It wasn’t long ago that Havana’s Plaza of the Revolution was packed with American tourists knocking into each other with selfie sticks while taking photos of the iconic image of the revolutionary Che Guevara and trying to catch a ride in a candy-apple red 1952 Chevrolet Bel-Air.
Today, those polished 1950s-era American convertibles that came to symbolize quintessential Cuba sit empty, the tourists they once carried largely gone.
The drivers spend their lives like most Cubans do: coping with prolonged power outages, standing in line at poorly stocked supermarkets and watching their friends, family and neighbors — sick of all the hardships — pack up and leave.
Ten years ago, President Barack Obama stunned the world by restoring diplomatic relations with Cuba, ending more than 50 years of Cold War estrangement between the United States and a country with which it had once been on the brink of nuclear war.
For two and half years, Cuba brimmed with enthusiasm amid a remarkable wave of investment and tourism, fueled by deals signed by major American companies such as Google, AT&T and Major League Baseball.
But a financial implosion caused by a cascade of factors — the tightening of U.S. policy by the Trump administration, Cuba’s mismanagement of its economy, the crushing effect of the Covid-19 pandemic — has kept visitors away and launched an immigration exodus of epic proportions.
Tourism, once a lifeblood of Cuba’s economy, has collapsed, down nearly 50 percent since 2017, with new U.S. visa regulations making it harder for even Europeans to travel there.
“The comparison between then and now is literally night and day,” said Luis Manuel Pérez, who works as a chauffeur.
A former engineering professor, Mr. Pérez, 57, once had a stream of customers who paid $40 an hour to ride in a classic car. Now, he’s lucky to land one a day.
“The difference is abysmal,” he said.
Many of the thousands of private businesses that the Cuban government allowed to open in recent years are trying to stay afloat after losing so many workers to migration. Streets are filled with garbage as fuel shortages impede trash pickup.
Many Cubans put it succinctly: 10 years ago, there was hope. Now, there’s despair.
“You go on the street, and people’s smiles are fading,’’ said Adriana Heredia Sánchez, who owns a clothing store in Old Havana.
Cuba’s unraveling underscores the United States’ oversized role in the country, and comes as Donald J. Trump is about to return to the White House: He has nominated Marco Rubio, a Republican senator from Florida and a Cuba hard-liner, to be secretary of state.
By many measures, Cuba is suffering its worst crisis since Fidel Castro seized power 66 years ago, surpassing even the early 1990s when the dissolution of the Soviet Union left Cuba without its chief lifeline.
Cuba has suffered three nationwide blackouts since October. Official figures show the population has plunged by at least one million, or 10 percent, since the pandemic. More than 675,000 of those Cubans moved to the United States.
Even the infant mortality rate, which communist rulers had so proudly brought to levels lower than the United States, has been climbing.
Cuba was one of the few countries in Latin America touted for eliminating child malnutrition. But today its milk rations for children, as well as staples such as rice and beans, are often delivered late to state-run stores, if at all.
The sense of misery is a far cry from the excitement felt the week in 2016 when Mr. Obama attended a Tampa Bay Rays baseball game in Havana with Cuban President Raúl Castro.
“If Obama had run for president in Cuba, he would have been elected,” Jaime Morales, a tour guide in Havana, said laughing.
Mr. Obama also eased U.S. policy toward the island, allowing American cruise ships to dock in Cuba, more U.S. airlines to fly there and more Americans to visit.
Then, President Trump reversed course. In 2018, after mysterious illnesses befell U.S. embassy employees, which some believed to be an attack by a hostile nation, he sent so many workers home that it effectively closed the embassy. (The Biden administration reopened it in 2023.)
In his last days in office, Mr. Trump also returned Cuba to a list of state sponsors of terrorism, a designation severely limiting its ability to do business globally and that President Biden kept in place.
Mr. Morales, 44, recalls that a ship was already at port when the cruise policy was revoked: He was at a pier waiting for passengers with reservations for his walking tours of Havana, but nobody disembarked.
