00:00This is Apropos.
00:03The island economy was already struggling under the burden of decades of U.S. sanctions,
00:08but the situation in Cuba has rapidly deteriorated since Donald Trump signed an executive order
00:13threatening to impose tariffs on countries that sell or provide oil to the Caribbean nation.
00:19As airlines suspend flights to the island, long queues are forming at gas stations with fewer buses running,
00:26power cuts hitting homes, hospitals and other state institutions.
00:30Emerald Maxwell has the latest.
00:33In the streets of Havana, coal sellers are everywhere.
00:37Amid power outages lasting up to 10 hours and as shortages of fuel, food and medicine begin to bite,
00:44hard-pressed Cubans are having to be resourceful.
00:48The situation is getting even more complicated than it was, so we're out looking for coal.
00:52Our budget doesn't stretch to an electric generator or an EcoFlow battery or anything like that.
01:00Charcoal is the most affordable option.
01:02It's not exactly cheap, but at least it solves the problem.
01:07No foreign fuel or oil tanker has arrived in Cuba in weeks, meaning many are resorting to cooking with coal.
01:14Those who can afford it, meanwhile, have been turning to solar panels.
01:18Installers have seen demand go through the roof.
01:20These last few weeks and months have been incredible in terms of the sheer level of demand.
01:31Since U.S. President Donald Trump severed the island's access to its primary petroleum sources in Venezuela and Mexico,
01:39the Cuban government has brought in emergency measures to ration what fuel is left
01:43and ease blackouts that are affecting everything from homes to hospitals.
01:48They've shuttered universities, reduced school hours and the work week and slashed public transport,
01:54leaving Cubans stranded and worried.
01:57I've got a trip to make and everything's been cancelled.
02:00There's nothing.
02:00We're stuck here and what's worse is the helplessness about what's going to happen, the uncertainty.
02:05The crisis also threatens to cut Cuba off from another vital economic lifeline,
02:12that of tourism, which looks set to continue its plummet,
02:16after Cuban officials warned airlines that they wouldn't be able to refuel their planes on the island for at least a month.
02:22For more, we're joined now by Lillian Guerra, Professor of Cuban and Caribbean History at the University of Florida.
02:30Lillian, thanks so much for being with us on the programme.
02:33We saw there in that report just how ordinary people have been struggling over the last couple of days, particularly.
02:40Talk to us a little bit more about how this crisis is affecting people there.
02:45As we know, long before this current situation, it's been very, very difficult, economically speaking, for the government in Cuba.
02:55Yes, I would say that some of the images that you showed were a bit misleading.
03:00Most Cubans would not be able to buy solar panels.
03:03Most Cubans are not even able to leave their homes.
03:07We have a situation that today is far more dire than any situation Cuba has faced in the last century.
03:14Currently, the situation is such that, you know, we have 90 percent of the food having been imported to Cuba now for years.
03:22I mean, that statistic, you know, is an official one since at least 2018, 2019.
03:30And then, you know, the fiddling with the currency to make it a one island currency provoked tremendous inflation in the economy.
03:39That was coupled with drastic efforts, I would say, on the part of the military to further control the tourist trade and to control, more importantly, not just scarcity.
03:51And that means, you know, distribution of goods by forcing people to buy them with a sort of ATM card instead of just freely buying them with currency in state stores.
04:03But but but also controlling what is the state sector of private enterprise, these small little businesses, which are now really subject to a kind of politicalization or politicization and loyalty test that they frankly were not subject to, you know, even 10 years ago.
04:22So we have a situation that I think really doesn't resemble anything we've seen before.
04:28It's far worse in some ways than what happened in the early years after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
04:34Yeah. Many observers saying this is the worst crisis in Cuba's modern history.
04:38Sounds like you would agree with that.
04:40Why exactly, Lillian, is this happening now?
04:43Why is Washington claiming that Cuba poses a threat to U.S. national security, as Donald Trump claims?
04:51Well, Donald Trump is going to claim that because he's interested in two things.
04:55He's interested in reversing the course of history and he's interested in real estate.
05:01So, you know, I don't think that Cuba is representing now more than it ever has a national security threat.
05:08I think that's an excuse in order to enable him to then prevent any fuel from arriving in Cuba.
05:15And Cuba is utterly dependent, has been for years, on Venezuelan fuel.
05:20In fact, it wasn't just using it for its own purposes.
05:23It was reselling much of the fuel that it received from Venezuela in order to secure more hard currency on the world market
05:31and then be able to fund its own businesses.
