Cuba's Uncertain Future

By Danny Valdes

As I came to political consciousness in the late 1960s and the 1970s, Cuba was a bright star in my political imagination, proof that socialism was not only possible, but could actually solve fundamental problems of a more expansive view of human rights. The Cuban people freed themselves from the colonial yoke of the United States and determined for themselves what their path forward would be.

Cuba remains in my heart. I want the Cuban people to succeed. I need them to succeed. They have fought long and hard against overwhelming odds, in particular, the 60-year-old illegal U.S. embargo (which the government said has cost the Cuban people $148 billion over the 60 years) and repeated CIA interventions. Imagine what Cuba could have done with those billions of dollars.

But I am deeply worried. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the socialist bloc and the disappearance of that essential economic assistance, Cuba’s economy has collapsed to the point that the government has requested emergency shipments from the World Health Organization of powdered milk for children under the age of seven. What the Cuban people were able to create with the aid of the socialist bloc is now in danger of falling apart under the pressure of a decidedly unfriendly world capitalist system, which would like nothing more than to return Cuba to its former role as a plaything for organized crime and international capital.

How does a poor socialist country maintain its right to self-determination if it has to play by the rules of international capitalism, which admits of neither socialism nor the right to self-determination? Would the U.S. end its embargo if Cuba agrees to ask the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank for usurious loans, thus becoming just another country of the Global South in permanent debt? The Cuban government is experimenting with certain kinds of private enterprise, but how much is too much? (In this interview last October, Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel gives the government’s perspective on the economic crisis and the way forward.)

The U.S. embargo is a dead weight around the neck of the Cuban people, and the U.S. government spends millions of dollars a year trying to foment an uprising against the Cuban government. But those two facts alone don’t explain the rising dissatisfaction, especially among young Cubans, who only know this current period of economic scarcity. I am concerned about the government’s harsh response to the public demonstrations on July 11, 2021, and I have listened to pro-socialist Cubans on the island and others who point to increasing antidemocratic tendencies by the government. I am also concerned about reports (e.g., here and here) that the Cuban military is deeply involved in the island’s economy.

This is all by way of introduction to this essay by Danny Valdez, a Cuban-American member of the Democratic Socialists of America, who participated in a tour of Cuba last October. We are reprinting his essay from The Indypendent. It is thoughtful, personal, and insightful. — Danny Spector

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As a first-generation Cuban American who grew up in Miami, Cuba was a place I had long wanted to see with my own eyes, a place that had taken on a mystical quality, shrouded in the fog of immigrant stories, at once a paradise and a prison.

But I didn’t quite know how to feel when I saw the email that I had been accepted to participate in a Democratic Socialists of America delegation to Cuba that took place in October. I knew this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to visit “mi patria,” but I also had to wrestle with the immense weight of my family’s history of grief and grievance around the island and its government. 

My parents were not thrilled about me traveling there, especially with a group of socialist organizers. But I asked them to write out what they remembered about Cuba and the circumstances of their leaving; they sent pages and pages of writing, and I was so thankful. I learned new parts of their stories and about the complexity of their feelings around the subject. 

The victory of the Cuban Revolution came with its price — as do all major political upheavals and revolutions. In the case of my family, it came with the price of my paternal grandfather being jailed for six years by the nascent revolutionary government. It came with the price of my paternal grandmother having to flee the island with her husband in jail and three kids in tow, not knowing if she would ever see him again. On my mother’s side, it came with the price of my grandmother waiting in long lines for food and not knowing whether there would be enough to feed my mother consistently. For my family and many hundreds of thousands of others, the reality of the revolution did not live up to its promises.

I have long since fallen out of step with my family’s views of Cuba. Still, while it is certainly true that the reactionary politics of first-wave Cuban immigrants like my grandmother are fueled by class grievance, there is also real, raw generational trauma there. I did not directly experience having to leave the only place I knew, the only language I knew, my friends, my family, my school, my community, but it is a trauma I nonetheless inherited. It was in the air as thick as the Miami humidity — in stories on the Spanish language news, in conversations overheard at the grocery store, in the old photos taped onto my grandmother’s living room walls. 

