Cuban, Venezuelan regimes put officials over citizens

Tourists sip cocktails in state-owned Cuban resorts while local children go without milk. Venezuelan students sit in crumbling schools while the illegitimate dictatorship spends millions on propaganda and spyware.

These aren’t isolated failures — they’re symptoms of a larger design. The economic crises in Cuba and Venezuela weren’t imported. They are homegrown.

Both incompetent regimes have long blamed foreign forces and external pressure for their hardships. But the truth is simpler — and more damning. Decades of corruption, economic mismanagement and elite enrichment have hollowed out once-functioning economies and left ordinary people to pay the price.

Cuba: Empty hotels, full regime pockets

Once proud of its sugar exports and medical system, Cuba now imports sugar, faces routine blackouts and suffers shortages of medical care. Yet in 2024, according to Spanish newswire Agencia EFE, the Cuban regime allocated more than 37% of its total investment to the tourism and hospitality sector — over 11 times more than it spent on health care and education combined. Existing hotels sit largely empty, with occupancy rates hovering around 30%, but construction of new resorts continues.

Who benefits? Cuban military conglomerates like GAESA, FINCIMEX and CIMEX and the regime officials who run them. These entities dominate the island’s tourism, remittance and retail sectors, serving the regime’s elite, not the public. Cubans struggle with fuel, food and electricity shortages while resources are funneled into beach resorts and regime-tied vanity projects that can be privatized to their elite managers when the regime collapses, as occurred in the Soviet Union.

Venezuela: Propaganda over progress

In Venezuela, a different flag waves over the same broken model, which is propped up by the Cuban security services that monitor and intimidate the Venezuelan armed forces. Bloomberg News reports that in 2024, the Maduro regime spent more than $2 billion in a few months — the highest spending rate of the year, hitting just as a presidential election was held. Despite the fact that $1.7 billion in taxes was collected that same month, the minimum wage remained under $2 per month, less than the cost of a kilo of cheese.

News reports in late 2023 note the regime claimed to double its 2024 national budget to over $20.5 billion, ostensibly for economic growth. But according to the news site teleSUR, only $180 million — less than 1% — was allocated to the health sector. And while military intelligence received nearly $1 billion for counterintelligence technology for internal repression (including of military officers), just $18 million was set aside to feed over 5 million schoolchildren. That’s $3.49 per student, per year.

Venezuela’s infrastructure reflects these distorted priorities. A 2009 $7.5 billion railway deal with China resulted in nothing but abandoned construction sites, yet the debt continues to be paid in discounted oil. In Venezuela, blackouts regularly plunge large swaths of the country into darkness.

The online Spanish-language site El Impulso reports that one 2024 power outage affected 16 states, followed by another just days later that left 20 states without electricity for over 12 hours. Years of regime neglect, theft and corruption are to blame.

Mismanagement or a corrupt model?

These aren’t policy mistakes; they’re features of economic systems built to preserve authoritarian power.

• In Cuba, military-run companies dominate the economy, and investments are made not based on need, but on profit for regime officials.
• In Venezuela, vast public spending props up stolen elections and propaganda, while hospitals and schools deteriorate. Massive debts are accumulated and repaid through oil at a reduced price, robbing future generations of their prosperity.

The Cuban and Venezuelan people are resourceful and resilient, but no amount of ingenuity can overcome systems that prioritize propaganda, power and personal gain for corrupt political leaders and elites over the public well-being.

The path forward

The international community must continue to expose the lack of freedom, corruption, cronyism and economic mismanagement of these regimes and amplify the voices of the Cuban and Venezuelan people demanding access to health care, electricity, fuel, basic hygiene items, medicine and food missing from the shelves.

The international community must amplify the voices of the Cuban and Venezuelan people demanding the ability to engage with the outside world economically, free of the repressive controls of the corrupt regimes.

Real change begins with transparency, accountability and an economic model that puts citizens — not regime officials — at its center.

The economic crises in Cuba and Venezuela weren’t imported. They were built, brick by brick, by regimes that continue to choose absolute control and self-enrichment over freedom.