal market is like 1,500 pesos.

• 3:11Rund Abdelfatah?

  1,500 Cuban pesos equals around 62 US dollars. And we're talking about a country where that can be more than a quarter of your monthly wages.

• 3:20Speaker 08

  It's a really bad situation, and I don't think it's going to be better, at least not under the circumstances that they are living right now.

• 3:30Rund Abdelfatah?

  What his family was living through was happening all across the island nation of around 10 million people.

• 3:39Speaker 09

  Earlier this year, NPR reporter Ader Peralta went to Cuba to hear directly from the Cuban people.

• 3:45Speaker 06

  "My love, the thing is very bad," she says. Her friend stops her. She's saying too much in front of a microphone. But Maris Lacy dismisses her. Because that's the thing about the thing. The thing can be anything.

• 4:00Speaker 09

  The people Ader met talked in a kind of code so as to not appear critical of the Cuban government about la cosa or the thing.

• 4:12Speaker 06

  "The thing is our food, our sustenance, our clothes."

• 4:19Speaker 06

  "How's the thing? It's super high. It's super expensive. It's super bad."

• 4:24Rund Abdelfatah?

  In mid-March, Cuba experienced an island-wide blackout that's left millions without any power. It's the third major blackout in four months.

• 4:34Speaker 09

  How did Cuba get here? One version of the story is that the US's outside influence has made it impossible for Cuba to flourish. Not long after the 1959 Cuban Revolution, at the height of the Cold War, the United States began working to undermine the communist government there. The CIA plotted to assassinate Fidel Castro at least eight times. And 60-plus years of economic sanctions have stunted the island's potential and led to Cuban people's suffering. That's one side.

• 5:03Rund Abdelfatah?

  Another version of the story is that inside Cuba, the communist government has repressed dissent and mismanaged the economy for decades, transforming the island into an impoverished police state that's forced millions of Cubans to flee.

• 5:19Speaker 09

  To make sense of all this, we're going back to the very beginning of the Cuban Revolution to look at how both sides of this story have shaped the current crisis. I'm Ramtin Arablouei.

• 5:30Rund Abdelfatah?

  And I'm Randa Abdel Fattah. Today on the show, Cuba from the inside and out.

• 5:42Speaker 10

  This is Jamir calling from Philadelphia. I like listening to Throughline because I look at history as a record of our existence.

• 5:54Speaker 11

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• 5:58Speaker 00

  This week on the NPR Politics Podcast, the midterm elections are wrapping up and millions of people have already voted. We're taking one final check of the electoral pulse with a new NPR PBS News Marist Poll. It shows Democrats still poised to make gains, but also with some warning signs for just how many. We'll explain on the NPR Politics Podcast.

• 6:22Speaker 12

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• 6:54Rund Abdelfatah?

  Part one. The two embargoes. In January 1959, like today, Cuba was in the news.

• 7:03Speaker 14

  The revolution in Cuba has thrown out the Batista administration, and it has installed a provisional government. That was the first step. Now, the revolution must consolidate itself.

• 7:16Rund Abdelfatah?

  And all eyes were on Fidel Castro, the leader of the Cuban revolution, who had defeated Cuba's dictator, Fulgencio Batista, and ushered in a new era for the island.

• 7:27Speaker 15

  I know that who rule in Cuba now, who gives orders now in Cuba, is the public opinion, with the free press.

• 7:41Rund Abdelfatah?

  Fidel Castro promised something different: A new Cuba, ruled by the Cuban people.

• 7:47Speaker 09

  It was an optimistic time for Cuba. For many Cubans, the revolution was the first step in securing a real democracy.

• 7:58Speaker 16

  That was the dream.

• 7:59Speaker 09

  This is Lillian Guerra. She's a Cuban-American history professor at the University of Florida. Lilian was born in the US in the 1970s, but much of her family remained in Cuba.

• 8:10Speaker 16

  The revolution against Batista in the 50s and the rise of Fidel Castro, the goal and the promise that they will have this nationalist, capitalist, and democratic and socially progressive society.

• 8:25Speaker 09

  At first, Fidel Castro was very popular. The young charismatic lawyer said he wasn't a communist and was seen as a national hero. One of his first acts in power was to implement huge land reforms to break up large foreign-owned sugar plantations and redistribute that land to farmworkers.

• 8:45Speaker 16

  Some of these plantations, which were huge and had hundreds of thousands of acres of land. And the reality was that land was so concentrated in the hand of a few that the land reform only affected 3% of landowners.

• 9:02Speaker 09

  Who it did impact was US companies that had big investments in the Cuban sugar industry. They owned hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland. And according to Lillian Guerra, these US-owned plantations didn't exactly play fair.