Above everything else, this trip recommitted me to the need to end the decades-long U.S. blockade on Cuba. This is a policy that causes nothing but desperation and hardship on the island. I saw first-hand its many effects, beyond even what government officials would describe to us. Life in Cuba is difficult, and many times more so since Trump reinvigorated the embargo and the worldwide economic turmoil of the pandemic wreaked havoc on an already-fragile economy. What I also saw in Cuba was a vibrant culture of solidarity, a people of incredible warmth and resilience, a government that was trying and failing in significant ways to cope with modern realities, and yet a government that was trying.

I was left in awe of how much Cuba manages to do with so little, and how little we in the United States manage to do with so much. It is a place full of contradictions — great hope and great heartbreak, wrapped up and intertwined.

Meeting With the President

We were told to leave our phones on the bus as we pulled up to el Palacio de la Revolución, Cuba’s rough equivalent to the White House. The building stands proudly at the end of the Plaza de Revolución, alongside the famous ministerial buildings with the faces of Cuba’s revolutionary heroes emblazoned on their facades. After the revolution, the Plaza became the place where hundreds of thousands of Cubans from around the country would often gather to hear Fidel Castro give notoriously-long speeches where he would lay out his plans for the country. Since Fidel’s passing and his brother Raul’s retirement, it has been void of its once vibrant rallies and speeches. 

We entered the Palacio de la Revolución and went through a metal detector, then up a short set of stairs to a place known as el Salón de los Helechos, the Hall of Ferns. The walls and doors — seemingly every vertical surface — were covered in various subspecies of ferns and mosses. Stout palms and bushes grew from inlaid garden beds. It was later explained to us that the plants are all the kinds that grow in Cuba’s Sierra Maestra, the mountain range on ­Cuba’s eastern end where Fidel Castro and his rag-tag group of revolutionaries landed in 1956 to kick off the armed struggle that would see Castro become the island’s president, prime minister, commander-in-chief, secretary general and first secretary of the country’s only political party over the course of his nearly 50 years in power. Cuba’s current president, the man who greeted us in the same halls Fidel once walked, is a very different man. 

His name is Miguel Díaz-Canel. He is tall and built, with slicked-back white hair and (notably in this context) a clean-shaven face. He wore a suit, not the iconic green military fatigues of the Castros. He spoke in the quiet, confident tone of a bureaucrat. This is a man who is symbolic of a new era for Cuba and also a man trying to follow in the footsteps of a larger-than-life figure who was the glue holding the country’s politics together — an impossible balance to strike. The most prominent poster we saw of Díaz-Canel featured his face placed in a line with Fidel and Raul Castro, with big red letters across the bottom that spelled “Somos continuidad,” or “we are continuity.” 

President Díaz-Canel spent just over two hours with us. A few members of our delegation gave prepared statements about our socialist solidarity with Cuba and about how honored we were to be invited to have this conversation. I have to stress it was a big accomplishment for our delegation that this meeting took place. It was a sign that the Cuban government takes our organization seriously and sees us as potential partners in the work of ending the U.S. blockade. 

Díaz-Canel began his remarks in a surprising way: “Cuba is not perfect.” He described his government as trying to do something for which there is no guidebook: constructing a socialist state while under the weight of an economic blockade. Cuba is in a near-unprecedented economic crisis which it is still struggling to recover from, a crisis that has caused nearly half a million Cubans to leave the island in the last few years. This crisis fell on Díaz-Canel in 2019, the year he became socialist Cuba’s first leader that does not have the last name Castro.

That same year Donald Trump announced he was reimposing a slew of sanctions and restrictions that had been loosened under the Obama administration. In fact, over the course of his presidency, Trump would not only “cancel” any and all “relaxing” of sanctions that had occurred under Obama, but he would go on to impose hundreds of new sanctions and restrictions on Cuba that targeted everything from travel to remittances, to medical cooperation, to even affecting Cuba’s ability to do business with international banks and businesses. And then, the coup de grâce — just days before Trump’s term ended in 2021, he added Cuba back to the State Department’s “State Sponsors of Terrorism” list, which stipulates additional limitations on finances and goods.

