Category: Dossier Cuba 21 English

Remittances, the government’s main source of foreign currency income, fell 43% in 2024 compared to the previous year and 70% compared to 2019.

With fragile governability, high levels of social discontent and a massive exodus of one million Cubans in the last three years, the change of regimen in Cuba is possible in 2025.

GAESA has lost control of the remittance business in Cuba, due to a quiet “citizens’ financial rebellion” against its banking monopoly. Just over 95% of the flow of remittances from the Cuban diaspora to the island is being channeled through a network of more than 150 “informal banks”. GAESA will only collect around US$81.6 million at the end of this year.

Between January and October 2024, 1,718,636 visitors arrived, a drop of 48.23% compared to the same period in 2019, before the pandemic. In 2023, tourism revenues reached only US$1.216 billion, a drop of 61.82% compared to the US$3.185 billion obtained in 2019. The recovery of tourism in Cuba requires profound structural changes.

The transportation sector is another important sector of the economy that is a victim of the looting and the control that GAESA -the main oligarchic-mafioso organization of the Cuban regime- has over the country’s finances.

Maduro’s mega-fraud turned out to be useless. He lost and everybody knows it. However, his will to cling to power by blood and fire following Havana’s instructions has turned Venezuela into a neuralgic problem for regional and international stability. But the struggle for Venezuela’s future is far from over.

During the first half of 2024 reveals a worrysome increase in crime compared to the same period of the previous year. In total, 432 crimes were reported between January and June 2024, representing a daily average of 2.37 crimes.

2023 was the year in which crime began to be recognized as a problem in Cuba. Throughout 2023, OCAC monitored and collected a total of 649 crime reports in Cuba, which is equivalent to almost two crimes per day.

The sharp drop of more than 50% of the Cuba’s three main lines of income – medical exports, remittances and tourism – have hastened the collapse of the governance regime. The celebration of 26 of July is a day that begins to mark the countdown to the extinction of the Cuban regime, given the depth of the crisis in which it is mired and its manifest incapacity to get out of it.

The fall of the Cuban peso (CUP) against the dollar experienced in recent weeks denotes the government’s inability to reverse this situation that has already gotten out of control.  The big culprits of inflation are GAESA -linked to the Castro clan and their cronies- and Miguel Díaz Canel, the president imposed by Raúl Castro.

The nationalization of property by suppressing the freedom of enterprise and the market is the key element that in the end – in the absence of a foreign patron to finance its shortcomings – has led to the multi-systemic crisis that has pushed more than 80% of the Cuban population into extreme poverty.

It is increasingly common to hear Cubans say that Cuba is the same or worse than Haiti.  In Cuba, with a different history than Haiti, the implementation of a totalitarian system after 1959 generated the basis for the current deplorable state of affairs. As a result, Cuba, from one of the most progressive Latin American countries up to that date, in the year 2024 approaches Haiti: the most backward country in the Western Hemisphere.