• 9:17Speaker 16

  They operated in some instances, like states within states, where they had toll roads, they had private port facilities and all that kind of stuff. And they paid people in a company script that was only redeemable in a company store. So that is what the land reform was meant to overturn. The land reform was passed May 1959.

• 9:44Speaker 09

  Five months after the revolution.

• 9:46Speaker 16

  The government starts implementing it. This, of course, was horrifying to those US businesses that owned this land and to US investors in the sugar markets.

• 9:58Speaker 09

  But inside of Cuba, the land reform was seen as a big win.

• 10:03Rund Abdelfatah?

  The thinking was that if these laborers who had worked for foreign-owned sugar plantations owned their own land, they would be better able to participate in a free economy as consumers. Not exactly communist thinking.

• 10:17Speaker 17

  I think that might be, to an American listener who associates Fidel Castro as sort of like the poster child for communism, the idea might be surprising to a lot of people.

• 10:28Speaker 16

  Yes, and frankly, there is nothing surprising about it.

• 10:32Rund Abdelfatah?

  And that's because by the late 1950s, Castro's message of change was becoming more and more appealing to Cubans who were growing tired of the Batista dictatorship's corruption and brutality. And at the time of the revolution, Castro hadn't yet come out publicly and said he was a communist.

• 10:51Speaker 16

  Fidel does ultimately ride a wave of unconditional support for the revolution in 1959 to 1960. And he takes full advantage of that.

• 11:04Rund Abdelfatah?

  But then...

• 11:05Speaker 16

  Things begin to happen that nobody expected.

• 11:09Rund Abdelfatah?

  The Castro government started to dismantle the free press.

• 11:13Speaker 16

  Between January and May of 1960, this extremely lively, vibrant press, which included national television stations, which included dozens and dozens of radio stations, and newspapers, that all got nationalized.

• 11:32Rund Abdelfatah?

  Many people in Cuba, especially the wealthy and middle classes, were not happy with the changes Castro was enacting.

• 11:40Speaker 16

  Even in the worst moments of dictatorship prior to 1959, the press played a heroic role. There were always journalists who were willing to report on what was really happening, and they paid a very high price. And Cubans were very aware of that.

• 11:57Rund Abdelfatah?

  The dream of a more democratic, free Cuba was quickly proving to be, just that, a dream. After the revolution, hundreds of thousands of Cubans left the island, many of them bound for the US.

• 12:11Speaker 09

  And the US received fleeing Cubans with open arms because the US was anxiously watching Cuba, and it hoped by supporting the exodus of Cubans leaving the island, it would destabilize Fidel Castro's government.

• 12:26Speaker 17

  How quickly, within Cuba, did people realize everything has changed? And how quickly, outside of Cuba, did the US realize they have now an enemy in Cuba?

• 12:40Speaker 16

  Well, the Eisenhower administration, pretty much from the get-go, saw Fidel Castro and the revolutionary movement with hostile eyes.

• 12:49Speaker 09

  Many members of the Eisenhower administration were suspicious of what Castro wasn't saying out loud. It was the Cold War, and they feared he was a communist.

• 12:59Speaker 16

  The US position under Eisenhower is about containment at first.

• 13:05Speaker 16

  Tolerance at first. What nobody expected is that August of 1960, Fidel is going to come out with a week of national jubilation and nationalize all foreign-owned businesses on the island.

• 13:18Speaker 09

  Before the revolution, US companies owned or controlled 90% of Cuba's electrical grid, telephone system, and mines. And they had a large stake in sugar plantations and oil refineries. Now, all these industries belong to the Cuban government. US companies lost $1.9 billion in investment.

• 13:40Rund Abdelfatah?

  Castro defended his actions at the United Nations General Assembly. He called out the US for being an imperial force that exerted too much power on Cuba and other UN countries.

• 13:53Speaker 16

  What nobody expected is that two months later, he's going to decree the nationalization of all medium and large-scale businesses that are domestically owned.

• 14:03Speaker 09

  Meaning Castro's government wasn't just seizing foreign-owned companies, which many Cubans supported, it was also taking over Cuban-owned companies.

• 14:12Speaker 16

  By December of 1960, without ever having said, "I'm a communist," or even revealing the degree to which he has integrated Communist Party members to his state, the government is communist in all but name, and it controls 80% of the economy, 80% of the economy.

• 14:31Speaker 09

  The US was not liking what it was seeing in Cuba. And tensions between the two countries began to escalate in a heated back-and-forth. First, the CIA started training a special military force of Cuban exiles to invade the island and topple the communist government. The 1961 invasion, known as the Bay of Pigs, was a huge failure for the US. Then, Fidel Castro shot back with a speech where he--

• 14:57Speaker 16

  declares that the revolution is socialist. And so, you know, at that point, the deal is done.

