On its first day in office, the second Trump administration redesignated Cuba as a State Sponsor of Terrorism (SSOT). This was a status conferred on the island country during the president’s first term, which the intervening Biden administration rescinded just days before the transfer of power.1 The designation’s corresponding impact on Cuba’s tourism-dependent economy, in addition to decades of mismanagement by the Cuban Communist Party (PCC), has provoked a dramatic economic, security, and migration crisis.
Vagrants can be seen scavenging through piles of uncollected garbage in Havana and beggars line the streets of its historic center. Widespread blackouts depriving millions of power are now commonplace, as is violent crime in what was once one of the hemisphere’s safest countries.2 The scale of the current crisis is comparable to the so-called special period, the term used by Fidel Castro to describe the protracted downturn that followed the sudden collapse of Cuba’s Soviet benefactor in 1991. Trapped between the ossified ideological commitments of exile neoconservatism and twentieth-century Marxism, the Caribbean nation seems unlikely to exit its ongoing stasis under conditions of state repression and sanction-induced dysfunction.
Security Unraveled: The Spoiled Fruits of One-Party Labor
Lost on many international supporters of Salvadoran President (and recent Castro admirer) Nayib Bukele is the fact that the current one-party states of Cuba and El Salvador boast comparable records on security.3 For decades, Cuba was one of the safest countries in the Americas, with an average homicide rate of five per 100,000 between 2000 and 2019. An unparalleled feat in the Caribbean Basin, for many years, the socialist island hosted virtually no drug trade or organized crime.4 Unsurprisingly, Cuba boasts an incarceration rate of almost eight hundred per 100,000, the second highest in the world behind only El Salvador.5
The Cuban regime even goes as far as to actively cooperate with U.S. counternarcotics operations. The State Department’s 2024 International Narcotics Control Strategy Report notes that the Cuban Border Guard reports “known or suspected drug trafficking efforts to the US Coast Guard,” both of which maintain a “long-standing relationship.” It adds that low drug production and consumption in Cuba are the result of a “robust security presence that severely limits the ability of transnational criminal organizations to establish a foothold.”6
More recently, however, the country’s historical gains on security are increasingly in jeopardy. According to official figures, drug-related incidents doubled in 2023 among Cuban residents while reports of gun violence and arms trafficking are increasingly common.7 Tellingly, official figures on the total number of homicides on the island have not been made public since 2019, though it is nonetheless unlikely that the current homicide rate exceeds ten per 100,000.
Performative Interpretations of Performative Ideologies
For decades, the influence of neoconservatism has promoted a binary, thermostatic interpretation of the Cuban condition on the political right—particularly among Americans of Cuban, Nicaraguan, and South American descent. In their view, sanctions leveled by Washington are necessary for promoting regime change yet paradoxically also have no impact on current woes.
While it’s certainly true that Marxist rule has come with its own set of maladies, it’s quite clear as well that the immediate catalyst of the crisis has been a hardening of U.S. sanctions. Just days before leaving office in January 2021, the Trump administration decided to give Cuba SSOT status on the advice of then senator Marco Rubio, now the Secretary of State. The purported pretext for the decision was that Cuba had harbored leaders of the Colombian Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN) guerrilla group.
