The Depressing Saga of Cuban Socialism

September 29, 2024 by Dan Mitchell @ International Liberty

Since I’m a numbers wonk, I think the most powerful evidence for the failure of Cuban socialism is comparing that nation’s growth (or lack thereof) to what’s happened in Taiwan and (pre-crackdown) Hong Kong.

 

They all had similar levels of economic development 60-70 years ago.  But Taiwan and Hong Kong then zoomed ahead thanks to pro-market policies while communist-run Cuba has largely stagnated. While decades of data tell a compelling story, it also is instructive to examine how ordinary people suffer because of Cuba’s socialist system.  Here are some depressing excerpts from a recent Reuters report by Mario Fuentes and Alien Fernandez.

Cuba’s communist-run government on Monday slashed by a quarter the weight of its subsidized ration of daily bread, the latest shortage to strain a decades-old subsidies scheme created by the late Fidel Castro. The bread…will be reduced from 80 grams to 60 grams (2.1 oz), or approximately the weight of an average cookie or a small bar of soap. …The Caribbean island nation is suffering from extreme shortages of food, fuel and medicine, shortfalls that have primed a record-breaking exodus of its citizens to the nearby United States. …

Cuba earlier this year sought help from the World Food Programme to guarantee the supply of subsidized powdered milk for children, another key staple of the Cuban ration book that has recently grown scarce. Beyond the few remaining centrally planned economies like Cuba’s and North Korea’s, rationing is typically only used during war-time, natural disasters or specific contingencies.

Cookie-sized bread rations? If nothing else, the Cuban system probably limits obesity.  For our next example, I’ll start by reminding people how Venezuela’s socialists ruined that country’s once-strong oil sector.

Well, Cuba’s socialists are doing the same thing to that nation’s once-iconic sugar industry. Here are some excerpts from a BBC story by Will Grant.

For hundreds of years, sugar was the mainstay of the Cuban economy. It was not just the island’s main export but also the cornerstone of another national industry, rum. …Today, though, …the sugar industry as broken and depressed as it is now – not even when the Soviet Union’s lucrative sugar quotas dried up after the Cold War. …”There’s not enough trucks and the fuel shortages mean sometimes several days pass before we can work,” says Miguel, waiting in a tiny patch of shade for the Soviet-era lorries to arrive. …Last season, Cuba’s production fell to just 350,000 tonnes of raw sugar, an all-time low for the country, and well below the 1.3 million tonnes recorded in 2019. …Cuba now imports sugar to meet domestic demand – once unthinkable, and a far cry from the glory years when Cuban sugar was the envy of the Caribbean and exported around the world.

Cuba importing sugar?!?

Reminds me of Milton Friedman’s sarcastic quote about government and the Sahara Desert.

Only Cuba has turned satire into reality.

Let’s close by debunking (again) the silly notion that Cuba has an admirable healthcare system. Daniel Raisbeck and Jim Epstein wrote about the system for Reason. Here are some highlights.

“If there’s one thing they do right in Cuba, it’s health care,” said Michael Moore in a 2007 interview. “Cuba has the best health care system in the entire area,” according to Angela Davis… It’s a testament to the effectiveness of the Castro regime’s propaganda apparatus that this myth, so deeply at odds with reality, has persisted for so long. “The Cuban health care system is destroyed,” Rotceh Rios Molina, a Cuban doctor who escaped the country’s medical mission while stationed in Mexico…

“People are dying in the hallways,” says José Angel Sánchez, another Cuban doctor who defected from the medical mission in Venezuela… Clinics lack the most routine supplies, from antibiotics to oxygen and even running water, and their hallways are often occupied by ailing patients because there aren’t enough doctors to treat their most basic needs. Cuban hospitals are unsanitary and decrepit. It’s exactly what you’d expect in a country impoverished by communism.

Gee, isn’t socialism wonderful?

P.S. Our friends on the left are a bit sensitive about Cuba, such as Bernie Sanders. What’s most laughable is that some of them even concoct measures (such as the “Happy Planet Index” and Jeffrey Sachs’ estimate of progress on social development goals) purporting to show Cuba ahead of the United States. But at least everyone is equally poor!