The Dangers of a Cuban Collapse

Cubans remain poor. It would be no fun to live on the $15-35 per month that is paid to most government employees. Even with subsidized (and rationed) staples as well as free rent, health care and education, many neighborhoods of Havana are decrepit. Balconies fall off apartment buildings. Whole buildings collapse into the street. People wait in long lines to collect remittances at Western Union, whose window has a faded poster of Fidel and Raul Castro declaring, “The Revolution, thriving and victorious, is moving ahead.” The woman in line wearing American flag tights—stripes on one leg, stars on the other—is no doubt in the revolutionary vanguard. Cuba depends for hard currency on remittances from the United States and Europe, as well as payments and subsidies estimated at $9.4 billion per year from Venezuela. Caracas is not in a position to continue that much longer, raising the specter of economic collapse and a massive outflow of people that could present the United States with an unexpected foreign policy crisis on its own doorstep.