Back in 2019, ELN insurgents killed twenty-two in a car bombing in Bogotá while Cuba hosted peace talks between the ELN leadership and the Colombian government. But because Havana refused to undertake the illegal extradition of ELN negotiators, Washington reasoned (two years after the fact) that the regime was a sponsor of terror. Never mind the long history of Washington-sponsored terrorism in Cuba,8 or that the same logic warrants adding Norway to the terror list.9
To be sure, groups like the ELN were directly supported by Havana in decades past.10 Yet, as with narcotics, Cuba cooperates with U.S. counterterrorism efforts despite its SSOT status. The designation nevertheless prompted the Biden administration to wage a more devastating campaign of economic warfare against Havana than Trump ever did during his first term. Practically overnight in 2021, global banks and pharmaceutical companies, among others, pulled out of Cuba on pain of facing the consequences of doing business with a terrorist-friendly state.11
Then, in 2022, the administration stipulated that foreigners who thereafter visit or had visited Cuba since 2011 would be barred from visa‑free travel to the United States, a clear deterrent for tourists from around forty countries, including allies like Britain, France, and Spain.12 This is in addition to the first Trump administration’s invocation of Title III of the Helms-Burton Act, which allows companies that do business with Cuba to be sued. These moves amounted to a deathblow to the cruise industry on the island.13
All of this came at a time when tourism in the Caribbean was surging after years of pandemic-induced travel restrictions. But because Washington took deliberate steps to deter tourism to Cuba, no such surge took place on the island. For perspective, tourism to the region as a whole returned to pre-pandemic levels of around thirty-two million visitors in 2023. Yet in Cuba, visitors totaled just two million in 2023 and 2024, a far cry from the more than four million who came in 2019, with predictable results for the country’s economy.14 In 2020, the island experienced a 10 percent decline in GDP that has recovered to only around 1 percent growth since 2021.15
The saddest part about tourism’s sanction-induced demolition is that it occurred in tandem with the end of Cuba’s twenty-seven-year dual currency regime, a monetary reform long advised by both domestic and international economists.16 On January 1, 2021, the Convertible Cuban peso, known colloquially as the CUC, ceased to be legal currency. In contrast to the generic Cuban peso, the CUC was largely reserved for affluent Cubans and tourists, and it maintained a mostly one-to-one peg with the U.S. dollar.
The dual currency regime created myriad distortions within the Cuban economy. Affluent Cubans with access to dollars could buy subsidized peso goods for a fraction of their market price and consume additional goods from CUC shops. Conversely, ordinary Cubans who paid in Cuban pesos saw their buying power reduced. A form of internal brain drain became prominent as highly skilled state workers left their professions for careers with easy access to CUCs, such as tourism and taxi driving. Currency unification would not only address these issues but also attract foreign investment and make everyday goods and services more attractive to tourists.17
Unfortunately, the wholescale loss of foreign commerce and tourism that came from the SSOT designation of January 2021 exacerbated the adjustment costs of the new currency regime. Fluctuations in the peso’s exchange rate with the dollar are now unpredictable and often severe. The Cuban government reported an official rate of inflation of 70 percent in 2021, though independent economists have suggested that the true figure in any given year since then could be as high as 500 percent.18
Self-evident as the impact of sanctions may seem, many in the United States continue to believe otherwise. At a prominent American university, I asked a panel on Cuban political economy about the terror designation’s effect on the unfolding crisis. All four panelists dismissed the notion outright, with one contending that Cuba suffered no impact when the island was first listed in 1982. This answer was preposterous: it ignores the reality that tourism—as opposed to sugar exports during the 1980s—is the current driver of the island’s GDP.19 To that end, international visitors from virtually all destinations, along with economic growth, jumped 50 percent after relations were eased and Cuba was first delisted as a sponsor of terror in 2015.20
The inevitable complement to right-wing neoconservatives in Miami are the so-called “solidarity anti-imperialists” of the international Left. As devastating as recent sanctions and a sixty-five-year-old embargo have been, it’s naive to insist that a regime that repelled a South African invasion in Angola has forever lacked the means to foster productive economic activity on the island.21 In economic terms, the history of revolutionary Cuba is one of dependency on a wealthy benefactor, a more lucrative arrangement than regime proponents make out.
According to the Cuban government, the U.S. embargo has caused more than $150 billion in losses.22 Yet until 1990, the Soviet Union subsidized Cuba to the tune of $65 billion, paying Havana seven times the world price of sugar.23 Beginning in 2000, moreover, Venezuela agreed to send its socialist ally a yearly quota of fifty-three thousand barrels of oil per day (bpd), later increased to ninety thousand by 2005, in exchange for Cuban medical missions. Havana would then proceed to resell the bulk of the imported Venezuelan oil at market price.24
Adjusting for inflation, the market price of the 100,000 bpd Cuba received in 2007 totaled $5.47 billion. Even in 2024, Venezuela sent its ally thirty thousand barrels per day with Mexico providing another twenty thousand barrels per day as a humanitarian gesture.25 All told, Caracas subsidized Havana to the tune of $122 billion via oil shipments between just 2007 and 2017. For perspective, the Marshall Plan totaled $174 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars, and Cuba’s total GDP today is around $100 billion.26 Clearly, the regime had substantial funds at its disposal in the recent past, much of which it squandered.