05:35The state-owned sector, the economy, really employs about 85 percent of Cubans.
05:41So we don't have a situation drastically different than we did under, we could say, the height of communism in the 1980s.
05:47The big difference is that since 2009, when Raul Castro formally took power from Fidel through the present,
05:55we have the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias, which is the armed forces of Cuba, really controlling the state capitalist economy.
06:05And I know this might be confusing for people, but effectively the government has survived because it adopted capitalism in 1991
06:12and it controlled that capitalism.
06:15It managed it.
06:16And so today we have a situation where the military owns the vast majority of the tourist base of the economy.
06:26It has doubled the number of hotels in the last five years.
06:30And it also is an extremely corrupt military that has no accountability.
06:34There's no transparency with regard to even how it pays itself.
06:40The CEOs are generals and other high-ranking officers.
06:43Now, this is not a threat to the United States.
06:46This is simply, in fact, a kind of right-wing military authoritarian dictatorship that is the kind of dictatorship
06:53that the United States historically has liked to work with in Latin America.
06:58So I actually find it really scary that we have the Trump administration, in the wake of what has happened in Venezuela,
07:05making gestures towards negotiating, in quotes, with the Cuban government.
07:11Because a transition under Trump would really be no transition at all for the Cuban people.
07:17It may very well satisfy some of his demands and would satisfy the need for the military to maintain itself in power,
07:27perhaps on the excuse that it maintains order in the country.
07:30And, yeah, because we've heard Donald Trump warning Cuba to strike a deal without really going into much detail about what exactly he's seeking there.
07:38Is Washington ultimately striving for regime change?
07:42And you mentioned Venezuela there.
07:44Are there real fears in Cuba that there might be a similar scenario about to play out there?
07:49Yes, well, I would say first that on the island there is tremendous outrage over the hypocrisy of the Cuban government.
07:58That has been the case now for decades, but it certainly has reached a sort of blowing point in the last few years.
08:05We've seen 2 million Cubans leave in between 2021, 2022, and the present at least.
08:13That is at least, you know, 20 percent of the population has gone.
08:16800,000 of them came to South Florida.
08:20And this exodus is the largest exodus ever seen in the history of the revolution.
08:28I mean, the height of immigration that occurred in the 60s never topped a million people.
08:35Between 1959 and 1979, you got about a 700,000-person exodus over that whole long decade.
08:42So what we have today is really unprecedented.
08:44I think that it's a very fragile situation.
08:48The government has no legitimacy.
08:50Miguel Diaz-Canel has no legitimacy.
08:52Raul Castro never did.
08:54And you have a very vulnerable population because it has been stripped of its ability to fight for its own economic security,
09:02to compete with state industries as entrepreneurs and to really get ahead.
09:08And there was a window in which that was happening.
09:10That was certainly happening, as I witnessed it, between around 2011 and 2017.
09:17And as often happens, you know, when the hard line in the United States shuts the door to any reforms, to the embargo, to any opening of relations,
09:25that serves the Cuban state.
09:28Because then they can go back and say that it's the United States' fault for all of its own mismanagement, corruption, and lack of accountability.
09:36So, you know, there were many, many hardliners who were jumping for joy in Cuba, in the government, when Trump took power the first time.
09:46I think they're certainly not jumping for joy now.
09:48But that doesn't mean that this kind of regime change will not be in some ways embraced on the island by people who are fed up.
09:58I think that that's a dangerous reality because if there is a regime change that is forced on the Cuban people through the Trump administration,
10:09and I would say that would not happen by landing troops on the ground.
10:13That would happen by perhaps extracting Raul Castro and some other symbolic heads of state like Miguel Díaz-Canel, but leaving intact the military.
10:23And then we really do have a situation of an official military dictatorship.
10:29And those are very, very hard to collapse, especially when they have the support of the United States.
10:35That's a dream situation for, you know, people interested in investment in Cuba and in sort of turning back the clock.
10:44And that is certainly what Trump wants.
10:46He wants to reverse history, both for his understanding of the United States, as well as power in places like Cuba,
10:54where the United States has largely been absent as a player and certainly as an investment force.
11:00Even in the 90s, when Cuba did turn to foreign investment and to joint ventures between the government and big time corporations, multinationals abroad.
11:10Lillian, lots to discuss, but we're out of time, unfortunately.
11:14Thanks so much for being with us on the program, though.
11:16That's Lillian Guerra, Professor of Cuban and Caribbean History at the University of Florida.
11:22Thank you so much.
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