This reinvigorated blockade has an undeniable, visible effect on Cuba and its people. We saw it in long lines for fuel, in cargo ships anchored offshore waiting for financial transactions to clear the legal maze of sanction law, and in more acute circumstances, like the severe restrictions faced by ­Cuba’s medical system. According to the UN, “from 1 March 2022 to 28 February 2023, the blockade cost Cuba an estimated $4.87 billion in losses, an amount that comes to $133 million dollars a day.”

Díaz-Canel said to us, “No other country has to operate under such conditions. Vietnam and China are not under blockade, and are able to develop their approach to socialism.” The blockade has indeed created a situation unique to Cuba in both the way it has worked to strangle the Cuban economy but also in the way it has shaped Cuba by isolating it from foreign capital. Would Cuba be as committed to its vision of socialism had American capital been allowed to wield its influence and create its oligarchs on the island? It’s a double-edged question to ponder. We have the example of China to see what a hyper-capitalized “communism” looks like. What then, is socialism with Cuban characteristics?

Socialism in Cuba lacks the consumerist flair of China. It is more down to earth, resourceful and neighborly. These properties define it both because of and in despite of the material conditions created by the embargo. In a society where resources are made scarce, shared responsibility and neighborly cooperation become not just an ideal but a necessity. The embargo has forged and reinforced an ethos of shared reliance that is an essential part of the Cuban socialist identity. 

At an elementary school we visited, I noticed a focus on learning about community, being good neighbors, revolutionary solidarity and a commitment to doing community service work — the dreaded collectivism of communism.

If the embargo comes to an end, socialism in Cuba is going to necessarily be different than it is today. By the same token, if the embargo continues to pummel the economy and create misery on the island, it is entirely possible that Cuba will succumb to reactionary pressure and the socialist experiment will be over. Many people who visit Cuba remark that it feels like a place stuck in time, but it is at an unprecedented rupture point.

This fundamental fact is the reason that the ­Cuban government is desperate to create a connection between Díaz-Canel and the Castros. If the socialist project is to successfully navigate this rupture, the Cuban government needs legitimacy first and foremost. 

I believe that President Díaz-Canel and his government understand that the Cuba of the last 65 years is dead. Their work toward ending the embargo, bringing foreign investment capital to the island and growing Cuba’s fledgling private sector are all signs of this. Díaz-Canel and several of his colleagues stressed time and time again that Cuba must adapt. In his speech, he laid out the goals of his government: control inflation, support the most economically-vulnerable, engage in neighborhood transformation and consultation, develop scientific pursuits that can be freely shared with the public, and implement the newly-passed family code, which legalized same-sex marriage and supports equal rights within families. He said, “Our goal is emancipation and social justice, not economic growth for its own sake.” 

The president closed his remarks to us by lauding the Cuban people’s capacity for “creative resilience and resistance.” 

Cuba, famous for being a place frozen in time, feels like it’s at an inflection point that could be as significant as the one that led to the revolution’s triumph in 1959. Regardless of where it ends, the road to Cuba’s future must start at the same place: ending the U.S. blockade. 

I can only hope that the fall of the embargo would lead the Cuban people to a world where they no longer have to be so resilient. I hope it would resuscitate the project of Cuban socialism, which is in a fragile state. And I hope that ending the embargo would not also mean opening Cuba to being subsumed by American capitalism, turning it into just another place for profit extraction for the world’s empires. That would be the most tragic possible ending for the revolutionary project that used a rejection of U.S. profiteering as its primary engine. But that is not my decision to make. It is a road Cubans will have to make for themselves, as they always have.

Journey to my grandmother’s home

I had the address of my grandparents’ house where my mother and my grandmother both grew up, and where they lived before fleeing in 1967. There would be another family living there now. In those days, the government seized the houses and apartments that were abandoned by Cubans who fled the island and assigned other families to live in them, setting the monthly rent at 10% of the salary of one worker.

There was a group of men with well-maintained American classic cars that perched on the same street as the hotel, offering us rides every chance they got. One afternoon, I decided to take one of them up on it. He asked me where I wanted to go, no doubt expecting me to say Vieja Havana or some other touristy spot. “Santos Suarez,” I said, the neighborhood where the house was, about three miles from the hotel. He looked at me quizzically. He said, “No one has ever asked me to take them to Santos Suarez before.” I explained that I was Cuban-American, that my family left in the 1960s, and that I was trying to find my abuela’s old house. His face softened. “Let’s go then,” he said.