A good example relates to the island’s routine blackouts. Cuba’s energy infrastructure consists of aging oil-fired power plants reliant on imports from Russia, Venezuela, and Mexico.27 Had Havana invested in natural gas, renewables, or sugarcane ethanol, it likely would have avoided many of the current blackouts. Instead, the Castro brothers chose to allow Cuba’s historical sugar industry to decline, giving rise to an overreliance on windfalls from tourism and Venezuelan oil.28
A 2025 investigation by the Miami Herald similarly suggests that much of the aforementioned windfalls went into the multiheaded conglomerate known as GAESA, which is owned by Cuba’s Revolutionary Armed Forces. Leaked financial records suggest that the military‑owned tourism enterprise Gaviota maintains approximately $4.3 billion “assets on hand,” nearly thirteen times the $339 million officials claim is needed to supply Cuban pharmacies annually. This situation persists even as the island’s health care system lacks 70 percent of essential medications by the regime’s own admission.29
The disparity suggests a predictable symmetry between PCC elites and the “capitalist imperialists” they routinely denounce. Created during the Special Period amid the country’s transition to a tourism-based service economy, the GAESA conglomerate made strategic acquisitions in the island’s most lucrative sectors. Just two of its subsidiaries—Almest and Gaviota—reported a net worth of 22.7 billion Cuban pesos as of July 2024, representing almost thirteen times the government’s total investment in public health and social assistance for 2023. On its own, Almest received 668 million pesos from state coffers yet contributed just two million pesos in taxes.
Despite the dearth in post-pandemic tourism, moreover, 36 percent of all government investments between 2021 and 2023 were allocated to tourism and hotel construction, while health care received just 1.9 percent. Another seventeen billion pesos were funneled into “business services, real estate and rental activities” through September 2024, more than fourteen times the 1.2 billion pesos invested in public health.
Such appropriations directly contradict the claim that the regime lacks funds to address humanitarian needs. The $4.3 billion available to Gaviota alone vastly exceeds the $250 million supposedly needed to maintain Cuba’s electrical grid and the $129 million required for hospital supplies.30 For all its claims of “anti-imperialism,” the regime’s praxis reveals something far more mundane: a self-serving elite that, like its capitalist enemies, has mastered the art of privatizing profits and socializing losses.
Socialism with Cuban Characteristics
From a Chinese perspective, the PCC’s poor economic record and lack of popular legitimacy stem from its dogmatic commitment to twentieth-century Marxism-Leninism. As the economist and embargo critic Dr. Carmelo Mesa-Lago has noted, the regime could easily prompt untapped economic activity by embracing market reforms akin to those undertaken by socialist China and Vietnam decades ago. In both countries, a majority of agriculture is privately managed, and state firms embrace market forces through competition with private, foreign, and other state firms.
