The New York Times: CUBA (2009)

Updated: April 16, 2009

A half-century ago, on Jan. 1, 1959, Fidel Castro brought down the curtain on Fulgencio Batista's right-wing dictatorship in Cuba. America's cavorting-cum-commerce ceased. Miami became Cuba's second city as, over the years, hundreds of thousands fled communist rule.

In the shadow of the 50th anniversary of the revolution, Cuba is a repressive society long under a single ruler -- the ailing, aged Mr. Castro still holds Cubans in his thrall even if he formally handed the presidency to his younger brother, Raúl, in 2006.

Through a labyrinth of rations, regulations, two currencies and four markets (peso, hard currency, agro and black), people make their way. Stress is rare but depression rampant in an inertia-stricken economy. Truth is layered. Look up and you see the Habana Libre, the towering hotel where Fidel briefly had his headquarters after the revolution: it began life as the Hilton. The seafront Riviera hotel, now so communist-drab it seems to reek of cabbage, once housed the rakish casino of the mobster Meyer Lansky.

After seizing power, Mr. Castro promised to restore the Cuban constitution and hold elections. But he soon turned his back on those democratic ideals, embraced a totalitarian brand of communism and allied the island with the Soviet Union. He brought the world to the brink of nuclear war in the fall of 1962, when he allowed Russia to build missile launching sites just 90 miles off the American shores. He weathered an American-backed invasion and used Cuban troops to stir up revolutions in Africa and Latin America.

Those actions earned him the permanent enmity of Washington and led the United States to impose decades of economic sanctions that Mr. Castro and his followers maintain have crippled Cuba's economy and have kept their socialist experiment from succeeding completely. The sanctions also proved handy to Mr. Castro politically. He cast every problem Cuba faced as part of a larger struggle against the United States and blamed the abject poverty of the island on the "imperialists" to the north.

For good or ill, Fidel Castro was without a doubt the most important leader to emerge from Latin America since the wars of independence of the early 19th century, not only reshaping Cuban society but providing inspiration for leftists across Latin America and in other parts of the world. But he never broke the island's dependence on commodities like sugar, tobacco and nickel, nor did he succeed in industrializing the nation so that Cuba could compete in the world market with durable goods. Since the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of its aid to the island, Cuba has limped along economically, relying mostly on tourism and money sent home from exiles to get hard currency.

Some experts have said that Raúl Castro is more pragmatic. He has given signals he might try to follow the Chinese example of state-sponsored capitalism. But his regime has made no significant changes. In March 2009, Mr. Castro announced a shake-up in his administration.

People say they have seen small improvements in the economy that do not go far enough. Many roads in Havana have been repaired. Microwave ovens, DVD players and cellphones are now in stores, but most Cubans cannot afford them.

The nation still imports more than 80 percent of what it consumes, and Mr. Castro is trying to encourage farming by giving fallow land to those willing to work it. But the money they can earn selling the food remains below what is needed for the tools and labor needed to start a farm.

Three hurricanes in 2008 cost Cuba $10 billion, or 20 percent of the gross domestic product. Salaries remain low, food prices are high and housing is scarce. Bartenders, with access to dollars, earn wages many times that of physicians. Tourism was up in 2008 but the price of Cuba's top export, nickel, dropped by 41 percent.

Many Cubans are putting their hopes for the economy on President Barack Obama's easing of longstanding restrictions on family travel and remittances to Cuba, although the Cuban government charges hefty fees on such remittances. Some people believe Mr. Obama needs to do much more to make a difference.

In the meantime, as the American embargo continues, foreign companies are gradually increasing their presence in Cuba. Brazil, China and Russia have joined the search for oil in Cuban waters in the Gulf of Mexico. Spanish companies have always had a strong economic presence, and relations between the countries have grown stronger since Spain passed a law in 2008 that allows anyone with Spanish grandparents to become a Spanish citizen.

Instead of lifting the trade embargo with Cuba, enacted in the 1960s in an unsuccessful attempt to force a change in government after Fidel Castro came to power, Mr. Obama is using his executive power to repeal President George W. Bush's tight restrictions and the looser restrictions under President Bill Clinton so that Cuban-Americans can now visit Cuba as frequently as they like and send gifts and as much money as they want, as long as the recipients are not senior government or Communist Party officials.

Mr. Obama is also allowing telecommunications companies to pursue licensing agreements in Cuba, in an attempt to open up communications there by increasing access to cellphones and satellite television.

In a sense, the policy shift is an admission that a half-century of American policy aimed at trying to push the Castros out of power has not worked -- as the Cuban American National Foundation, the most powerful lobbying group for Cuban exiles in Miami, conceded in April 2009. Cuba policy experts characterized Mr. Obama's moves as important humanitarian steps but said they still left open the broader question of how the United States and Cuba plan to engage in the future.