Luis [name changed] has been a taxi driver in Havana for the past 10 years. I got into his 1950’s Chevy, and he immediately sprang into action. He called his friend and jotted down some rough directions.

He drove down the grand avenue known as Paseo and through the Plaza de la Revolución, then on a road called Arroyo that took us right through central Havana. As we continued on, the Havana of the tourists gave way to the Havana of the everyday Cuban. It was absolutely bustling. It was just past 5 p.m., when people would be returning to their homes from work. The sidewalks were lined with teenagers being loud and obnoxious together (Luis lamented how cell phones were killing youth culture in Cuba), kids crossing the street with their parents. People were bringing home groceries, cooking together in makeshift outdoor kitchens, talking to each other across building balconies. Luis pointed out places my mom and grandmother would have probably frequented, told me about the different families that lived in the neighborhood, and gave me the neighborhood gossip.

We crossed into the Havana municipality called El Cerro and things changed again. This was clearly one of the poorer parts of town. The road went from concrete to dirt, with big patches of puddles and rocks. The houses were smaller and most were in bad shape; some were nothing more than shacks. There is garbage piled up around some of the street corners, something Luis tells me is one of the greatest frustrations of Habanernos, especially in the city’s more farflung districts. “Cuba is the only country in the world where you can visit the doctor for free but have to walk through human shit to get there,” he tells me. 

We get to talking about life in Cuba. He tells me he lives out  in Cuba’s countryside, where he grows and sells various fruits and vegetables, but he comes into Havana every day to drive a taxi. “Everyone in Cuba needs a side hustle,” he says. “Salaries from the government are just not high enough.” He told me life is hard in Cuba right now, that it’s easy to feel hopeless. “Cubans don’t need a lot to be happy; if we have a good job and can provide for our families we are happy. But we can’t do that right now, it’s very difficult.” I brought up that I was in Cuba with a political group that was working to end the U.S. blockade. He tells me that that’s good, but that a lot of Cubans were tired of hearing about the blockade. “There’s a joke we Cubans have, when we stub our toes, we blame it on the blockade; when we cut ourselves cooking, we blame the blockade.” He even told me about a conspiracy theory going around that the blockade is totally made up by the government. I assured him it was very much real.

Ironically, in the middle of this conversation, we came to an intersection with a giant mural on one of its walls that read “Solidaridad entre pueblos abajo el bloqueo” — Solidarity among people under the blockade. Another of the blockade’s double-edged properties is that it is at once a policy meant to delegitimize the Cuban government, but it is also the Cuban government’s biggest political tool. While its effects are visible everywhere, so is the government’s propagandizing around it. Luis tells me about what Cubans call “el bloqueo interno,” the internal blockade. “How is it possible,” he asks me, not looking for an answer, “that in a country surrounded by water and with lots of fertile land there is a shortage of food?” I knew I could cite all the stats and figures, tell him about the difficulty of importing the farm equipment and fuel needed to harvest the land and the trucks needed to distribute the food, but I got the sense that it would not shake his fundamental, and ultimately righteous, anger with his government. When every day is focused on the survival of your family, there is little room for politics. 

We made a left at the corner with the mural and Luis quickly rolled down his window and asked a passerby, “Is this Serrano Street?” The passerby said it was, so we continued down the road. This was it, the street my grandmother and mother lived on their whole lives in Cuba. Luis slowed down and we started looking at each house, looking for the house number. The houses in this neighborhood are bigger and in better condition — we are not in El Cerro anymore. About halfway down the block, we stopped at a house painted a bright blue with white trim. It looked to be two stories tall, and had a front porch with two beams holding up a balcony. 

