Interviewed in the early 2000s, Fidel Castro (who led Cuba 1959-2006) recalled that when in 1991 ‘the Soviet Union and the Socialist camp disappeared … [Cuba] took a stunning blow … From one day to the next, that great power collapsed and left us out in the cold, all by ourselves, and we lost all our markets for sugar, we stopped receiving foodstuffs, fuel, even the wood to bury our dead in. From one day to the next, we found ourselves without fuel, without raw materials, without food, without soap, without everything’. What little Cuba produced at that time, mainly sugar, tobacco and citrus fruit, was shipped to the Soviet Union and other socialist countries.

By March 2016, when US president Barack Obama paid a historic visit to the island, one of the key pressures on Cuba seemed to be easing. No US president had strolled along Havana’s Malecón since Calvin Coolidge in 1928. But from late 2014, Havana and Washington had been engaged in an unprecedented normalisation process, led on the Cuban side by the then president, Fidel Castro’s younger brother Raúl. In 2015 the two adversaries reopened their embassies in each other’s capitals, 54 years after diplomatic ties had been cut in January 1961, a break that came a year before the embargo imposed on Cuba (a ‘blockade’, in Havana’s terminology) in February 1962, which remains in force today.

Obama believed the blockade policy initiated by John F Kennedy – and maintained, with periodic loosening and tightening, by the eight presidents who came after him – had failed. He relaxed sanctions on the country, which led to an expansion of tourism and encouraged an influx of foreign currency and US exports. At the time, the ‘updating of the Cuban socialist economic and social development model’ designed by Raúl Castro rested essentially on three foundations. Cuba’s focus on tourism (both luxury and mass-market), the controlled entry of international capital to stimulate growth and local (…)

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(1) Fidel Castro and Ignacio Ramonet, My Life, Penguin, London, 2008.

(2) See Renaud Lambert, ‘Cuba’s new socialism’, Le Monde diplomatique, English edition, May 2011.