• 15:06Rund Abdelfatah?

  Cuba was now a communist country, one that sat only 90 miles away from the US. And after the Bay of Pigs, as the Soviet Union solidified its support and defense of Cuba, the US decided the threat was too close. In 1962, the US ramped up the pressure again with an embargo on all trade between the US and Cuba.

• 15:30Speaker 16

  It's a disaster from day one for Cubans because so much of the food that they ate, the spare parts that were needed in factories, the clothing that they bought, you know, the products that they had become accustomed to consuming, like Coca-Cola, all of those things are going to stop. And for a time, the Cuban people, I think, believed that this might be temporary.

• 15:57Rund Abdelfatah?

  Most Cubans living inside the country still supported Castro at this point.

• 16:02Speaker 16

  So there is a willingness on the part of the Cuban people to ride out the early part of the embargo. And there also seems to be a solution, which is maybe we can manufacture these things ourselves. Maybe this is what revolution meant, that we should be able to be self-sufficient.

• 16:19Speaker 03

  My fellow citizens, let no one doubt that this is a difficult and dangerous effort on which we have set out.

• 16:29Rund Abdelfatah?

  In October 1962, the back and forth between Cuba and the US came to a head when the US learned that the Soviet Union had stationed nuclear ballistic missiles in Cuba.

• 16:42Speaker 03

  No one can foresee precisely what cost it will take or what costs or casualties will be incurred.

• 16:50Rund Abdelfatah?

  The US created a naval blockade around Cuba to stop more Soviet weapons from getting in. The situation was tense. Nuclear war felt imminent.

• 17:05Speaker 09

  In the end, the USSR and the USA struck a deal. No more nukes in Cuba, on the condition that the US doesn't invade the island.

• 17:14Rund Abdelfatah?

  The US embargo, however, continues to this day. A version of the 1962 embargo, or "bloqueo," "bloqueed," as some Cubans call it, is still in place. Its aim was to destabilize the Castro government by sowing, quote, "hardship and disenchantment" among the Cuban people.

• 17:34Speaker 09

  To stay afloat, Cuba continued to rely on the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc. The USSR was Cuba's main trade partner.

• 17:43Rund Abdelfatah?

  But in spite of attempts to build a more self-sufficient island, and even with the new influx of Soviet trade, Cuba's economy faltered, and rations became a permanent feature of life.

• 17:55Speaker 16

  There is a certain degree of crony capitalism that reasserts itself in the form of crony communism. People called it "sociolismo," "sociolismo" instead of "socialismo."

• 18:08Speaker 09

  It's a play on words. "Socio," meaning buddy or good friend in Cuban slang. So they were saying "sociolismo," meaning you're taking care of your friends, rather than true socialism.

• 18:20Speaker 16

  And there is a certain degree to which your buddy, if you're all a bunch of loyalists, you know, whoever's your buddy who controls access to the rations or the ration distribution center, will ensure that people get half the amount of dried milk they're supposed to have, so that he can sell the rest of it under the table. And that black market economy very quickly becomes a standard bearer of the communist regime.

• 18:45Speaker 09

  For some people, like this upper echelon of communists with connections, life was pretty good. But for most Cubans, life was far from easy.

• 18:54Speaker 16

  Fidel has made a disaster of the economy, and we had negative rates of growth. Fidel decides to nationalize all the remaining small businesses on the island.

• 19:07Speaker 16

  Leaving nothing to serve as a substitute. So suddenly it's a crime to, you know, hire a plumber. You have to do it through the state and the state doesn't have an agency that, you know, contracts out plumbers. You know, all of these activities, these little small businesses, even the production of many goods that had replaced imports, like there were factories that emerged because of the embargo in the 1960s that produced things like iron beds or produce those spare parts that could no longer be imported.

• 19:36Speaker 09

  And according to Lillian Guerra, the Castro government also doubled down on measures to quell potential dissent, like the

• 19:44Speaker 16

  Committees for the Defense of the Revolution as a mass organization of people who are spying on, on one another. And their role, as Fidel put it officially, was to be tababocas, which means mouth shutters. They are supposed to, if you're standing in line for a ration and you're complaining about the quality or the fact that they, they don't have half of the amount that you're due, they're supposed to come out and tell you to shut up and that you're a counterrevolutionary and a gusano, and they're supposed to take your name down. And this is very effective.

• 20:15Rund Abdelfatah?

  This turn toward authoritarian tactics was not popular with everyone in Cuba. Now it wasn't just the press that couldn't be critical of the government. It was everyone.

