Special Period

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moscow also forgives cuban debts and absorbs trade deficits basically props the entire castro game up and then don't know if you know this the soviet union collapses and cuba hasn't been doing much beyond getting gold level prices for sugar which is now almost worth nothing Up to 90% is wiped off its economy and the island falls into a crisis that Castro will dub, euphemistically, the special period in times of peace.

Yeah, that's actually what I call my mid-30s as well, euphemistically.

Tinder not a thing back then.

Instead of relying on the state, the Cuban people develop a knack for so-called invento, which is a catch-all phrase meaning basically doing anything on the black market, anything illegal, or just scavenging household items out of other stuff like water heaters from tin cans or kerosene lamps.

This is tremendously impressive.

But the privation of the special period leads Cuba, and particularly Havana, down some dark criminal alleys.

most notably the phenomenon of genitalismo, which is literally jockeying, but is a code word for a new underworld of drugs and sex all over the Cuban capital.

This wouldn't be the last time that Cuba's structural dependence on America's adversaries would come back to bite it.

government called this rough patch the special period in a time of peace a fairly euphemistic name for a period that included mass food rationing widespread blackouts and importing more than a million bicycles from china because there was no fuel left for cars now what makes cuba's situation genuinely unusual is that even after all of this the embargo survived the soviet union had collapsed the cold war was over and most of the countries that had been on the wrong side of american foreign policy eventually got folded back into the global trading system Vietnam, which had fought a brutal and deeply personal war against the United States, rebuilt its relationship with Washington and is now Southeast Asia's fastest growing major economy.

China opened up and became the factory of the world.

Even Russia was doing substantial business with the west, at least until the war in Ukraine changed that.

And then COVID hit.

International arrivals collapsed and remittances dropped sharply too.

GDP fell by more than 10% in 2020 alone, becoming the worst contraction since the special period.

And if that wasn't enough, Cuba's government made the situation considerably worse.

There, there's a whole host of theories there, uh, that I can't really tell you what's true.

But what I can tell you is, uh, have you heard of the special period in Cuban history in, in the '90s?

No.

Uh, th- this is the fancy name that the Cubans called the period between 1991 and 1999.

Now, I, I think a lot of people also say what, what you mentioned that, you know, the, the blockade is gonna exploit them and, and it's gonna pressure them.

It's not enough.

Uh, as I mentioned, they had a special period already from '91 to '99.

They were able to withstand eight years without any, uh, place to be a parasite of, and they just let people die and, and emigrate.

Uh, and then in next week's show, we're gonna head into the 1980s when Castro's own involvement in the Latin American drug trade ends with a group f- of Cuban war heroes being lined up against the wall.

The 1990s special period, which is like massively important for understanding today in Cuba, when its economy tanked after the Soviet Union dissolved.

Drugs and sex and so-called jineterismo, which is jockeying in English, but, uh, means a little bit more than that in Cuba, was encouraged by the regime, and how Centro Havana in particular became this den of criminals.

And today culminating in a very fun story where you get to hear about me falling over in a pile of dog poo.

Yeah.

We're going to pick up the next part of this Cuba double header around the time of Meyer Lansky's death when Cuba gets embroiled in the Latin American cocaine trade.

Then we're going to whiz through the wild and oftentimes lawless special period in the 90s, culminating in the crisis of today, drugs, guns, and yours truly making a big old fool of himself.

Until then, thanks as always for listening.

The USSR collapsed in the '90s.

Cuba had a very difficult period, the Special Period, a complete collapse of, um, GDP collapsed by 40%, but Cuban exports fell by 80%.

Their imports fell by, by 75%.

Really difficult.