“It was like a bucket of cold water in the face,” he said. “The fantasy had ended.”
Ricardo Zúniga, a top Obama aide who conducted the secret negotiations to restore diplomatic ties, acknowledged that the administration failed to calculate how strongly allies loyal to Fidel Castro would oppose U.S. measures after the former leader spoke out against them publicly.
Though there was never an official quid pro quo for the lifting of travel and trade restrictions, Cuba freed political prisoners and broadly agreed to increase internet access and permit more private enterprise.
But the government was slow to authorize contracts with U.S. companies, while small businesses faced many bureaucratic roadblocks.
Fidel Castro knew that increased internet access and economic freedoms would lead more people to question Cuba’s lack of basic rights and could undermine the regime, Mr. Zúniga said. Castro saw the moves as a U.S. Trojan horse, and “that’s 100 percent what it was,” he said.
“My biggest takeaway is that Cuban government leadership never took advantage of opportunities to allow for gradual change in response to popular will,” he said. “So now they are stuck with social collapse.”
Ben Rhodes, another former Obama aide who worked on the negotiations, said that Mr. Biden’s decision to largely keep the Trump policies was particularly damaging, because it made them “bipartisan.”
“What U.S. interests are advanced by trying to turn a country 90 miles from Florida into a failed state with a starving population?” he said.
Two senior Biden administration officials defended its Cuba policy, noting that Mr. Biden did reverse some restrictions. It lifted a cap on how much money Cubans in the United States could send home, increased flights and created more banking opportunities for Cuban entrepreneurs.
The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because the administration did not authorize on-the-record-interviews.
But Cuba, one of the officials said, never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
Cuba’s harsh crackdown of a popular uprising in 2021 left hundreds of people in prison, which made it harder for Mr. Biden to justify easing restrictions, the official said.
Several Cuban American members of Congress who favored the restrictions also held considerable sway, and critics said the White House was concerned about the political landscape ahead of November’s election.
Mr. Rubio and other Republicans who helped shape Mr. Trump’s Cuba policy did not return requests for comment.
The Cuban government said recently that Mr. Obama’s brief rapprochement was positive for the country, but it was followed by eight years of aggression. Officials on Friday held a large protest outside the U.S. embassy.
José Ramón Cabañas Rodríguez, Cuba’s first ambassador to Washington when the embassies reopened in July 2015, said the United States was to blame for Cuba’s ills.
The Trump administration helped trigger mass arrivals at the southern border by shutting down visa operations, which forced Cubans to take irregular paths to the United States, he said.
The justifications for cutting back diplomatic relations, like accusing Cuba of sending troops to Venezuela or sickening embassy employees, were absurd, he said. “They simply lied,” he said.
Cuba’s inability to maintain its electric grid is directly tied to U.S. sanctions that cut the country’s income, he said.
“We’re concerned about the deterioration of the population’s standard of living, which is a fact, and it is tangible,” said Mr. Cabañas, who is now director of the government’s Center for International Policy Research.
“But at the same time, this has not been a country that sits on its hands waiting for someone to bring a solution,” he added. “We have lived through other previous cycles which impacted the quality of life, which many times were linked to hostile U.S. policy.”
Many Cubans have grown tired of their government blaming Washington, said Arianna R. Delgado, a makeup artist who left Cuba this year for Miami.
“Let’s be clear: Cuba was always bad, but now the situation is not that there’s less; it’s that there’s nothing,” she said through tears. “Now it’s a concentration camp, and the whole world has to know it.”
Rubén Salazar, 58, said people are cooking with charcoal, because there’s not enough gas.
“There’s no life here,” he said, “Cubans have no future.”
A pharmacy in Havana’s Vedado neighborhood doles out 200 numbered tickets the day before medicines are delivered. As a result, people must line up for hours, twice.
“Sometimes there are medicines that run out before they get to 200,” said Maritza González, 54, a teacher’s assistant, who needed an asthma inhaler. She’s found one only once this year. “Sometimes, they run out before they get to 50.”
On this day, she was No. 136.
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