By contrast, agriculture in Cuba is mostly controlled by the state and generally unproductive, while private enterprise comprises an inconsequential number of small businesses. Today, almost 60 percent of Cuba’s arable land is uncultivated, a fact which contributes to the country’s dependence on expensive food imports.31 The regime is actively backtracking on previous paltry market reforms, evidently casualties of the debacle of monetary unification. In December, the Ministry of Trade mandated the cancelation of all commercial licenses granted to various wholesale small businesses, effectively causing the liquidation of private retail inventories.32
When I asked Dr. Mesa-Lago why the regime remained so hostile to change, he deigned to mention Havana’s embrace of monetary reform, which he had previously advised. Nonetheless, the nonagenarian offered a cogent response: “They’re afraid. To them, reform entails a risk of collapse like the Soviet Union but this is the wrong lesson.” Indeed, from an autocratic perspective, the contrasting examples of China and Soviet Russia suggest that the latter’s mistake was allowing for increased political freedom, namely, freedom of expression and a more independent media—as opposed to just market reform.33
Naturally, the anti-developmentalists of the PCC have a multipurpose (if at times justified) scapegoat by which they can obviate blame. In 2020, Cuban president Miguel Diaz-Canel proclaimed the following in fluent party prose: “Concerning the proposals of Cuban economists of analyzing the Chinese and Vietnamese economic models [and] adapting them to Cuba . . . neither of these countries were submitted to a 60-year embargo.” Adding insult to injury, he concluded: “some of those economists only think about the private sector whereas the government’s premise is that the principal economic actor is the state with the private sector playing a complementary role.”34
Exactly like his counterparts stateside, Diaz-Canel’s dogmatism misunderstands market socialism as such. In China and Vietnam, private management of agriculture is the norm, but the state remains the underlying owner of all land; most Chinese companies are privately owned, but state firms comprise half of China’s market cap.35
Just so, Washington’s trade embargos against China and Vietnam were indeed shorter and less vicious than Cuba’s. Yet in Vietnam, market reform began eight years before the embargo ended in 1994.36 Prerevolutionary Cuba was also one of the most developed countries in the Americas, a fact conveniently omitted by solidarity propagandists.37 In 1959, the island had a GDP per capita of $3,000, three times that of its Chinese and Vietnamese peers. Today, China’s GDP per capita is almost $20,000, while Vietnam’s slightly exceeds Cuba’s at $8,000.38
Relative to the Soviet Union, the nature of China’s trade and assistance relationships with Cuba is decidedly mixed, seemingly generous and yet also cautious and limited at the same time. For instance, Beijing is currently financing ninety-two solar parks across the island, with fifty-five due to be built in 2025 and the remaining thirty-seven by 2028. Once completed, the undertaking is projected to meet two-thirds of residents’ energy needs.39 Yet China’s reluctance to engage more deeply with the Cuban economy becomes clear when juxtaposed against its efforts in the rest of the region. China maintains “comprehensive strategic partnerships” with commodity exporters Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela—but not with Cuba. While China continues to be the island’s second largest trade partner, behind Venezuela, Chinese exports to Cuba actually declined from $1.7 billion in 2017 to $1.1 billion in 2022. In the wake of the pandemic and the collapse of Cuba’s sugar industry, Beijing scrapped a long-standing agreement with Havana to import 400,000 tons of the product annually.
On security, Chinese firms such as Huawei, TP-Link, and ZTE have installed fiber optic cables, WiFi hotspots, and other digital infrastructure in Cuba under a shared cyber security agreement, though reports of eavesdropping stations have yet to be corroborated. At the same time, Havana is deeply indebted to the same and other Chinese companies, a fact which has contributed to Beijing’s unwillingness to pursue closer ties. Unlike Russia, which twice docked naval flotillas in Havana in 2024, China maintains a much lower profile on the island.40
Ideological Stagnation and Mass Migration
The Manichaean visions of both the PCC and Miami neocons inevitably perpetuate the same evils that each party denounces—respectively, U.S. sanctions and state repression. This was the precise conclusion of Jordanis, a colorful petrochemical engineer and part-time driver for tourists in Havana. As he told me on a recent visit, “The party and the maniacs in Miami need each other to survive.” Referring to the popular Cuban-American YouTuber Alexander Otaola, Jordanis added: “He’d be a pauper without the regime. I guarantee you he’s on their payroll!”
A seminal Miami neoconservative, the Roger Stone-advised Otaola suffered a crushing defeat in the race for Miami-Dade county mayor in August.41 His daily “news” show consists of largely unscripted diatribes against the perceived enemies of U.S.-sponsored “freedom and democracy.” The program’s grotesque infomercials for Miami-based plastic surgeries and gold chains are the lone stylistic departure from the hours-long rants of Fidel Castro. For this reason, some have floated the possibility that Otaola is a regime plant, drawing attention to his past as an actor in Cuba.
Most notably, the Cuban regime and stateside hawks maintain a particularly beneficial symbiosis on immigration. Since the 1960s, Washington and Miami neocons have promoted a de facto open border policy with Cuba under the pretext that fleeing Communism is itself grounds for asylum.42 As dire as the conditions in Cuba might be, asylum law is categorical: legal asylees must face a risk of persecution for racial, religious, political, or other in-group reasons. A significant number of Cubans fit these categories, but the vast majority—like other nationalities—do not.