My mind flashes to an old photo of my mom, all of five years old, sitting on the porch of this house with her cousins. I got out of the car and looked up and down the street. The neighborhood had a suburban quality to it. The houses are some of the best-looking buildings I’ve seen in Cuba. They are all painted, some in vibrant greens and yellows. I can’t help but think of my mom running up and down the streets as a kid, or of my grandmother walking on the sidewalks to and from school every day. I can’t help but think how, had circumstances been different, this house would have probably been a major part of my life as well. I thought about my mom’s writing on their departure:

“We left Cuba in 1967 with my mom and grandmother. But I do know how hard it was for mom and my grandma to be called all kinds of names by their neighbors, for my mom not being able to work because she did not partake in the rituals and things people in the workforce were forced to participate in, and many other things that scar a then 6-year-old forever and that shaped me into the person I am today. My mom, especially, was the one who was most affected by Castro’s regime. She, and scores of decent, hardworking citizens had to stand in long lines to be able to bring food, as little as the regime deemed fit, to the table. ”

For my family, this house is a resting place of memory. Some are joyful, some sorrowful, and many a mix of both. Because of the weight of those memories, my grandmother had no idea I was in Cuba, or that I was here, looking at what is probably the single most important place in the world for her. This was a place that for the rest of her life will remain in her mind’s eye, in an unaltered and undamaged state, suspended in time and space. A conduit for happiness and her rage. Maybe it was better that way.

Luis got out of the car with me. He asked a neighborhood kid about who lived in this house. The kid replied, “Who wants to know?” Luis explained who I was and what I wanted. The kid, with an easy familiarity, went up to the house’s open first floor window and yelled inside: “Manuel, someone is here to talk to you. Their grandma used to live here or something like that.” We thanked him as he ran down the sidewalk. Soon thereafter, an older man came to the door. Luis explained to him who I was and that I wanted to photograph the house for my grandmother. The old man hesitantly agreed. Luis also asked if we could go inside to take pictures, but the man refused. I had heard stories of other people with Cuban heritage approaching their familial houses and being invited in for coffee; that was clearly not going to happen this time. 

While Luis and the old man talked in Spanish, I took pictures from every imaginable angle. After about ten minutes, we were on our way back. Luis remarked about how good the house looked, and he told me the work must have been done before the pandemic. “Since then, a bag of cement costs about as much as a month’s salary.” 

On the drive back, Luis points out various buildings, giving me a tour of sorts. Under the frustration we had talked so much about, I could sense a different emotion seeping through: pride. 

I asked him if he had kids. He and his wife have twins, he replied. After years of struggling to have kids on their own, they were able to finally conceive using IVF. I looked at him and asked if the IVF treatments were covered by the Cuban healthcare system. Outside of paying for a few of the necessary vaccines that had to be imported, he explained, the IVF treatments themselves were done free of charge. For a moment, I couldn’t speak; I was totally blown away. I told him about the many people I know in the US who wish they could try IVF but cannot afford it. I told him of people I know who had tried IVF, and despite it being unsuccessful would probably be paying for it for the rest of their lives. In a moment I will never forget that I think perfectly sums up the great hope and heartbreak of Cuba, Luis turned to me and said, “I was able to conceive them, but I have trouble making sure there’s enough food for them every day.”

La Lisa: Neighborhood in Transformation

Our last official stop of the trip was perhaps the most all-encompassing. We were driven to Havana’s far southwestern edge to a neighborhood called La Lisa. What made this place special was that not that long ago, it was not a neighborhood. Over the past several years, this once vacant lot has been transformed by Cuba’s Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDRs), into a community that by all appearances was thriving. There was new housing being built out of cinder and cement. There was a school, a restaurant, a small farm, and a small general store. When we arrived in the late afternoon, the basketball courts, playground, and streets were overflowing with kids of all ages, seemingly engaged in some kind of afterschool program. This was not just a neighborhood, but a state-funded intentional community being constructed to house the scientists that worked at nearby facilities and their families.

Established a few months after the revolution, the CDRs are a dense network of neighborhood committees across Cuba. Growing up, I only heard about these committees as boogymen — a network of spies that would round you up if you dared speak against the government. It was a CDR that investigated my grandfather and arrested him for “counter-revolutionary activity.” 

