Starving Cubans fleeing to America may force Biden to act

Administrations facing tough reelection campaigns avoid controversial new policy initiatives. Not surprisingly, they prefer to campaign on their successes. 

Yet, a frightening humanitarian crisis is brewing just off the Florida coast. In Cuba, rampant inflation, sharply deflating wages and severe food shortages are driving a massive migrant exodus.

Many of those who remain behind have been reduced to just one meal a day, according to the Havana residents with families in the poorer provinces and diplomats who travel around the island I spoke to. Cubans spend hours checking chat groups for information on food arrivals. Desperate Cubans must wait in long lines to put food on the table for their hungry families. 

I recently revisited Havana to update my field research on the island’s emerging class of small and medium-sized private businesses. Architects, accountants, information technologists, hotel managers and restauranteurs, manufacturers of fine body lotions and upscale t-shirts — these talented, ambitious young entrepreneurs are Cuba’s future. But many will join the flood of migrants if the island’s economy continues to decay. 

The root causes of Cuba’s deepening humanitarian crisis are multiple and complex. Cuban agriculture, long saddled by socialist planning, is collapsing, registering steep declines in the harvests of basic commodities. 

This agricultural shortfall is both a cause and effect of the island’s debilitating foreign exchange crisis. Cuba’s farmers depend upon imported petroleum, imported machinery and parts, imported seeds and fertilizers — inputs the dollar-short economy can no longer afford.  

Widespread food shortages and multiple exchange rates (the result of a botched currency reform) have given rise to an array of food retail outlets. Hungry Cubans must scurry around town, checking in turn government stores, fruit-and-vegetable markets (with controlled prices) and private-sector distributors (with free-market prices). “Informal” black markets abound. 

Famously, the socialist government runs a highly subsidized ration system. Formerly, these bodegas guaranteed all Cubans access to basic foodstuffs. Today, these shelves are mostly empty. When shipments arrive of rice, eggs, or cooking oil, lines quickly form until supplies are exhausted.  

To bolster its foreign exchange, the Cuban government, like many of its Caribbean neighbors, has bet heavily on tourism. But this gamble, too, has turned sour.   

To tighten the noose around Cuba’s economy, President Donald Trump sharply restricted U.S. tourism, turning back the clock on the Obama-era relaxation that had encouraged U.S. visitors. And then came COVID-19, another body blow to the tourism-dependent Cuban economy.  

Importantly, President Joe Biden, and contrary to his 2020 campaign pledges, has retained many of the Trump-era travel restrictions. Consequently, U.S. tourists are not arriving in nearly the numbers seen during the Obama thaw. 

Today, Havana’s tourism districts are eerily quiet, hotel rooms are vacant, many restaurants are shuttered and nightclubs are dark. The anticipated influx of tourism dollars — which could have financed imports of foodstuffs — has not materialized. 

Cuban authorities have not released data on malnutrition and would be loath to acknowledge a humanitarian crisis in a society built around meeting basic needs. However,  international experts do not doubt the severity of Cuba’s hunger problem, especially in the nation’s poorer eastern provinces. 

The Cuban government ought to have abandoned its grossly inefficient socialist agricultural practices long ago. Now, it is too late for agricultural reform to respond to the immediate emergency in food security.  

Instead, to relieve some of these accumulated pressures, the Cuban government has relied upon the relatively liberal U.S. immigration policies toward Cubans. Some 450,000 Cubans have emigrated to the U.S. in the last two years. Hundreds of thousands more have departed to other nations, including Spain, Italy, Canada and Mexico.   

Most of these migrants are of working age and send a portion of their earnings back to family and friends on the island. The precise quantities of these remittances are unknown but likely equal billions of dollars per year. With dollars and euros in hand, Cuban households can use these remittances to import desperately needed food supplies. 

So mass emigration has a double payoff: fewer hungry consumers on the island and a surge in hard currency to pay for imported basic foodstuffs. But it’s still not sufficient to feed 10 million Cubans. 

Another problem: the remittances are distributed unequally, adding to the island’s growing inequalities. Cubans with access to foreign exchange can at least feed their families. Those without foreign-based benefactors face chronic food scarcities. 

Cuba’s food insecurity is a protracted crisis long in the making. Investment rates in agriculture, as throughout the stagnant Cuban economy, have been deficient and system-wide mismanagement is legendary.  

But there is no doubt that comprehensive U.S. economic sanctions — many in place for decades but tightened during Trump and mostly maintained by Biden — are a major causal factor behind the current emergency. Indeed, that is precisely the intention of tough sanctions: to squeeze the Cuban economy until it screams. Well, now it is screaming, only the screams are the weak voices of starving children.  

The purported targets of the sanctions, the Communist Party elites, remain well-fed. Certainly, those who appear from time to time on public television show no signs of weight loss. 

The Biden administration does not want to deal with Cuba — always a politically contentious issue — during its reelection drive. But can it remain indifferent to mass hunger and malnutrition among millions of people living only 100 miles off the Florida coast? And a humanitarian crisis that is, in part, of its own making? 

Richard E. Feinberg, professor emeritus at UC San Diego, recently returned from a weeklong visit to Cuba. He is the author of “Open for Business: Building the New Cuban Economy” (Brookings, 2016).