• 20:25Speaker 16

  From 62 to 65, there's the rise of tremendous discontent on the island, in the general population.

• 20:33Rund Abdelfatah?

  And to combat this, the Cuban government decided to invest in Cuba's youth, who they deemed as loyal, and the future of communist Cuba.

• 20:42Speaker 09

  The government expanded the school system, bringing education to peasant girls who would otherwise have been left behind. These schools were considered a revolutionary win in the effort to bring more equality to the Cuban people. But according to Lillian Guerra.

• 20:56Speaker 16

  The state has captured the attention of the youth and has, you know, increasingly told them that their parents are the way of the past, that, you know, that they're going to be the new men in socialism. And so they need to ignore, you know, what their parents might think or say. They need to leave behind the culture of Catholicism and reject foreign influence.

• 21:19Rund Abdelfatah?

  In some ways, this youthful disdain for the old guard in Cuba echoed the youth movements rocking the US and other parts of the world at the time.

• 21:28Speaker 09

  It's kind of like the vibe of Bob Dylan's "The Times Are A-Changing." "Your sons and daughters are beyond your command."

• 21:35Rund Abdelfatah?

  But Castro's government started to put some strict parameters on what being a good revolutionary Cuban youth looked like.

• 21:42Speaker 16

  The Cuban Communist state carries out a process of criminalizing behaviors that they label as ideologically diversionary. Those behaviors include listening to the Beatles. They include wearing jeans. They include being gay or being a person who tolerates gayness. They include liking abstract art. There are all of these things that are kind of considered to be politically criminal or that contaminate the collective consciousness and dilute their people's commitment to Marxist revolution.

• 22:18Speaker 09

  As the economy continued to struggle, morale in Cuba was low. In 1970, Fidel Castro tried to turn it around. He announced that the country was going to have a 10 million-ton sugar harvest, la zafra de los diez millones. And this harvest was going to jumpstart the economy and finally allow Cuba to be economically independent.

• 22:40Speaker 16

  You have doctors, you have teachers.

• 22:42Speaker 09

  Everybody who could possibly cut sugarcane was mobilized. It was supposed to show that the Cuban people could produce for themselves.

• 22:50Speaker 16

  And in the end, it fails.

• 22:51Speaker 09

  They came up short of their goal of 10 million tons. It was still the largest sugar harvest in Cuba's history, but it came at a price. In order to make this big harvest happen, the government let other parts of the economy fall apart.

• 23:10Speaker 16

  By 1971, people are so angry at what has happened at the state, at the way in which the economy has been devastated by this project, that at any one time in the year of 1971, 20% of the workforce doesn't even show up to work.

• 23:28Rund Abdelfatah?

  Some Cubans call Castro and his government's economic and social policies the "internal blockade." The US was blocking trade, but the Cuban government was taking away Cubans' economic autonomy and making them reliant on the government, all while squashing dissent. This second embargo was not just an embargo of material things, but of ideas.

• 23:52Speaker 09

  By the 1970s, hundreds of thousands of Cubans had left the island for the US. And Cuba, having failed to take off independently, became more and more entrenched with the Soviet Union.

• 24:05Rund Abdelfatah?

  Coming up, the Soviet Union falls, and the world watches to see if Cuba will be next.

• 24:15Speaker 18

  Hi, my name is Elias. I live in the UK, but I'm originally from Spain. I'm just so amazed by your work. You're listening to Throughline from NPR.

• 24:31Speaker 13

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This episode's sponsor is HubSpot, which offers the following message: What if, instead of updating your CRM, your CRM updated you? No catching up on manual edits, no more guesswork. HubSpot's self-updating CRM keeps your customer context current and helps you understand what to do next. So, marketing builds more demand, sales wins more deals, and customers keep coming back. Learn more at hubspot.com.

• 25:01Speaker 19

  Midlife brings a lot of changes. Your Turn with Alison Aubrey is a new podcast to help you navigate the twists and turns. From health and relationships to creativity and purpose, we can help steer your next chapter with Your Turn with Alison Aubrey. Find it on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 25:19Speaker 20

  This week on Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, we talk with fashion designer Daniel Vasevic about why he is in charge of renovating his parents' house.

• 25:30Speaker 21

  I don't have an architecture degree.

• 25:32Speaker 20

  Yeah.

• 25:33Speaker 21

  I'm not an interior designer, but I'm gay.

• 25:35Speaker 20

  Right, well, there you are.

• 25:36Speaker 21

  So how hard can it be?

• 25:39Speaker 20

  Don't miss our full conversation and the rest of our games. Listen to the Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me podcast in the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 25:50Speaker 22

  Part two. The Special Period.

