Cuba Libre

July 15, 2021·53 min·4 clips

Cuba just saw its biggest protests in 60 years—what does this mean for the regime?

1. Worldly from Vox Media covers Cuba's largest street protests since the revolution, featuring Michael Bustamante of Florida International University as the expert guest. 2. Bustamante is an associate professor of Latin American history at Florida International University and the author of 'Cuban Memory Wars: Retrospective Politics in Revolution and Exile.' 3. The episode's core question is why protests of this scale and geographic reach are happening now, and what they mean for US-Cuba foreign policy. 4. The protests spread from multiple cities and towns across Cuba, not just Havana, which is what makes them historically unprecedented; the 1994 demonstrations, the last comparable moment, never left the capital. 5. Bustamante identifies four converging factors behind the crisis: Venezuela's economic collapse reducing Cuban subsidies, Trump administration sanctions constraining trade and remittances, the Cuban government's failure to follow through on modest market reforms, and COVID destroying tourism. 6. Cuba's worst economic crisis in 30 years has produced rolling blackouts, food and medicine shortages, and conditions that people who lived through the 1990s 'special period' after the Soviet collapse describe as comparable. 7. The protesters are chanting 'patria y vida' (homeland and life), expressing economic grievance as a direct political challenge to the authority of the Cuban government rather than merely a protest about prices. 8. Cuba's dual currency system originated in the 1990s as a tool to protect state-subsidised prices during the Soviet-era collapse; it ran two parallel exchange rates—one-to-one for state enterprises and 24-to-1 for citizens on the street. 9. The Cuban government unified the exchange rates in January 2021, a structurally necessary reform, but executed it at the height of COVID when tourism had collapsed and without first expanding the private sector that would have absorbed the devaluation shock. 10. Bustamante calls the sequence 'a series of compounded errors and missteps' and notes the government then partially re-dollarized parts of the economy to capture remittances, making the monetary system more complicated than before. 11. The Trump administration put caps on remittances to Cuba; Bustamante notes Cuba imports approximately 70 percent of its daily food, making foreign currency flows critical and remittance caps directly damaging. 12. The Obama normalisation policy from 2014 boosted Cuban private sector activity and remittances; by 2016 a majority of Cuban-Americans said they opposed the embargo, but the Trump administration reversed that trend through sustained messaging in Miami. 13. The Biden administration kept Trump Cuba sanctions in place despite campaign trail promises to review them, constrained by concern over poor Democratic electoral returns in South Florida among Cuban-American and Hispanic voters in 2020. 14. Bustamante argues that the 'pressure cooker' theory of US sanctions—that intensifying suffering will cause regime collapse—has the counterproductive effect of giving the Cuban government a US scapegoat and allowing it to avoid accountability for its own mismanagement. 15. Miami Mayor Francis Suarez called for US military intervention in Cuba from the top of a car at a solidarity rally, which even hawkish Democratic Senator Bob Menendez publicly rebuked by saying 'let's stay on planet Earth.' 16. Bustamante argues calls for military intervention are irresponsible and ignore the history of US interference in Cuban affairs that contributed to the conditions that made the revolution possible. 17. The viral song 'Patria y Vida' became a protest anthem and Bustamante notes it encapsulates an older Cuban-exile historical vision that treats the pre-revolution period as basically acceptable—a narrative he challenges as a historian. 18. The episode is an interview format with the host guiding a senior academic through analysis; the tone is explanatory and occasionally self-deprecating about the complexity of currency economics. 19. Listeners who want a nuanced historical and policy analysis of the Cuba-US dynamic from an academic with personal Cuban-American roots will find this episode particularly useful. 20. Listeners who want a quick news summary or a partisan framing of Cuba policy from either the hawkish or pro-engagement camp will find Bustamante's balanced critique of both sides unsatisfying.

As heard by us

A clear-eyed look at Cuba's protests, U.S. pressure, shortages, and the limits of street politics.

Worldly treats Cuba's biggest protests in decades as both a sudden eruption and the product of a long squeeze. The episode ties public anger to food and medicine shortages, blackouts, and the pandemic's blow to tourism, then widens the lens to U.S.

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