Raúl Castro faces the economic crisis
After Fidel Castro's death on November 25, 2016, rumors of change in Cuban society began to circulate. In reality, long before his death, Fidel had handed over the reins of power to his brother Raúl, who had maintained the same political course, albeit listening to the demands of Cuban youth and intellectuals. While there has been no real political change over the last ten years, certain rights have been conceded to the population. For example, since 2010, Cubans have been allowed to own a cell phone, a computer, a DVD player, a car and an apartment. These are deceptive measures, given that all these goods remain economically inaccessible to the majority. Cubans have recently been able to connect to the Internet (wifi and 3G networks) and communicate freely with the rest of the world, something unthinkable 15 years ago.
Some more significant reforms to encourage private sector development were launched in the early 2010s. Faced with the global economic crisis, the government, forced to lay off 500,000 civil servants between 2010 and 2011, decided to encourage self-employment. As early as 2011, thousands of licenses were granted to individuals, enabling them to open their own businesses (although a law limiting the creation of one business per person would soon limit this entrepreneurial freedom). This has enabled many restaurateurs to open their own establishments. New casas particulares (guesthouses) have sprung up, and many drivers have been able to set up on their own. As a result, the number of mini-negotiations in Cuba has grown exponentially, with 178 jobs officially available in the private sector. By levying taxes on the revenue from these, the government has been able to replenish the coffers: in 2016, at the party congress, Raúl Castro in fact welcomed a slight improvement in growth (+4% in 2015). If the private sector has made it possible to reap wealth, it's because it is essentially dependent on tourism, which was doing rather well in Cuba during the 2010 decade. But when the Covid-19 crisis hit the world, the situation changed.
Post-castro and the pandemic
In April 2018, Raúl Castro's right-hand man Miguel Díaz-Canel (64) was elected by the National Assembly with 99.83% of the vote. Not surprisingly, he was the only candidate. An engineer by training, Miguel Díaz-Canel has held various positions in the administration and within the Cuban Communist Party. However, this change of presidency remains a change of facade, since until 2021, Raúl Castro remains First Secretary of the Communist Party, "the highest governing body in Cuban society". Miguel Díaz-Canel will succeed Raúl Castro as First Secretary of the party on April 19, 2021. In the meantime, a new constitution, approved by 86% of Cuban citizens at the beginning of 2019, once again promotes the private sector, without adding anything to the reforms of 2011. The only real changes are the addition of a prime minister and the limiting of presidential terms to a maximum of two. State-owned companies remain all-powerful and are the main economic and industrial players. In practice, the economy - apart from the black market - remains dominated by state capitalism.
When the global pandemic struck in early 2019, Cuba immediately closed its borders, only to reopen them a year and a half later, on November 15, 2021. During this period, the many Cubans whose main source of income was tourism found themselves penniless, exacerbating an already precarious situation. The pressure cooker exploded in the summer of 2021, when on July 11 and 12, thousands of Cubans demonstrated to cries of "We're hungry" and "Down with dictatorship". This popular movement, the largest in Cuba since Fidel Castro's Revolution, resulted in the imprisonment of more than 700 Cuban citizens over the following months. On October 13, 2023, Miguel Díaz-Canel was re-elected for a further 5 years at the head of Cuba with 97.66% of the vote. On March 17, 2024, protests broke out in Santiago de Cuba and Bayamo, in the east of the country, shouting "corriente y comida" ("electricity and water"). In 2024, the shortage of energy resources (electricity, water, gasoline) and food in Cuba reached an all-time high. While the pandemic and the US embargo are clearly the main reasons for this situation, there are other factors to explain it, such as the staggering devaluation of the peso, the electricity crisis due to poor maintenance (lack of parts), and the dysfunctional nature of the Cuban production system (no agriculture, import-dependent economy). While the gradual liberalization of the economy agreed by the regime (creation of mipymes - small and medium-sized enterprises - in September 2021) offers a breath of fresh air to many Cubans, this effort remains insufficient. Just look at the 2024 GDP estimated at $27.4 billion, more than four times lower than in 2020 ($108 billion). Over the same period, the number of tourists has fallen from 5 million (2020) to 2.5 million (2024 estimates). Not very encouraging figures...