• 25:55Speaker 09

  In 1991, the world order as it had been for decades collapsed.

• 26:00Speaker 22

  The gradual deterioration and final collapse of the Soviet Union has hit other socialist nations like the aftershocks of an earthquake. Perhaps none has been hit so hard as Cuba.

• 26:11Speaker 23

  There's this tremendous sense of crisis in Cuba now.

• 26:14Speaker 09

  After the fall of the Soviet Union, Cuba entered what its leader Fidel Castro coined "the special period in the time of peace." That term came loaded with irony for everyday Cubans because for them, this period was anything but peaceful. For decades, the Soviet Union had been sending oil, food, and machinery to Cuba, and the entire economy was subsidized by Soviet money.

• 26:40Speaker 16

  The public health sector was utterly dependent on Soviet aid. The school system was dependent on Soviet aid. Infrastructure, you couldn't pick up garbage without the oil to put in your trucks. You know, all this stuff from the Soviet Union, not only is it unavailable and unimportable, it actually ceases to be produced.

• 26:59Speaker 24

  And they lived a period of several years of dire, dire economic needs.

• 27:08Speaker 09

  This is Maria de los Ángeles Torres. Born in Cuba, she's a professor of Latin American and Latino studies at the University of Illinois in Chicago and has written extensively about the history of US-Cuba relations.

• 27:21Rund Abdelfatah?

  Cuban people experienced widespread energy and fuel shortages. The government instituted strict food rations. Hunger increased. The staple foods from the Soviet Union that people had relied on for decades disappeared. Blackouts lasted up to 20 hours a day.

• 27:40Speaker 24

  And people would be coming out and cooking together because they didn't have the fuel for each household to be able to have their own kitchens.

• 27:48Rund Abdelfatah?

  Desperation peaked in 1994, when 35,000 Cubans took to the open sea on homemade rafts, risking death to make the 90-mile journey to the US.

• 28:05Speaker 09

  The Cuban government, in response, had to change out of necessity. It had to open up the economy to more capitalist market forces as a matter of survival. It started legalizing some small private businesses, and it also encouraged the development of foreign investment and the tourism industry.

• 28:22Speaker 16

  That in particular was pretty hard to stomach.

• 28:26Rund Abdelfatah?

  This is history professor Lillian Guerra again.

• 28:29Speaker 16

  So much of the revolution's mythology, created by Fidel Castro and enforced by the Communist Party, rested on the idea that tourism was bad, that foreign investors were the bane of communism. And in fact, you get the very thing that Fidel spent the 90s and the 80s criticizing.

• 28:48Rund Abdelfatah?

  The government began to encourage foreign businesses to set up shop in Cuba and take advantage of the cheap labor Cubans provided those investors.

• 28:58Speaker 16

  And the company is paying the Cuban government, not the workers directly, more than in fact the worker will receive. Let's say that the Cuban government is receiving for every one of its workers a monthly paycheck of $500. Well, the Cuban is actually only getting 50, and the government gets to keep the rest. And so the Cuban who works in that assembly plant has to be grateful because he has more than the average Cuban, and he gets a bag of goods that nobody has, like deodorant, really nice shampoo, detergent, you know, basic products that are no longer available on the ration or in the national currency, that are manufactured abroad, imported.

• 29:40Rund Abdelfatah?

  The Cuban government needs to fill the void left behind by the collapse of Soviet aid, and it begins to turn to other countries, like Venezuela.

• 29:49Speaker 16

  So Hugo Chavez really creates a relationship with Fidel that's based on the Cuban state contracting doctors and other professionals.

• 30:01Rund Abdelfatah?

  Under Castro, Cuba had a robust education system, which allowed them to train professionals like doctors to send abroad. Venezuela wasn't the only place this so-called white coat army went. Doctors were sent to Guatemala, Brazil, Honduras, Haiti, and more.

• 30:19Speaker 09

  In exchange for doctors, Venezuela sent Cuba 100,000 barrels of oil a day. In addition to oil, Cuba also got money. Some studies estimate that leasing skilled professionals to foreign countries brought in billions of dollars a year to Cuba.

• 30:35Speaker 24

  Then the question is, what happens with that money? Okay, is it reinvested or not? There's been investments in hotels and in infrastructure around hotels.

• 30:48Speaker 09

  But Torres says the government didn't invest in other infrastructure, like the energy grid or road repairs.

• 30:54Speaker 24

  All of a sudden, there's blackouts. You cannot drive, okay, in certain streets because the potholes are huge. So there's a question of what was happening to the money that was being generated.

• 31:11Speaker 09

  An extreme economic crisis, hunger, crumbling infrastructure, a government response that goes against the communist ideals Castro preached for decades and ends up enriching the government more than the Cuban people. This is the situation Cuban people find themselves in at the turn of the century.

