Power To the People
What I Learned In Cuba During the 2024 Grid Collapse
I saw the hazy edge of Florida from a balcony in Cuba. It’s that close. But somewhere in that short distance, time warps. Cuba operates in the same time zone as the East coast of the US, and yes, many of the surroundings are from bygone eras, but present day feels slower, too. Drivers drive slower. People answer the phone slower. The time between ordering food and eating is longer. Arranging transportation involves a lot of waiting. No one knows what will happen next, so you make a plan and then surrender to time.
I love old things, especially old buildings. In Cuba, I fell asleep staring at a ceiling built in 1800. There’s artwork everywhere. I love when an ecosystem thrives because it’s protected from human overuse or development, like a healthy reef. I swam in a deserted and pigless bay, studded with sea urchins and enormous yellow coral brains. I snacked on starfruit from the tree and avocados the size of a baby’s head. I was star struck by the beauty and natural abundance of Cuba.
And yet, most Cubans want to leave. Many people are visibly depressed. They have severely limited access to resources to maintain or repair what is old and a near-total ban on commerce makes sustainability impossible. The good is obvious. The problems are obvious. The solutions are illegal.
At first glance, Cuba is very different than the US, and the US has a strange divested interest in maintaining that narrative. It’s apparent that the Cuban government’s mismanagement of the island took a different form than the ideals of US government on its “own” land and economy, but I see the result and the stymied solutions as wildly similar.
What I learned directly1 from Cubans and my own observations mirrors the historical overview of the US embargo (1962-present) in that opinions are mixed. Almost everyone agrees the embargo should end, but not everyone thinks it’s the primary cause of destruction nor the solution to revitalizing the Cuban economy. There is unilateral dislike for Cuba’s current president, Miguel Diaz-Canel, but differing opinions about Fidel Castro’s legacy.
As a politically engaged American TCK tourist, my inclination is to see the ravages of US imperialism everywhere (and it is present). But I repeatedly fall victim to the very mindset I deplore by forgetting that people of other nationalities are far more concerned with the abuses of their own governments than they are with the US.
Among Cubans I spoke with, C is a young woman, probably mid-20s, undergoing radiation (free!) for breast cancer in Havana. J is a father of two in Havana, saving money to pay coyotes to guide his family on an exit journey. E is a single mom of a son with medical needs in Trinidad, hoping to immigrate to Europe where she has extended family. While medical treatment for her son is free, most doctors have left the country, and transportation to her son’s out-of-town appointments is cost-prohibitive. D is an artist in Trinidad, probably in his early 30s, one of very few younger people hoping to stay in Cuba.
In Trinidad on October 17, E showed me on her phone that the Cuban Minister of Energy announced energy saving measures, cutting further into the nonsensical 12-4AM rations. There was confusion and mistrust of reasons given by the government, especially since Havana usually keeps power when other cities are rationed. According to E, that’s because people in Havana protest immediately when they lose power. By the following day, all power was off across the country.
Schools and businesses closed, refrigerated food rotted, and phone batteries couldn’t be recharged, nor internet accessed, even if you had some battery power. Some people have generators, but there was no fuel to keep them going.2
The week before we left for Cuba, Hurricane Helene decimated western North Carolina, about a three hour drive from my home. Most people outside the mountains didn’t know about the scale of destruction for days because the storm took out both physical and electrical means of communication. When you don’t have electricity, the ability to communicate information slows even further. On October 18th in Cuba, the driver who was supposed to take us back to Havana from Trinidad never showed up. We never found out why because we couldn’t contact him.
When we flew out of Havana on October 19th, the airport had lights on, but the monitors that usually show flight details were blank. Without electricity, there was no wifi to check into our flight, so we couldn’t access boarding passes. Our plane flew to Miami on auxiliary power, the only noticeable difference being that the cabin lights stayed off the whole flight.
There is relief in having options, but I wasn’t eager to leave.
