How to Rebuild Cuba’s Crumbling Economy
A Cuba expert imagines a bold reform plan drafted in Havana and blessed by Washington.
Photographer: Ben Denzer for Bloomberg Businessweek
Cuba is in truly dire straits. The Caribbean island is being crushed between two powerful opposing forces: a Trump administration intent on forcing regime change with a punishing oil blockade and a defiant Cuban Communist Party wedded to an anachronistic state-led model and a deep distrust of the revolution’s “historic enemy.”
This is an unsustainable degree of stress for an economy made brittle after decades of being drained of two essential components—people and capital. Since 2019, at least 1.5 million Cubans, 15% of the population, have abandoned their homeland, fleeing a repressive bureaucracy to seek a better life abroad. This exodus, on top of a low fertility rate, has left behind an aging populace: About a quarter of Cubans are older than 60, one of the highest shares in Latin America.