Now, many decades later, a small coalition of American politicians have begun to publicly question whether the embargo holds any benefit to the Cuban people or the interests of the United States. The embargo forbids any company, whether US-based or foreign, from operating both in the United States and in Cuba. Because the United States is a more attractive market for the vast majority of international corporations, Cuba is left isolated from the rest of the world.
For most legislators, though, Mr Isacson said US sanctions were not acknowledged to the same degree as the Cuban government’s own failures in economic structuring. “It’s a question of weighing variables — like how much worse did [the embargo] make it?”
“The shortages have created all types of wars, and in the end the economic conditions are objective conditions that shape the people’s subjective opinion,” Ms Calzadilla said. “We’re living through a Great Depression.”
In four years, in street trades, the value of the Cuban peso fell from 25 pesos to the dollar to over 300 pesos to the dollar, while the average salary in Cuba remained stagnant. Seeing no future on the island, over half a million Cubans have decided to abandon ship and migrate to the US over the past three years, most of them flying to Nicaragua or Panama and trekking up to the US-Mexico border, where they turn themselves in to US officials and submit a plea for asylum.
Mr Isacson, who tracks migration numbers out of Cuba and the rest of Latin America, said he expected there to be another wave within next few months. “It’s going to be a really bad year in the Caribbean,” he said.
Yaquelin, from her home in Matanzas, is leaving because the financial arithmetic of daily life no longer makes sense.
“There’s so much necessity, they’re asking for 300 pesos [a tenth of an average monthly salary] for a bag of rice. Even the MLC stores are completely empty now,” she said in bewilderment.
When asked how she’s surviving, she laughs. “You just have to put things together, you have to make things work in any way that you can.”