Tomayto, Tomahto
I shared on Instagram a few highlights and observations about food in Cuba. Packaged goods are rare and there is very little available in stores, of which there are very few. There’s not a big variety of goods produced within Cuba either, and yet as we drove through farmland and along the coast, eating simply but well, I got to thinking: isn’t this an ideal sustainable ecosystem? With little polluting or ravaging infrastructure, quality natural resources and climate, a very small population, and limited exports, there should be an abundant amount of seafood, livestock, fruits and vegetables, coffee, sugar, and tobacco to sustain the population and provide jobs without over-consumption.
I put this question to D, the artist in Trinidad, and he told me this story. D’s friend is a farmer who grew tomatoes successfully. On paper, the government controls every part of every industry and supply chain. In reality, they can’t feasibly be in all places at all times. The government sets the official price for all goods and services. Government jobs, which are all jobs, officially, pay far less than is necessary to live on, even if it were possible to survive exclusively on goods available at official government prices from official government shops. So there is a robust black market that everyone knows about and uses.
The farmer harvested a good crop of tomatoes, then packed and shipped them by truck to whatever black market grocers he knew of. The trucks were stopped at a government checkpoint and the tomatoes were confiscated. The farmer was told to go through the appropriate channels next time. So at the next harvest, the farmer called up government trucks and said, “my harvest is ready for official transport to official suppliers.” Even though the farmer will make much less from the government than on the black market, something is better than nothing and he didn’t want to risk retaliation (of what kind, I’m unsure). But the government trucks, unable to rip off every grower at once, didn’t arrive until four days later, by which time the tomatoes had rotted. That farmer no longer cultivates tomatoes.
Of course that system benefits no one, not even the government, so it is confounding why it persists. What it doesn’t do is hurt the most powerful leaders enough for them to care about changing their policies. In a word, it’s corruption.
Fidel Castro’s system wasn’t initially corrupt but still undermined the livelihoods of Cuban people, as illustrated by another story D told me about Castro’s reforms of sugar production in the 1960s. At one time, Cuba was the largest producer of sugar in the world. Profits from sugarcane, including after the abolition of slavery in Cuba in 1886,3 made some Cubans incredibly wealthy and there are still hints of what they spent that wealth on in the insane craftsmanship of buildings.
In 1958, the Eisenhower administration refused to sell weapons to either faction in the Cuban revolution. Fidel Castro came to power through the Cuban revolution, and relations between Castro and Eisenhower were friendly until the Cuban “Agricultural Reform confiscated land owned by many American businesses and Cuba continued to sponsor revolutionary movements in other parts of the Caribbean. By March 1960 the U.S. government began making plans to help overthrow the Castro administration.”4
Citing the quick spread of communism, the US government stated that the "only foreseeable means of alienating internal support [for Castro in Cuba] is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship… [by denying] money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government."
“In June 1960, Eisenhower's government refused to export oil to the island, leaving Cuba reliant on Soviet crude oil. Cuba and the Soviet Union signed [an oil] trade agreement…which the United States viewed as a provocation, and successfully urged Esso, Texaco, and Shell to refuse to process Soviet crude in their Havana and Santiago de Cuba refineries. Cuba confiscated the refineries and the United States responded by canceling its quota of sugar purchases from Cuba….” And on, and on.
Setting aside the more glaring travesties within that embargo setup, Cuba found itself unable to rely on the former profitably of sugar. Castro wanted to diversify the economy anyway, but “Cuba's sugar production suffered greatly at the outset of the industrialization drive in 1962. The occupational restructuring introduced by [Castro’s] government created a severe labor shortage at harvesting time.”5
Finally, we get back to D’s example of Castro’s “good principle, disastrous execution” leadership. Castro had most of the 14 robust sugar processing facilities at the time dismantled and sold off the machinery to other countries. Simultaneously, Castro’s government made a huge (and successful) effort to increase literacy rates in the country, which sounds like it involved a lot of student mobility and a decline in regular industry. To hear D tell it, Castro decided that everyone should be college educated, so he gave everyone degrees, but not a robust education.6 Subsequently, lots of farmers “felt too good for the countryside” and moved into more urban areas, but without the training or means to maintain the quality of architecture, for example, in the homes they moved to.7
Some sugar trading options returned soon after this period, but the infrastructure to process it was gone and there weren’t spare parts left to repair the remaining factories. I got the impression that some of the modern power grid issues are due to similarly sudden and drastic decisions that are hard (or impossible) to reverse or repair. The embargo doesn’t help. Current embargo terms, according to D, allow Cuba to conduct business with other countries, including US businesses with no direct ties to the Cuban government,8 but Cuba must pay upfront in cash for all imports. Oil tankers arrive from Venezuela or Argentina, but turn right around when Cuba can’t pay in cash.