Preferential access to residency, welfare, and parole (made even more generous during the Biden presidency) acted as a magnet for millions of Cubans.43 Per the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act, Cubans are exempt from entering the United States at a legal port of entry and are eligible for residency after one year of living in the country. When I explained to Jordanis that the Mexican government had a program to hire migrants to work for the state oil firm Pemex, the petrochemical engineer gave a glib answer: “That’s fine but why live in narco Mexico when Uncle Sam gives Cubans everything regalado—for free?”
The migratory results speak for themselves. Mass migration from Cuba to the United States serves as an escape valve by which the regime can ease pressure over domestic discontent. This in turn swells the ranks of Miami’s neocons, as well as Republican voter rolls in Florida. To give an idea of the scale of the exodus, the Cuban government estimates that one million left the island between just 2022 and 2023, out of a total population of 11 million; independent estimates have put the figure at around 2.5 million, 800,000 of which settled in the United States, particularly in the state of Florida.44 For all the talk of Democrats importing voters in order to win elections, Florida Republicans have an obvious electoral interest in maintaining an open border with Cuba.
The broader crackdown on illegal immigration by both the Biden and Trump administrations since 2024 has led to a precipitous decline in border crossings, including from Cubans. Data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection shows that only 132 Cuban nationals entered the United States illegally in March, just as the current administration has stripped the group of Temporary Protected Status.45 So long as the Cuban Adjustment Act continues, however, the incentive for émigrés to eventually settle in the United States, rather than in other Latin American countries, will continue to be overwhelming.
Recognizing the failure of more than six decades of regime change policy, the White House could pursue a more pragmatic approach in the service of its immigration goals. Unfortunately, the decisive influence of Miami hawks in the administration as well as in the two-seat majority House of Representatives makes this possibility unlikely.
The neoconservative trio of Representatives Mario Diaz-Balart, Maria Elvira Salazar, and Carlos Jimenez already sabotaged a deportation deal with Venezuela. Just days after Trump’s second inauguration, Caracas acquiesced to deportation flights in exchange for the renewal of Chevron’s oil license in its waters. The irate Miami hawks subsequently threatened to derail the president’s legislative agenda unless he reneged on the deal, which contributed to the deportation of hundreds of Venezuelans with no criminal records (including known dissidents of the Venezuelan regime46) to a maximum security gang prison in El Salvador.47
The apparent incoherence of neoconservative aspirations for regime change and Trumpian immigration enforcement has come as a godsend for Maduro. In the aftermath of the Salvadoran deportations, thousands poured onto Venezuelan streets to protest against Washington’s forced disappearances to El Salvador. Amid the propaganda boon for Caracas, the Venezuelan opposition’s inability to criticize their chief moral and financial backers in the United States has dealt a crippling blow to anti-regime opponents.48
A Cold War Without End
The circular nature of the Cuban condition should be obvious to all save the most deluded in both the PCC and Miami exile community. The sad truth is that the grievances of both Miami neocons and regime partisans are eminently understandable. In the sixty years before the revolution, U.S. forces occupied Cuba on three separate occasions. Uncle Sam and Wall Street bankers also robbed the island of its trade and monetary policy until 1934.49 Thereafter, the remainder of the island’s prerevolutionary leaders can be described, to varying degrees, as pawns of the national security, mob, and business interests of their northern neighbor. The fact that so many in Miami resort to whitewashing this history, including exile terrorism, will forever serve as a gold mine for regime propaganda.50
A likely reason that the Biden administration chose not to delist Havana as a sponsor of terrorism until 2025 was the aftermath of Cuba’s July 2021 protests.51 The demonstrations were in part the result of preceding sanctions and were quashed by state repression. Radicalized anti-regime elements in Washington and Florida subsequently pushed for further sanctions.52
In the same vein, solidarity anti-imperialists fail to grasp the political own goal of excusing torture and mass imprisonment as acts of righteous resistance against U.S. imperialism. Today, Cuba has around a thousand political prisoners, more than any other country in the Americas.53 Hardly an egalitarian paradise, the regime also maintains a de facto health and tourism apartheid whereby Afro-Cubans are barred from state hotels, and quality health care facilities are reserved for tourists and affluent, light-skinned Cubans.54
Any solution to the Cuban conundrum, therefore, will require more pragmatism from both sides. For its part, the PCC should embrace a variant of Marxism-Leninism more conducive to Cuban flourishing. It could do this through common sense reforms that allow a currently meager private sector to more easily supply basic goods to Cuban citizens. Further afield, the regime could solicit the expertise of Chinese peers for the development of a market-socialist pharmaceutical sector, a not-so-far-fetched possibility considering that Havana developed two Covid vaccines.55 As for Washington, the day may come when a future administration overturns both the embargo and the Cuban Adjustment Act.