My grandfather, the lynchpin of my family’s grievance with the Cuban government, was a cop under the previous president, Fulgencio Batista. He did not support the revolution, and was in fact working to undermine it. After Castro took power, he lost his job as a cop and he got a job at La Tropical, a brewery where his dad had worked. In my father’s words:

“That’s where the sabotage charge comes in. He was accused of jamming the machines that capped the bottles, causing a disruption to the production of beer. These machines were very old because they were the very same machinery that were in the industries and businesses that were nationalized, like Bacardi, Coca Cola, etc. The machines were breaking down everyday even before he started working there but it was an excuse to put him away. You see, what he actually did and they couldn’t prove was that he clandestinely collected money for the families of the prisoners already in jail to help them survive because the system would cut them off to further hurt the ‘contra revolucionarios.’” 

From an objective distance, I can see an interpretation of what my grandfather did as funneling money to counter-revolutionaries, of my grandfather as part of the resistance to the revolution. I can see the need for defending the newly born revolution from being smothered by right-wing reaction, as has happened so many times in history. But down in my gut, I cannot shake off the imprisonment of a member of my family so easily, especially after the way it haunted my grandmother and it still haunts my father and his brothers to this day. 

I was always told that the CDRs were a malevolent wing of the Cuban government, but now I was entering a thriving community they were building. A place they were creating from nothing to house people, to enrich the lives of kids. I wrestled with this the entire time we were in La Lisa, a duality that was inescapable and encapsulating really of my entire experience in Cuba. 

I came to Cuba with the mission of untangling that messy web of history, of getting to the bottom of it once and for all. What I realized in La Lisa is that all I can do is add new threads. I have to use the threads of the past; the grief, the grievance, the trauma, the hurt; I have to take the social solidarity, collective reliance, the conscientious building of a new type of society; I have to take the poverty, the resilience, the desperation; I have to take all of it and weave it together. I had to pull together a new, personal understanding of my homeland-that-could-have-been.

Homeland or Death

We undoubtedly had an abnormally luxurious experience of Cuba. We were driven around in a large air-conditioned bus. We had ample access to food and water. Our hotel was sleek and modern, with a rooftop pool, a gym, and a full bar at our disposal. In terms of what we experienced, we got the “party line” on how Cuba functions, which was fascinating in its own right and is not a perspective I feel should be automatically dismissed. In fact, every single government official we spoke to, from the president on down, acknowledged Cuba’s difficult situation and the need to adapt in order to meet the moment. In any other country I would take anything a government official tells me with critical skepticism, and I do the same for Cuba. You will hear it repeated often in the United states that everything wrong with Cuba is the fault of communism or of their corrupt government. I’m sure there’s corruption, I’m sure there’s incompetence, I’m sure that Cuba’s government is plagued with the same problems that all governments have. But even without taking every single one of their claims at face value, it is clear that the dire situation in Cuba right now cannot be laid only at the Cuban government’s feet. 

Whatever Cuba’s problems are, they are unambiguously exacerbated by the fact that they are under economic siege, the target of a policy that is meant to deliberately starve them. Like I often retort to my parents, if all of Cuba’s problems are the fault of its government, why does our government continue to uphold a brutal economic blockade? If communism is so inherently flawed, why does our government feel the need to apply so many external pressures? I am partial to the answer Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Fernández de Cossío gave us: the example of Cuba simply cannot be allowed to succeed.

Still, After taking in with my own eyes the way things are experienced on the ground in Cuba — I can’t help but sympathize with the people’s increasing lack of faith in their government. They have been asked over and over again to sacrifice for their country, and they are getting increasingly little in return. Cuba’s motto, “Patria ó Muerte” (homeland or death), at one time a rally cry for the country’s revolutionary ambitions, today feels more like an ultimatum. 

When it came time to leave our hotel and return to the airport, we doubled back along the same route that we took when we first arrived. I was seeing the same murals, the same buildings, the same crowded bus stops, but it all had a different context now, a depth of understanding I didn’t have before.

As we boarded our flight, the pilot announced that our plane was Brazilian-made, a legal shield against US sanction law which says nothing made with more than 10% U.S. components can be imported to Cuba. I found my seat and we taxied slowly past Cubana Airlines planes that sat in front of crumbling old aircraft hangers. Several of the planes had moss and vines growing over them, relics of a better time lined up to see us off. As we took to the skies, Cuba’s lush green dissipated and shrank into the distance. I couldn’t help but feel like I was leaving home to come home.