Everyone in Cuba was distressed about current conditions. But older people who lived during the early days of Castro’s reforms, such as E’s mom, said that “at least things [like electricity] were more predictable with Castro,” and “if Castro came back from the dead, he’d die all over again to see this happening.”
There’s plenty of legitimate blame to go around for conditions in Cuba. The leaders of Cuba today are wealthy, yet uphold deplorable public policies because it benefits them. Which is exactly the playbook of the US government in Cuba and the US. Reading over the history of the embargo, it’s clear that when the US government says they hate communism, what they really hate is another country or leader cutting off US business on foreign soil. In other words, Americans hate having the means of production controlled by someone who isn’t actually doing the work, which, in a searing irony, is the cornerstone of capitalism.9
The Poor Will Always Be With You
Part of traveling as an Adult Third Culture Kid (ATCK) is the ability and inevitability of drawing a million parallels between worlds. TCK therapist Maria Tricarico wrote, “if I spend too much uninterrupted time in my passport country, I feel disconnected from parts of my [own] story…”. Cuba, though it is unique from China and the US, felt familiar to me in ways both comforting and jarring.
If you did happen to grow up in China like I did, some of Castro’s reform ideas probably sound familiar. It pains me that many Americans have long standing and ongoing negative connotations of China because of anti-communist propaganda and racism. I want to expound on the realization I had in Cuba of dissonant political terms converging into similar outcomes, especially in the ways we experience and conceptualize of poverty.
Most people in Cuba today are poor. Some kids ask tourists for money and you’re expected to tip attendants at museums and restrooms, but I didn’t see anyone road-side begging like I do in the US. In Havana I saw one person sleeping at the foot of a massive monument and one person sitting on a bench in a public park who looked unwashed and disheveled. But I didn’t see any slums, shacks, tent or under-bridge living, or people carrying around their belongings either in the countryside or cities.
Witnessing poverty abroad rightfully encourages many Americans to recognize our privilege.10 “We have to fix this” is the moral response to witnessing or experiencing poverty. Curiously, Americans who recognize poverty abroad often fail to address it at home. Homelessness in the US is skyrocketing (a 12% increase from 2022 to 2023) but there have been obvious examples of people living on the streets in most American towns and cities for some time. Moreover, many Americans facing insurmountable poverty do everything in their power to look clean and tidy because homeless people are abused in our society. Yet we’re more offended by the sight of poverty than by its reality, so some cities have announced that it’s illegal to be homeless.
The inclination to lament lack of resources in Cuba or China (where extreme poverty has been largely eradicated) is right, but not while ignoring or punishing impoverished people at home.
While the policies are different, there are policies that exacerbate poverty in both Cuba and the US. When leaders say, “this is a complex issue to solve,” it’s true that the circumstances of individual lives, and therefore all societies, are complex. And yet principles of treating each other with dignity and care are not complex, especially since the resources to eradicate poverty exist, so keeping or implementing bad policies that “complicate” a government’s duty to serve the people is corrupt and immoral.
Traveling in Cuba didn’t make me love communism, but it continues to make me angry when “democracy good, communism bad” is a prevalent undercurrent in conversations about people and places that I love. While poverty and corruption in Cuba and the US have resulted from Communist-Socialist and Democratic-Republic labeled governments, neither operates on the ideologies they profess.11 Or more accurately, they do, and both are destructive.