But until the old orthodoxies can be rejected and replaced, citizens on the island will remain hostage to the pointless and counterproductive machinations of neoconservative grandees in Miami and party apparatchiks in Havana, both fighting a Cold War without end.
This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume IX, Number 3 (Fall 2025): 184–95.
Notes
1 Matt Spetalnick, “
Trump Revokes Biden Removal of Cuba from US State Sponsors of Terrorism List,” Reuters, January 20, 2025.
2 Al Jazeera and News Agencies, “Millions without Power as Cuba Hit by Another Nationwide Blackout,” Al Jazeera, December 4, 2024.
3 Juan David Rojas, “The Bukele Model and the Future of El Salvador,” American Affairs 8, no. 2 (Summer 2024): 153–69.
4 Parker Asmann, “Socioeconomic Shifts Could Challenge Cuba Drug Policy,” Insight Crime, January 8, 2018.
5 Emily Widra, “States of Incarceration: The Global Context 2024,” Prison Policy Initiative, June 2024.
6 U.S. Department of State, Bureau for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, International Narcotics Control Strategy Report, Volume 1: Drug and Chemical Control (Washington D.C.: U.S. Government Publishing Office, 2024).
7 Will Grant, “‘The Violence is Getting Out of Hand’: Crime Grips Cuba’s Streets,” BBC News, September 24, 2024.
8 Ed Agustín, “Biden’s Cuba Policy Leaves the Island in Wreckage,” DropSite News, October 1, 2024.
9 Juan David Rojas, “Miami’s Long Cold War,” American Conservative, August 12, 2024.
10 Central Intelligence Agency, “Cuban Support for Nationalist Movements and Revolutionary Groups,” Interagency Intelligence Memorandum Series, July 1977.
11 Agustín, “Biden’s Cuba Policy Leaves the Island in Wreckage.”
12 Simon Calder, “Travellers Who Have Visited Cuba in Last 11 Years Will Need Visa to Enter US,” Independent, September 22, 2022.
13 John B. Bellinger III, Thomas A. Shannon Jr., John P. Barker, Baruch Weiss, “Two Years of Title III: Helms-Burton Lawsuits Continue to Face Legal Obstacles,” Arnold & Porter, May 10, 2021.
14 Caribbean Council staff, “Latest Tourism Figures Suggest Achieving Cuba’s 2024 Arrivals Target Difficult,” Caribbean Council, September 9, 2024.
15 World Bank, “GDP Growth (Annual %)—Cuba,” World Bank Open Data, 2025.
16 Augusto de la Torre and Alain Ize, “Exchange Rate Unification: The Cuban Case,” in Cuban Economic Change in Comparative Perspective Paper Series-Brookings, eds. Richard E. Feinberg and Ted Piccone (Washington D.C.: Brookings Institution, 2014), 103–16; Álvaro González Lorente, Montserrat Hernández López, Francisco Javier Martín Álvarez, and Javier Mendoza Jiménez, “Eliminating Monetary Duality in Cuba,” Studies of Applied Economics 38, no. 1 (2020): 1–11.
17 Helen Yaffe, “Day Zero: How and Why Cuba Unified Its Dual Currency System,” London School of Economics, February 10, 2021.
18 Mark Frank, “Cuban Peso in Free Fall against the Dollar,” Reuters, January 26, 2022.
19 Jorge Salazar-Carrillo, “The Collapse of the Cuban Sugar Industry: An Economic Autopsy,” FIU Digital Commons, November 6, 2013.
