The sun still sets over Havana. The mojitos are still cold. The vintage Chevrolets still cough their way down the Malecon. Yet something has gone terribly, terminally wrong. Cuba's tourism industry, the pulsing economic heart of this Caribbean socialist experiment, has collapsed. Not a stumble. Not a wobble. A full-faced, bone-crunching, dust-kicking tumble into the abyss. And who do we have to thank? The eagle-eyed, blockade-loving, embargo-wielding bully boys in Washington, who have turned economic pressure into an art form. A rather blunt, bludgeoning art form, but art nonetheless.
Let us set the scene. Picture a man, his face the colour of a well-worn suitcase, sweating into a guayabera shirt as he watches the tour buses roll in. Except they don't roll in. They don't roll at all. The airport tarmac is a shimmering mirage of emptiness. The hotel lobbies echo with the ghostly chime of abandoned piña coladas. The beachside vendors hawk their wares to seagulls who, quite frankly, are not interested in shell necklaces. This is the aftermath of the US's 'maximum pressure' campaign. A campaign so relentless it makes a Victorian debt collector look like a cheerful philanthropist.
Let me pour myself a restorative gin. Good lord, it's warm. That's what happens when blockades affect supply chains. Even the tonic water has a sense of grievance. But I digress. The numbers, if you can stomach them, are bleak. Tourist arrivals have plummeted faster than a drunk journalist down a Miami stairwell. The once bustling resorts of Varadero are now morgues for deckchairs. The cultural tours, the cigar factories, the rum distilleries all stand as monuments to a trade war that has lost all pretence of subtlety.
The US line, of course, is that this is about freedom and democracy. But let's be honest, it's about pique. It's the schoolyard bully who lost a game of marbles and has now sworn to salt the earth so nothing ever grows again. The Trump administration's policy of tightening the noose around Cuba's neck was not a surgical strike. It was a sledgehammer to a soufflé. And the Biden team, with all their talk of 'reviewing policy', have done precisely nothing. Reviewing policy, in Washington speak, means rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic then claiming you've built a new ship.
The consequence? A nation that has already endured a half-century of economic strangulation is now gasping for air. The black market has become the mainstream. The peso has become a punchline. And the people, the warm, resilient, irrepressible Cuban people, are left to improvise. They always do. They are masters of the 'inventar' the art of making something from nothing. But even their ingenuity has limits when faced with a superpower's grudge.
I am reminded of a conversation I had in a dimly lit paladar in Centro Habana. A man, old enough to remember Batista, looked at me over a plate of ropa vieja and said, 'They want us to beg. They want us to break. But we do not break. We bend. We sway. We survive.' It was poetic. It was defiant. And it was heartbreaking because even as he spoke, I could see the cracks. The empty shelves. The desperate eyes. The tourism collapse is not just an economic statistic. It is a human catastrophe played out in slow motion.
So here we are. The cruise ships don't come. The charter flights are cancelled. The beaches wait for tourists who are now scared off by the very real threat of being turned away at immigration or caught in a web of financial sanctions. And the US sits in its marble halls, patting itself on the back for a job well done. Congratulations, Washington. You've broken a nation's spirit. Or at least you've tried. But I'd wager my last bottle of Havana Club that Cuba will rise. It may rise slowly, painfully, on crutches made from old bicycle frames and spare parts. But it will rise. And when it does, it will have a story to tell. And I'll be there, gin in hand, to write it.
Until then, raise a glass to the lost tourists, the empty hotels, and the indomitable spirit of an island that refuses to be erased.
