14ymedio, Havana, October 18, 2024 — The origin of the current economic crisis in Cuba has its roots in 2016, and the country received a mortar blow in 2019, the prelude to the pandemic. This year it has bottomed out. The Economic Research Service of the US Department of Agriculture has written a report that expresses, with numbers and data from the last decade, the accelerated deterioration of the Island in production, import capacity, tourism, quality of life and food security.
The text arrives at an appropriate time if it is about understanding the multiplicity of factors that have led Cuba to the “bottomless pit” that the Government denies, despite the paralysis of schools, cultural activities and much of the services decreed this Thursday. The collapse was seen coming and is felt more intensely – in addition to the energy situation – at the level of food. The drastic reduction in imports in 2023 led, according to the report, to 1.4 million Cubans lacking the 2,100 daily calories essential for a correct diet.
The number – which represents 12.8% of the Cuban population – is trivial if compared to the number of Cubans who suffer from food insecurity. The document, despite the difficulties in collecting data and making estimates, says that there are 4.2 million, 37.8% of Cubans, who are going hungry. Hunger is due not only to the country’s inability to buy food, but also to its own productive inefficiency. The balance between imports and production has been broken for years, and the consequences for the state coffers have been disastrous.
The report takes into account Washington’s embargo on the regime but keeps a detailed record of the increase in Cuba’s dependence, since it has received more and more inputs from the United States for three consecutive years. However, it warns, Havana has concentrated its purchases on a single product: chicken, the protein that – after the almost total extinction of pork and beef – has become an emblem of the crisis.
The fall in crops, of which the independent press has been warning for years – 14ymedio is, in fact, one of the sources cited by the report – also presents alarming numbers. Hit by hurricanes and floods, corn production decreased from 404,000 metric tons in 2016 to 250,000 last year. Wheat fell from 335,000 metric tons to 140,000 in those years, and sugar – former coat of arms of the Cuban economy – fell to 110,000 metric tons from the 1.1 million that were exported in the past.
With no products to export, the country ran out of money to import. The price has been paid by Cuban households, whose purchasing power has diminished considerably, due to inflation and the increase in the cost of living.
On the international stage, the loss of financial prestige by Cuba, a country accustomed to debts and non-payments, has also skyrocketed. Between 2017 and 2022, the Island frantically imported what it needed from the European Union, the United States and Brazil, while exporting a modest amount of products to Europe, China and Switzerland. In 2023, Russia – which gave its Caribbean partner about 25,000 metric tons of wheat – rose to the top of the list. The rapprochement was not without political overtones, but business with Moscow has not been running smoothly either.
The United States, a key partner for the country’s survival, in 2020 sent products to Cuba worth $157 million. From that year on, the amount increased: 299 million in 2021, 319 million in 2022 and 337 million in 2023. Of these shipments, 89% were chicken, which the report considered a “moderate” increase.
The United Nations World Food Program has also sent food to the Island, and in 2022 provided 3,142 tons of food to Cuban schools, benefiting 510,000 people. The aid came after Hurricane Ian, which wreaked havoc that the Government continues to invoke to justify food shortages. Last February, in addition, Havana asked for unprecedented help from the UN to guarantee the consumption of powdered milk to children under seven years of age.
The Department of Agriculture insists that in order to comprehensively calibrate the Cuban “multidimensional” debacle, it would be necessary to have data from important allies of the Island – Russia, Venezuela and Vietnam – traditionally hermetic when it comes to providing them. Cuba is not the only communist economy monopolized by the oldest state in the region, but its central planning has led to numerous “distortions” that the regime intends to correct, with strategies hitherto ineffective.
Havana’s administrative inability – obsessed with a tourism sector that has not taken off and with the export of medical services – has also led to the waste of key resources such as nickel and zinc, whose mines have been overexploited by companies such as the Canadian Sherritt International and the Australian Antilles Gold, to whom Cuba also owes millions of dollars.
The document also makes a kind of “history of rationing” on the Island, from the appearance of the notebooks in 1962 to the successive cuts during the mandate of Miguel Díaz-Canel. While in 2010 these “subsidized” products cost the State – according to official figures – about 14.1 billion pesos, in 2020 that figure had dropped to 8.9 billion, almost half. Since then, the report regrets, the official discourse does not stop talking about “late deliveries” or “delays in imports.”
There is ample evidence that tourism, another sector in which the Government quantifies its chances of acquiring foreign currency, does not contribute enough to stabilize the country’s pocketbook. In 2019, US restrictions affected – discreetly, because tourism continued to represent 10.4% of Gross Domestic Product – the flow of visitors. But it was during the pandemic that the debacle reached its critical point, falling from the 4.3 million visitors reported in 2019 to the 1.1 million received in 2020, and only 356,000 the following year. The recovery has been slow: last year only 2.4 million tourists were received.
The use of “mules” and the tendency to personally bring foreign currency to the country in cash, says the report, complicate the study of remittance behavior. As of 2019, according to researcher Emilio Morales, the figure experienced a radical drop of 45%. Only 9.18 billion dollars arrived in the country that year, which is interpreted as a change of the diaspora’s intention: if before emigrants tried to help their relatives on the Island, now their main objective is to get them out of the country.
Indeed, according to the report, 1.3 million Cubans live in the United States, and the number, since 2020, has increased dramatically. If we add the Cubans who entered the country between 2022 and 2023 – about 435,000 – and those who have requested asylum in Mexico between January 2022 and November 2023 – about 36,000 – there are arguments to affirm that Cuba has lost approximately 4% of its population, although independent studies suggest that the percentage is even higher.
Although the relationship – at the migratory, family and economic level – between Cuba and the United States has continued to get closer after the vicissitudes of recent years, there has been no total rapprochement between the two countries. Complicated neighbors throughout history, a greater link would seem “logical,” the report concludes. However, the stagnation of a regime that seems to enter its final phase every day distances the country from wellbeing and precipitates it towards almost irreparable levels of misery.
Translated by Regina Anavy
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