29 ONEI staff, “Long Term Trend in International Visitor Arrivals,” Oficina Nacional de Estadística e Información de la República de Cuba (ONEI), 2023.
21 Edward George, The Cuban Intervention in Angola, 1965–1991: From Che Guevara to Cuito Cuanavale (New York: Routledge, 2004).
22 Isabella Oliver and Mariakarla Nodarse Venancio, “Understanding the Failure of the US Embargo on Cuba,” Washington Office on Latin America, February 22, 2022.
23 Carla Gloria Colomé, “Carmelo Mesa-Lago: ‘Today’s Cuba Is a Catastrophe,’” El País English, June 16, 2024.
24 Carmelo Mesa-Lago and Pavel Vidal, “El impacto en la economía cubana de la crisis venezolana y de las políticas de Donald Trump,” Real Instituto Elcano, May 30, 2019; Dan Erikson, “Castro’s Chávez Strategy,” Inter-American Dialogue, December 2005.
25 Ana Isabel Martinez, “Mexico’s Pemex Increased Crude Shipments to Cuba in 2024, Filing Shows,” Reuters, May 6, 2025.
26 Carmelo Mesa-Lago, The Cuban Economy: The Current Crisis, Its Causes, and Policies for the Future (Miami: Florida International University, 2020).
27 Marc Oestreich, “Special Issue: Cuba in Darkness,” Grid Brief, December 4, 2024.
28 Salazar-Carrillo, “The Collapse of the Cuban Sugar Industry: An Economic Autopsy.”
29 Nora Gámez Torres, “Leaked Documents Show Cuban Military Sitting on Billions of Dollars amid Humanitarian Crisis,” Miami Herald, March 4, 2025.
30 Gámez Torres, “Leaked Documents Show Cuban Military Sitting on Billions of Dollars Amid Humanitarian Crisis.”
31 Andrés Pertierra, “Why Cuban Agriculture Is Such a Mess,” Sin Embargo (Substack), December 16, 2024.
32 Eloy Viera Cañive, “The End of Wholesale Trade in Cuba Between Private Entities,” El Toque, December 9, 2024.
33 Frank Dikötter, China after Mao: The Rise of a Superpower (New York: Bloomsbury, 2022).
34 Mesa-Lago, “The Cuban Economy: The Current Crisis, Its Causes, and Policies for the Future.”
35 Carmelo Mesa-Lago, “Evaluation of Economic-Social Performance of Two Socialist Economic Models: Cuba (Central Plan) and China-Vietnam (Socialist Market),” Latin American Research Review 59, no. 2 (2024): 253–73; Tianlei Huang and Nicolas Véron, “China’s State vs. Private Company Tracker: Which Sector Dominates?,” Peterson Institute For International Economics, July 27, 2023.
36 Dean Brelis, “An Interview with Viet Nam’s Nguyen Van Linh,” Time, September 21, 1987; David Mowry, “Lifting the Embargo Against Cuba Using Vietnam as a Model: A Policy Paper for Modernity,” Brooklyn Journal of International Law 25, no. 1 (1999): 229–62; Lan Cao, “Reflections on Market Reform in Post-War, Post-Embargo Vietnam,” Whittier Law Review 22 (2000): 1029–57.
37 Lillian Guerra, Heroes, Martyrs, and Political Messiahs in Revolutionary Cuba, 1946–1958 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018).
38 Jutta Bolt and Jan Luiten van Zanden, “GDP Per Capita—Maddison Project Database—in Constant International-$, Historical Data,” Maddison Project Database 2023, with minor processing by Our World in Data, accessed May 13, 2025.
39 “Cuba on Track to Install 50 Solar Parks This Year, Ministry Says,” Reuters, March 20, 2025; “Cuba Begins Construction of 55 Solar Parks with Chinese Financing,” Fundación Andrés Bello, April 16, 2025.
40 Ed Agustín, “‘China is Not Cuba’s Sugar Daddy’: Ties Between Communist Nations Weaken,” Financial Times, October 13, 2024.