Relations with the United States are still tense
Closer ties under the Obama administration. The US embargo on Cuba, imposed in 1962, is still in force in 2022. However, Obama is credited with bringing the two countries closer together. In January 2011, he authorized American travel to Cuba for academic, cultural, religious or sporting purposes. That same year, Obama also lifted travel restrictions for Cuban-Americans wishing to visit family in Cuba, allowing Cuban exiles to visit the island as often as they like. The caps on payments into Cuban accounts have also been lifted. Finally, on December 17, 2014, diplomatic relations between Cuba and the United States, under the impetus of Obama and Raúl Castro, were re-established. On July 20, 2015, a Cuban embassy opened in Washington and an American embassy opened in Havana. Obama finally visited Cuba in March 2016, for a historic three-day visit. He says he wants to continue this policy of openness. He relaxed the economic embargo, but did not repeal it.
In January 2017, Donald Trump's arrival in power marked a serious halt to the warming of relations with Cuba. Lifting the embargo became a utopian dream. While he did not ban American citizens from traveling to Cuba, the Republican president did introduce restrictive measures. As a result, Americans can only travel to the island through an American agency, which will ensure that travelers contribute to the enrichment of the population, but under no circumstances to the Cuban state. A way of encouraging private enterprise while asserting its opposition to the Cuban regime. At the end of 2017, the diplomatic crisis known as the "acoustic attacks" came to put a serious brake on US-Cuban rapprochement. Several diplomats at the American embassy in Havana suffered dizziness and cognitive and hearing problems, but no one was able to explain the reason for the Havana Syndrome. The United States, suspecting an attack by the Cuban state, repatriated some of its diplomatic staff and expelled Cuban diplomats from American territory in retaliation. To date, no investigation has clarified either the syndrome or the person responsible. And given that Cuba had no interest in worsening its relations with the United States, there are whispers on Cuban territory that these acoustic attacks were the work of another foreign power, why not China?
Joe Biden, who succeeds Trump in 2021 and spent 8 years as Obama's vice-president, seems surprisingly disinclined to restore friendly relations with neighboring Cuba.
Commentators assure us that the man probably prefers to preserve his electoral interests in Florida, where the anti-Castro Cuban-American community is highly influential. In 2021, the Biden administration, though rather inclined to remove Cuba from its blacklist (a list of countries supporting terrorism to which Trump had added Cuba in 2019), was finally moving in the opposite direction. Since January 2021, anyone who has visited Cuba has had their ESTA (temporary tourist visa) automatically and permanently invalidated. The only way to travel to the USA after visiting Cuba is to apply for a (long and tedious) 10-year tourist visa... Similarly, any vessel (merchant or pleasure) transiting Cuban waters is denied access to US shores for six months. Indirect economic coercion. At the same time, since January 2021, the American Embassy has resumed issuing visas to Cubans wishing to settle in the United States.
The case of Guantánamo
A U.S. possession for over a century, the Guantánamo naval base (on the southeastern tip of Cuban territory) has been equipped since 2002 with a penitentiary center in which the U.S. holds detainees from the war waged "against terrorism". A true anomaly, this base continues to agitate Cuban geopolitics. In 2006, the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed the first special tribunals set up to try "terrorists" held at the Guantánamo base. A law passed by the U.S. Congress immediately established new special courts and prohibited detainees from taking civil action to challenge their detention. On June 12, 2008, the Supreme Court (America's highest court) renewed its disapproval, citingHabeas corpus: this procedure enables a common law judge to rule on the legality or otherwise of a person's detention and, if necessary, order his or her release. As a result, detainees liable to be brought before a special court are able to appeal to the civil courts on the issue of their detention, which is deemed illegal under international law.
On January 22, 2009, a few days after his inauguration, President Barack Obama made it clear that he wanted to put an end to the Guantánamo camp by signing a presidential decree announcing its closure in 2010. Trials of prisoners were to be suspended until they could be moved to a new camp. Soon, however, tensions between the Obama administration and the Guantánamo military commissions were such that the prison's closure was postponed indefinitely... During his election campaign, Joe Biden, the current U.S. President, promised to put an end to this prison with its dubious human rights reputation, but by 2022 - 20 years after its opening - there was no political will to close the detention camp. From July 5 to 8, 2023, an American nuclear-powered submarine remained at anchor in Guantánamo Bay, an act denounced on July 11 of the same year by the Cuban Minister of Foreign Affairs as a "provocative escalation by the United States, whose political and strategic motives are not known". On Thursday June 13, one day after the arrival of a Russian flotilla in Havana Bay - comprising a nuclear-powered submarine, a frigate, an oil tanker and a salvage tug - following exercises in the Atlantic, an American nuclear submarine (the USS Helena) was once again present in Guantánamo Bay.