• 31:31Speaker 16

  You cannot escape the outrage that Cubans felt. They also were outraged by the fact that the Cuban state, whenever something would come up that was obvious, visible evidence of its own mismanagement or its own hypocrisy, they would blame the special period or they'd blame the US embargo. And so citizens had this incredible sort of, you know, memory checklist. And it was, it was one thing after the other that Cubans complained about. The number of grievances were miles, there were countless grievances.

• 32:07Speaker 09

  That spark changes outside of Cuba, too, and in Cubans' relationship to the outside world, particularly with the US. People's discontent with the government had also led many to seek new lives elsewhere. In the US, a new diaspora of Cuban-Americans started to grow and change.

• 32:27Speaker 24

  There was more of an outflow of people leaving Cuba. And that started changing the configuration of the community. The politics is a whole different ballgame. But the affective relationships that people had to their relatives was much closer. If you think about at least my wave of immigrants, the beginnings of the 1960s, we spent 20 years without seeing our relatives. Whereas people who were leaving in the 90s, they did not have that waiting period. All right?

• 33:04Speaker 09

  Family members in the US would send money back to Cuba or supplies. These relatives were playing an important role in the Cuban economy.

• 33:14Speaker 24

  Cuba was aware of the remittances and was aware of the power of how much money people could send back. So the remittances become very important during this period of time. That was a sea change of attitude, I think, here in Miami and in other places where there were Cuban exiles, because people felt that they could then really have a relationship with their relatives that didn't have to go through the government. You could support your relatives, but that didn't mean you were supporting government. And so that is another way that I think that Cuba survives during that period.

• 33:56Speaker 24

  That affective tie allows for a, if you will, a Cuba beyond borders of the political to kind of exist.

• 34:08Speaker 09

  It was a new kind of relationship that also changed how people inside Cuba felt about the people who had left.

• 34:15Speaker 24

  They saw their families as supporters. And they saw their friends who left as people who were, you know, trying to better their lives, not being traitors to the revolution. And they, they do lose confidence in their government because it's not their government who's taking care of them anymore, it's their relatives.

• 34:37Speaker 09

  Despite the discontent and the economic challenges, the communist government still survived. And as the economic storm of the special period started to clear, the government would even reverse course. It tightened down the economic controls once again, like scaling back opportunities for private businesses.

• 34:56Speaker 24

  It's almost like liberalization is a last resort. And it is only when it is like they're up against the wall that they sort of say, OK, let's do this. And as soon as it is resolved, then they go back to the old ways of doing things. In those 90s, there were debates within the government. Again, I don't think it's a monolithic government. I think there are factions in that government that have different points of views. There were those who argued for liberalization. I think that the ones who argued for repression end up winning.

• 35:36Speaker 24

  When I look at the situation today, I think that if Cuba had gone a different direction with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, they would not find themselves in the situation that they are today. I think they opted for maintaining a centralized economy and one that is very rigid and not very productive because they were afraid of political change. So they find themselves with a very unproductive economic system and one that tends to rely on other countries.

• 36:20Speaker 24

  It's almost like, I think, they have reached the cliff's end here.

• 36:26Speaker 09

  Coming up, Cuba on its way to the edge of the cliff.

• 36:34Speaker 25

  Hi. This is Christina from Houston, Texas, longtime listener, first time caller, and you're listening to Throughline from NPR. This show reminds us that history is not black and white, and we'd be wise to learn from it. Keep up the great work.

• 36:48Speaker 11

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• 38:04Rund Abdelfatah?

  Hi, Rund here. If you're listening to this episode and you feel like you've learned something about the world around you, send us some love. You can leave Throughline a review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. We really do read those reviews. They help us understand what people love about the show and what they want to hear more of. And while you're at it, make sure you follow the show, too. That helps other people find out about our show. It's one way you can help us. We really appreciate your support. It means a lot to us. So, thank you. Now, back to the show.

• 38:41Speaker 22

  Part three, the Cuban thaw.

• 38:45Speaker 26

  An announcement that Fidel Castro's opponents have been waiting for years came in the middle of the night.

• 38:51Speaker 22

  In a letter published in the Communist Party newspaper, Castro said he's no longer physically able to lead Cuba.

• 38:58Rund Abdelfatah?

  In 2008, 81-year-old Fidel Castro officially stepped down as president, handing power to his brother, Raul.

• 39:06Speaker 24

  That's not necessarily a transition. Giving Raul the reins of power is precisely symbolic of the political crisis that Cuba has lived since the revolution, and that is, it has not allowed for a renovation of political leadership.

