The exodus began in 2021, when anti-government rallies filled the streets, protesting oppressive policies and the lack of medicine and food. Castro had died five years before, but the Communist Party retained its grip on power, and it put down the protests harshly, jailing and beating hundreds of demonstrators. Since then, an estimated eighteen per cent of Cubans—as many as two million residents—have left. This represents the largest outflux in the sixty-six-year span of the tumultuous Revolution.
The government is ripe for overthrow. But this has been said many times before. Is this time any different? Anderson, who visited the country recently, senses it might be. He writes,
Critics have been predicting that the regime in Havana is about to collapse since the demise of the Soviet Union, thirty-five years ago. During my recent visit, though, the situation felt unusually tenuous. It is as if the convergence of penury, incapacity, and decline has finally become impossible to ignore. Cuba has many chronic problems, but the essential one is that its economy doesn’t provide for its people. After Fidel Castro stepped down as President, in 2008, he made a rare admission of his government’s inability to run the economy: “The Cuban model doesn’t even work for us anymore.” Castro had been in office for forty-nine years. His brother Raúl succeeded him for nine years more, and an acolyte of theirs named Miguel Díaz-Canel has led for the past six. None of them has been able to reverse the slide.
I hope Anderson is right. One of the most beautiful islands in the world, populated by an incredibly resourceful, resilient, spirited people – Cuba is shackled by a horrible, oppressive system of government. It’s not going to be easy to get free of it. But that is what Cubans have to do – rise up and overthrow the bastards who control them. They did it before; they can do it again.
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