41 Douglas Hanks and Syra Ortiz Blanes, “Daniella Levine Cava Easily Beats GOP Challengers, Wins 2nd Term as Miami-Dade Mayor,” Miami Herald, August 26, 2024.
42 Orlando Gutierrez-Boronat, “Cubans’ Lives Definitely Were at Risk under Castro. That’s Why We Became Refugees,” Miami Herald, December 31, 2022.
43 Peter Van Buren, “Biden’s Parole Abuse Is Driving the Border Crisis,” American Conservative, March 25, 2024.
44 Nora Gámez Torres, “Cuba Admits to Massive Emigration Wave: a Million People Left in Two Years Amid Crisis,” Miami Herald, July 24, 2024; Alonso Moleiro, “From a Population of 11 Million to Little More than 8.5 Million: The Real Toll of Cuba’s Migratory Crisis,” El País English, July 23, 2024.
45 CiberCuba Editorial Team, “Dramatic Drop in Migration Data: Only 132 Cubans Entered the U.S. Illegally in March,” CiberCuba, April 16, 2025.
46 Tom Phillips, “‘I Just Ask God That He’s OK’: Family of Venezuelan Musician Sent to El Salvador Prison Agonizes over His Fate,” Guardian, April 20, 2025.
47 Marc Caputo, “Exclusive: How Congress’ ‘Crazy Cubans’ Pushed Trump to Kill Oil Deal,” Axios, March 3, 2025.
48 On July 19, 2025, the Trump administration brokered a three-country agreement exchanging all cecot prisoners of Venezuelan descent for 10 Americans detained by Caracas. The administration also subsequently restored Chevron’s oil license in Venezuela, presumably as part of the agreement. No such efforts have been made to engage with the Cuban regime despite overtures from the latter. See: Alonso Moleiro, “Trump’s Immigration Policy and Ties to Bukele Hit Venezuelan Opposition and Give Maduro a Boost,” El País English, April 23, 2025; Eric Bazail-Eimil, “Cuba Tried to Improve Its Relations with the US by Cooperating with Trump’s Deportation Flights. It Didn’t Work,” Politico, June 2, 2025; Aram Roston, Ted Hesson, and Vivian Sequera, “El Salvador Sends Detained Venezuelans Home in Swap for Americans,” Reuters, July 19, 2025.
49 Ada Ferrer, Cuba: An American History (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2021); Louis A. Perez Jr., Cuba Under the Platt Amendment, 1902–1934 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1986); Peter James Hudson, Bankers and Empire: How Wall Street Colonized the Caribbean (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019).
50 T. J. English, Havana Nocturne: How the Mob Owned Cuba and Then Lost It to the Revolution (New York: Harper Collins, 2008); Anna E. Wenzel, “Power and Control: Political Violence in the Cuban Diaspora, 1960-1976,” Past Tense Graduate Review of History 8, no. 1 (2021): 46–71.
51 BBC News staff, “Cuba Protests: Thousands Rally Against Government as Economy Struggles,” BBC News, July 12, 2021.
52 Rojas, “Miami’s Long Cold War.”
53 Noam Chomsky and Vijay Prashad, On Cuba: Reflections on 70 Years of Revolution and Struggle (New York: New Press, 2024); Tirana Hassan, “World Report 2023: Cuba,” Human Rights Watch, 2023.
54 Octavio Gómez Dantés, “The Dark Side of Cuba’s Health System: Free Speech, Rights of Patients and Labor Rights of Physicians,” Health Systems & Reform 4, no. 3 (2018): 175–82; Julie Mazzei, “Negotiating Domestic Socialism with Global Capitalism: So-Called Tourist Apartheid in Cuba,” Communist and Post-Communist Studies 45, no. 1–2 (2012): 91–103.
55 Pedro I. Más-Bermejo, Félix O. Dickinson-Meneses, Kenia Almenares-Rodríguez, Lizet Sánchez-Valdés, Raúl Guinovart-Díaz, María Vidal-Ledo, and Enrique Galbán-García, “Cuban Abdala Vaccine: Effectiveness in Preventing Severe Disease and Death from Covid-19 in Havana, Cuba: A Cohort Study,” The Lancet Regional Health–Americas 16 (2022).