• 39:24Rund Abdelfatah?

  This is Maria de Los Angeles Torres. She's a professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois in Chicago.

• 39:33Speaker 24

  Fidel was a central figure for many people. People who were not necessarily ideological felt a certain affinity to him, even if they were living in disaster. I think Raul does not have that kind of relationship with people, and clearly, the military personnel that has been put in charge of the various components of the government does not have that repertoire at all. And so it has made it easier for people to be more critical of the government.

• 40:12Rund Abdelfatah?

  As Raul Castro took power, just across the Atlantic Ocean, another leader stepped into office, U.S. President Barack Obama. Throughout his two terms, Obama pursued what was dubbed "the Cuban thaw," the start of a new chapter between the two countries, resuming the kind of diplomatic relations that hadn't been seen in more than 50 years. He started with relaxing travel and trade restrictions. Then he became the first U.S. president to visit Cuba since 1928, and he called on Congress repeatedly to lift the U.S. embargo on Cuba.

• 40:51Speaker 08

  I have to say that Obama was like a refreshment, like a hope for many people in Cuba.

• 41:00Rund Abdelfatah?

  Eloy Viera is a journalist at El Toque, currently living in exile in Canada. But he was born in Cuba, and he lived there during Obama's presidency.

• 41:10Speaker 08

  If we talk about information, for example, Obama was a change in that perspective because after Obama's visit, the government decided to allow Cuban people to have internet in their phones.

• 41:24Rund Abdelfatah?

  In 2015, President Obama allowed US businesses to invest in Cuba's telecommunications sector and build internet infrastructure to connect Cuba to the world. The government also opened hotspots to the public.

• 41:39Speaker 09

  But when Eloy was growing up, Cuba didn't have public internet. The island didn't get connected until 1996. And for nearly two decades after that, web access was slow and spotty. It was also expensive to get and tightly monitored by the government.

• 41:54Rund Abdelfatah?

  People still couldn't access the internet in their homes, only in public spaces regulated by the state, like cyber cafes or parks.

• 42:03Speaker 08

  One of the main things that I remember from Cuba at that point is that in a big park, in a public space, many people screaming to their phones, trying to talk with their relatives, with their friends in other parts of the world. But you have someone seated beside you, another seated next to you. So they were sharing, sometimes even intimacy.

• 42:29Rund Abdelfatah?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 42:31Speaker 08

  Using...

• 42:31Rund Abdelfatah?

  But that's where the Wi-Fi was, right?

• 42:33Speaker 08

  Exactly. But it was funny, but it also expressed that hunger of the people to get not just connected, but to feel part of the world. They were living like in a bubble for years.

• 42:47Speaker 09

  A dual internet developed in Cuba. For those who could afford it, there was access to the World Wide Web. For most Cubans, there was access to Cuba's tightly controlled and censored Intranet.

• 43:00Speaker 08

  Internet has become like a tool for many, many people in Cuba who have used their social networks as a way to create synergies between them, to create strategies between them, and to talk about the Cuban problems on the internet. And the access to internet, it changed that mentality, the way of the people in Cuba sold the rest of the world.

• 43:30Speaker 09

  But in the meantime, the thawing relations between Cuba and the US had frozen over once again.

• 43:36Speaker 16

  Everything reversed course in 2016 with the election of Trump and then the subsequent reversal of policy on the part of his administration. You know, the hardliners in Cuba were re-empowered.

• 43:48Speaker 09

  Again, this is Lillian Guerra, history professor at the University of Florida.

• 43:53Speaker 16

  They took the reins back.

• 43:56Speaker 08

  I think that the end, the closure of the Obama era, it was like a hit of reality, saying, "You have been living a fiction for these two years."

• 44:08Speaker 17

  What did that feel like? To go from having this kind of glimpse of maybe a little bit more openness, more freedom of expression, more information, to then what began to unfold in the years after 2016?

• 44:24Speaker 08

  I have to say that it was one of the main or worst frustrations of my generation.

• 44:31Speaker 09

  Travel restrictions were back. The money from US tourism and investment from US companies dried up, and the Cuban economy took a downturn.

• 44:41Speaker 08

  The regime wanted that you believe that something was possible under their control. And for my generation, this generation that started to make activism, journalism, at that moment, it was a huge frustration.

• 45:02Speaker 09

  The last decade in Cuba has been characterized by worsening economic desperation, and the pandemic didn't help. In 2021, Cubans took to the streets in a massive display of frustration and grievance with the government.

• 45:18Rund Abdelfatah?

  Cuba is one of the most tightly controlled countries in the world, which is why yesterday's demonstrations were astonishing.

