In 1950, as conservatives are keen to point out, Cuba was among the better-off societies in Latin America. Its income per person was ahead of the Dominican Republic’s. Today, by that same measure, the Dominican Republic is more than twice as rich as Cuba. 

However, something happened to Cuba that did not happen to its neighbors — not just a 1959 socialist revolution but a US blockade, in force since 1962.

What makes Cuba’s trajectory remarkable is not simply the income gap with its peer nations but what the country achieved in spite of it. Cuban life expectancy, nine years behind that of the United States in 1950, drew level with it by the early 1980s. Infant mortality fell below the US rate around the turn of the century. On the Human Development Index, Cuba still led the Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, and Panama as recently as 2009 — on a fraction of their incomes. These are the egalitarian gains the blockade was never able to erase, though their erosion since the first Donald Trump administration escalated the war on Cuba in 2019 has been obvious. The comparison with the worst example of capitalist development in the region, Haiti, is even more stark.