Groups who call(ed) themselves Communists are indeed responsible for mass murder and destruction. So are Democracies. So are Christians. So are Muslims. Etc. It becomes meaningless to say, “well, they call themselves Christian, but they aren’t acting like a real Christian.” We don’t get to say whether other people’s definitions of themselves are real or not, we only have the opportunity to try and live by our own ideals.
Power and money are almost inevitably corrupting agents. I don’t mean to paint with so broad a brush as to say that there is no such thing as degrees of social health or corruption. I am against any glamorization of suffering. The average Cuban is significantly poorer than I am. I can get myself to a medical facility and receive care, even if it’s extortion. That hardly makes me grateful to my own government. I have zero doubt that my elected officials would sooner watch me suffer unto death than sacrifice their personal power, because they do it every day, both to American citizens and abroad. Remember? You’re not allowed to be homeless, and the embargo was founded on a plan to “decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.”
Easy Does It
Arriving in the Miami airport on our way back home, one of the first things I noticed was the smell of food. We ate Subway and empanadas. My cellphone service worked again, and I could easily read signs and communicate with TSA.
I love our home in North Carolina and I love the feeling of returning home, even from vacation. I did feel some relief that we “got out” because I felt the collective stress of the unknown, but I didn’t want or need to “escape” Cuba. I’ve been contemplating what makes a person say, “thank goodness I’m here, and not there?”
My answer depends on two factors: familiarity and belief. Most of us feel a sense of home and belonging in terms of familiarity. Familiarity can be nourished over time, but it has deep roots in childhood. Cuba felt familiar to me, because of some similarities to China, in a way that the United States never has. Cuba transported me to the best parts of my childhood: confidence in my parent’s ability to guide me through the unknown, enjoying fruit and playing soccer with my family and strangers, being poor but feeling rich, registering industrial collapse as typical. I felt relaxed in Cuba.
I am psychologically at home in crisis or “developing world inconveniences” because the parameters of the problem are apparent and the needs are acknowledged, instead of denied, ignored, or lied about. But of course familiarity with ceaseless distress is also traumatic. Familiarity helps define a sense of home, but familiarity with losing your home, or losing peace at home, is a wound.
Thus the importance of belief. We tend to feel good in a place where we believe our own trajectory and that of society around us is improving or is reasonably likely to improve. Lack of belief in a good future in one’s location creates a social fight, flight, or freeze response. Many Cubans and Chinese and some Americans leave their home countries in hopes of a future to believe in elsewhere. Some stay and fight for a future they hope for. And plenty of people are frozen by circumstance or loss of belief.
I think many Americans don’t feel the similarities between China, or Cuba, or elsewhere and the US as familiarity because there remains a gap of ease. While ease is often felt in the context of familiarity, we’re sometimes lulled into equating ease with freedom. The distinction between familiarity and ease is very apparent in countries like Cuba or China, where excessive state involvement in services and commerce evaporates ease - think of the tomato example.
Excessive capitalist involvement merges services and commerce to form abominations like privatized health insurance, but it does make some things much easier, like shopping from Amazon. Capitalist ease is antithetical to freedom because it’s afforded by the exploitation of the working poor, both domestically and abroad, like wages and working conditions of Amazon employees in relation to exponentially increased shareholder wealth. Inconvenience is not your enemy, it’s corrupted power that is an enemy to freedom.
A criticism I’ve heard repeatedly of communist economies is that if everyone makes the same amount of money, people aren’t incentivized to excel, or even work at all. There are examples to that point, such as doctors leaving Cuba. Yet making communism the economic punching bag doesn’t improve anyone’s life. There are people who will do what they love regardless of pay in both communist and capitalist economies, often at great cost to themselves.
Across from our first AirBnB in Havana, there was a man sanding the paint off an old car with a brillo pad. He made very slow progress over the three days we watched him, but he kept at it. Next door, some renovations were underway. Three men were making a door or some sort of reinforced panel from scrap planks and a hand saw. I rode in a 1953 Pontiac retrofit with a Hyundai engine. These are not easy ways to get jobs done, but they do require expertise and innovation.
