US-enforced poverty in Cuba is baffling to contemplate, 65 years after its start

I have been thinking of the strange verb “immiserate,” plus its various forms like “immiseration,” meaning the act of impoverishing or making people miserable, as in, “The workers were immiserated.”

The word came more vividly to mind on a recent Thursday hike with friends, including Sarah Donohoe, a neighbor who like me is a newspaper columnist. She has published weekly in Estes Park, Colorado, for nearly 20 years. Sarah told me the way her Cuban relatives live.

“They own a house,” Sarah explained. “It’s small and crowded. There is one room they have fixed up nicer than the rest of the house, which they rent out — sometimes by the hour — to travelers and prostitutes. Two nights a month make more money for the family than a month’s salary as a lawyer at the university ($29).

“There’s not much to eat, so my brother ordered food to be delivered from Spain. As guests, we didn’t want to impose on our hungry hosts. We brought with us on our airline trip suitcases full of medicines, toiletries, towels and Jell-O. They are crazy about Jell-O.

“We saw no big stores. People open a window on the street and sell things through it, till they run out. Those at the back of the line may get nothing. Most of the Cuban people have nothing, just nothing. When we returned home, we left behind nearly everything in our suitcases, all our clothing items, clean underwear, handkerchiefs, soap and new toothbrushes, because they need it all so desperately.”

Sarah and others in our Shawnee Thursday group were walking that sunny morning in Stoll Park just south of Johnson County Community College in an America that — despite our bitterness and quarreling — blooms with prosperity, fine cars on the streets, nice houses for many, though little for many more. Yet even our poor people have a world more than Cubans.

Sarah’s brother years back married a Cuban woman. They now live in Spain, where her sister-in-law practices medicine. Sarah entered Cuba on a family visa and met her brother in the country, cursed since 1960 — cursed for 65 years — by an embargo forbidding Cuban trade and nearly everything else with American interests. Worldwide, it is the most enduring embargo in modern history — just one of many ugly U.S. penalties ladled out to Cubans.

In 1960 the U.S. Department of State issued a memo recognizing that Fidel Castro had majority support within Cuba for his administration and the spread of communism there. It stated that the “only foreseeable means of alienating internal (Cuban) support for that government is through disenchantment…based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship.”

The American government thus ordered a policy that would be “adroit and inconspicuous as possible” while aiming to deny “money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.”

In other words, to make the Cuban people miserable. It worked. They are destitute. But it did not overthrow their government. Think of it, all that deliberately imposed misery over 65 years, just wasted. Still being wasted today.

The policy didn’t even stop Cuba from allowing Russia to set up on their soil nuclear missiles aimed at America. It certainly didn’t stop America from supporting an armed attempted revolution against Cuba, which failed. During that brief period it might have been said immiseration was justified because we were “at war” with Cuba, as Russia is with Ukraine today.

For more than 60 years we have not been at war with Cuba. Yet for some reason we 347 million Americans still relentlessly punish those 11 million Cubans on a little island. So, immiserate them, goes the strange theory that this is the way to win. Except when it doesn’t. We just magnify the misery of the Cuban people decade after decade to no point.

Sarah said a blackout occurred while she was there, one of several, but this was the first. When the lights came back on a couple of hours later, a young family member held up his fist and (in jest) shouted “Viva Fidel!”

To explain why Sarah didn’t need a big meal at lunchtime, she told her host she usually just ate an apple or a peanut butter sandwich.

“We don’t have apples or peanut butter,” her host replied.

“But, boy,” Sarah enthused, “did they have avocados! Huge, gorgeous, delicious avocados, served cubed, salted, with olive oil and maybe some vinegar. Wonderful mangos!”

So in the midst of poverty imposed by the American embargo and the frequent stupidity of their own government, Cubans struggle to eke out a life. They dance. They stroll the beloved 5-mile walk along Havana harbor known as the Malecón. They enjoy the sea breeze. They do the best they can.