Cuba - Lonely Planet [23]
Sniffing the blood of a dying communist animal, the US tightened the noose in 1992 with the harsh Torricelli Act, which forbade foreign subsidiaries of US companies from trading with Cuba and prohibited ships that had called at Cuban ports from docking at US ports for six months. Ninety percent of the trade banned by this law consisted of food, medicine and medical equipment, which led the American Association for World Health to conclude in 1997 that the US embargo had caused a significant rise in suffering – even deaths – in Cuba.
In August 1993, with the country slipping rapidly into an economic coma and Havana on the verge of riot, the US dollar was legalized, allowing Cubans to hold and spend foreign currency and open US-dollar bank accounts. Spearheaded by the unlikely figure of Raúl Castro, other liberal reforms followed including limited private enterprise, self-employment, the opening of farmers markets and the expansion of the almost nonexistent tourist sector into a mainstay of the new burgeoning economy.
But the recovery was not without its problems. Class differences re-emerged as people with US dollars began to gain access to goods and services not available in pesos, while touts and prostitutes known as jineteros/jineteras took up residence in tourist areas where they preyed upon rich foreigners whose designer clothes and comfortable capitalist lifestyles they longed to emulate.
Although some of the worst shortages have been alleviated thanks to the reinvestment of tourist revenue into public services, the período especial has left a nasty scar. Much to the popular chagrin, the government also started to go back on some of its earlier liberalization measures in an attempt to reestablish an updated brand of old socialist orthodoxy (eg by raising the taxes in casas particulares and limiting their capacity).
Following the 1994 balsero crisis (whereby temporarily loosened restrictions on emigration caused more than 36,000 Cubans to flee to the US, many of them on homemade rafts) and a handful of further shots in the ongoing diplomatic war that had been plaguing US-Cuban relations for decades, the US pulled the embargo a notch tighter in 1996 by signing the Helms-Burton Act into law. Widely condemned by the international community, and energetically leapt upon by Castro as a devastating propaganda tool, the bill allows US investors to take legal action in the American courts against foreign companies utilizing their confiscated property in Cuba. It also prevents any US president from lifting the embargo until a transitional government is in place in Havana.
Return to beginning of chapter
THE NEW LEFT TIDE
Cuba entered the new millennium in the throes of the Elián González drama, a tragic family crisis that was to become an allegory for the all-pervading senselessness of the ongoing Cuban-American immigration showdown.
Further problems were faced with the new Bush administration across the water who rolled back US policy to resemble the worst of the Cold War years with rigid travel restrictions, economically damaging financial constraints and a hawkish no-compromise political rhetoric.
* * *
In 2001 Maine became the first US state to pass a resolution calling for a complete end to the trade and travel ban against Cuba.
* * *
At home Castro lost vital friends in the EU (who placed sanctions on high-level diplomatic