(image credit: Wikimedia)
The sight of hungry people scavenging through dumpsters and panhandling was once more common in cities in the United States and Europe than in Havana. But a series of quiet moves, first by Trump, and now by Biden, have produced a humanitarian crisis throughout Cuba.
As he watches the world go by each day from the shade of his porch in southern Havana, Ramone Montagudo, 72, a retired history teacher, has a front row seat for the wreckage. Until a few years ago, the garbage men regularly emptied the blue waste containers on the corner of his street where he and his neighbors dump their household trash. Now flies swarm over a sea of rubbish in the sticky heat. He watches some of his poorer neighbors – who until a few years ago had enough to eat – pick leftover food out of the rot.
“When it comes to food and medicine, we’re living through an extraordinarily difficult situation,” Montagudo says. “This country has always been sanctioned, and we used to get by. But Trump filled in the gaps.”
Cuba has been sanctioned for longer than any other country in modern history. But almost a decade ago the Obama administration softened sanctions on the island and restored diplomatic relations with Havana, admitting that over half a century of immiserating the island had failed to oust the communist government. The economic rebound was swift. But in the final weeks of the Trump administration, the White House put Cuba back on the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism, alongside Iran, Syria and North Korea, for nakedly political reasons and without providing evidence.