• 45:25Speaker 27

  They were asking for food, medicine, and vaccines, but their loudest cries were really calls to end the communist regime, to end the dictatorship.

• 45:40Rund Abdelfatah?

  And they were met with a brutal crackdown. Police detained around 1,000 people, hundreds of whom are still imprisoned today. The conditions that fueled the 2021 protests have only worsened since then. And that brings us back to the start of this year, when a dire situation transformed into a full-blown crisis, as Cuba's oil supply from Venezuela was cut off for weeks. Cuba has been short of food and clean water, suffering from intense power blackouts, and facing its worst economic crisis in 67 years.

• 46:17Speaker 24

  I think that Cuba has found that it has really very, I would say, actually almost no options in terms of its ability to develop any kind of economic relations with countries that can help sustain the military and power in Cuba, and specifically petroleum and other goods.

• 46:43Speaker 17

  One thing that has been sort of debated or talked about a lot that I've been seeing in the coverage is how to interpret this moment, whether it's more the responsibility of the Cuban regime and its mistreatment of the Cuban people for so long, or the US embargo that is more of the cause for the current crisis.

• 47:07Speaker 16

  The either-or dynamic, it's either utterly the fault of the United States embargo, or it's the fault of the Cuban communist government. That's a very comfortable paradigm for both the Cuban government as well as its detractors.

• 47:25Speaker 24

  I think that the argument that it's only the embargo is actually a very US-centric perspective. Because the corollary to that is that if it's the embargo, then the only thing that can save Cuban people is taking away the embargo. While, obviously, the United States is a huge factor in Cuban politics and has always been, I don't think it's the only factor. I think Cubans have, in their hands, the ability to, despite the embargo, make choices about how they deal with, you know, the economy, how they organize their politics, how they trade with other countries, how they deal with their own citizens.

• 48:05Speaker 16

  The communist state relies on the total economic dependency of the population. You don't have any economic autonomy, nor do you have political or social autonomy from the state. And ostensibly, this is all for, you know, the general good. But effectively, it has been for the general impoverishment.

• 48:26Speaker 16

  Cubans are more equally poor than they are equally rich. And you have an economic elite, which is the Cuban Communist government, very top echelon, that live like kings.

• 48:39Speaker 24

  The embargo has actually created a series of cottage industries that have actually allowed the Cuban military to create lots of small and big businesses around the embargo, that they have become a factor in not wanting the embargo lifted. These are not hard-earned dollars. These are public monies. And I think that that is the difference. And that is where the critical perspective comes.

• 49:21Speaker 08

  So I don't know if the regime is going to fall. But what I'm really sure is that in 2026, something is going to happen with the regime.

• 49:35Speaker 08

  Even in this moment, when they feel or they seem being weak, they are not weak. They keep the control inside the island. They keep the narrative. Because even when the people have access to internet, they control, they filter internet. They keep repressing people who express themselves on their social networks. I think that the situation here is going to be determined by the reaction of the Cuban people. So everything is in the hands of the Cuban.

• 50:10Speaker 08

  If the regime crumbled, it's just because a lot of Cubans went out to the streets. They keep in the streets and they start a new revolution.

• 50:45Rund Abdelfatah?

  That's it for this week's show. I'm Randa Abdel Fattah.

• 50:49Speaker 09

  I'm Ramtin Arablouei, and you've been listening to Throughline from NPR.

• 50:54Rund Abdelfatah?

  This episode was produced by me.

• 50:56Speaker 09

  And me and.

• 50:57Rund Abdelfatah?

  Julie Kane.

• 50:59Speaker 21

  Anya Steinberg. Casey Minor. Christina Kim.

• 51:02Speaker 28

  Devin Kadyama.

• 51:03Rund Abdelfatah?

  Irene Noguchi. Kiana Morghadan.

• 51:06Speaker 28

  Thomas Coltrane.

• 51:08Rund Abdelfatah?

  Fact checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vogel.

• 51:12Speaker 09

  Also, thank you to Johannes Dirgiv, Dylan Kurtz, Rebecca Ferrer, Beth Donovan, and Tommy Evans.

• 51:26Speaker 13

  This episode was mixed by Jimmy Keely. Music for this episode was composed by Rantin and his band Drop Electric, which includes

• 51:34Speaker 28

  Naveed Marvi, Cho Fujiwara,

• 51:36Rund Abdelfatah?

  Anya Mizani.

• 51:39Speaker 09

  And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write us at [email protected]. And make sure you follow us on Apple, Spotify, or the NPR app. That way, you'll never miss an episode.

• 51:53Speaker 13

  Thanks for listening.

• 52:07Speaker 13

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• 52:11Speaker 11

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• 52:42Speaker 13

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