Capitalism crushes craftsmanship because it takes time to hand make things. Why make art if a machine can produce more, faster? Why employ people who don’t produce like machines, or who question the distribution of profit? And so art becomes defiance under capitalism. An artist does not labor under the illusion that harder work can earn a way into the (m/b)illionaire class.
In Old Havana, the most touristy area we visited, plenty of people pester you to buy things or invite you to take a picture with them or burst into song, and then ask for money. An expectation to pay for something I didn’t ask for distresses me anywhere in the world. As part of the embargo, tourism is not a legal reason to visit Cuba, but “supporting the Cuban people” is. I give people in the US money too, of my own accord, for no reason other than support. I like when a government supports people. I do not like when a government tells me how I must support people.
I begrudgingly tipped a lot of people in Cuba for doing nothing. I asked a security guard if I could take a picture through the doorway of a closed museum, he said yes, and then asked for money. Once, I bought ice cream for a little girl who materialized in the midst of our family at the shop counter. Many more children suddenly appeared, but I didn’t buy more ice cream. Then I sat down to rest and watched some boys play marbles in the dirt. They immediately stopped their game to ask me for money. I didn’t tip them.
An elderly man followed us, singing jazz age ballads very well. Some listeners were lamenting that his talent was going unrecognized because he could be headlining clubs. I don’t know if he was robbed of a more dazzling career, but I think he loved singing. Art is so often the experience we make of it, both as the performer or the audience. I do not like giving money out of pity or obligation, especially when the art is great. I regret the forces at play, including inside me, that robbed me of being able to listen in peace and support that singer out of gratitude and enjoyment. (My family did tip him.)
I didn’t learn until after getting home that the U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) “holds that U.S. citizens may not receive goods or services for free from any Cuban national.” It’s hard to imagine a more asinine example of capitalism criminalizing communism. It’s illegal to be a tourist, it’s also illegal to do anything for free. It’s difficult to enjoy art for free when it’s a crime to share it for free.
It is a monumental undertaking to make Cuba believable again. I think Americans can identify heavily. Our governments are failures at caring for people and successful at being thugs. I have no interest in making those models more believable, so I resist the idea that experiencing Cuba should first and foremost elicit gratefulness for the ways in which my life is different.
Guarded privilege is weak power and at best a temporary shield for ease. The purpose of recognizing one’s privilege is not to protect it, but to use it as a crowbar in service of people who our governments increasingly deem illegal to exist. We begin to build a future to believe in when we see our own story within the story of others.
Limited to my proximity to my mom, the only person in our traveling group of 11 people who speaks Spanish, plus four locals who spoke English. I’ve done my best to represent what I understood from my conversations, but this is vibes-style reporting rather than full confidence in every detail of the economic apparatus.
Transportation was by far the highest cost in-country due to the scarcity and cost of fuel.
More than once, our Cuban friends announced that Cubans openly teach, display, and talk about the evils of slavery in their past, “unlike in America.”
Quotations in this section are from the Wiki page on the embargo and are further cited on that page.
With respect to Cuban history told by Cubans, it’s worth pointing out that Cuba’s free education system has a great reputation, especially in the area of medical research. For example, they developed 5 independent COVID vaccines and shared them generously with other nations.
Upkeep and preservation of infrastructure and quality architecture is beyond the financial means of working class people to maintain or improve in the United States as well, an important point in the devaluation of art and craftsmanship in capitalist systems.
Trump’s prosecutors dinged him for this! Not that it matters, LOL.
“Capitalism is not, as it is commonly misunderstood, ‘an economic system in which you work for money and then use that money to buy the things that you want and need.’ Capitalism is better understood as ‘an economic system in which some people leverage their capital (the things they already own) to make money, while everyone else has to work for their money.’” - MK. See footnote 11 for more depth.
Speaking for myself, in China (1994-2007) my complexion was idealized and my citizenship was protective, in Cuba I had mobility through hiring transportation and the ability to pay for what I needed, and in the US my race and moderate generational wealth are markers of privilege.