The Cuban Economy After 60 Years of Sanctions – A Case Study in What Isolation Actually Does

The architecture is the first thing you notice when you stroll through Havana’s streets on practically any afternoon. The city’s massive colonial buildings are elaborate and faded, their facades peeling in layers like old wallpaper, each layer revealing a different decade, a different political moment, or a different set of broken promises.

In the same way that neglect can occasionally result in beauty, some of it is truly lovely. However, the majority of it is merely the tangible documentation of a nation that ran out of resources to sustain itself and discovered that the outside world was largely unable to assist in filling the void due to factors stemming from a Cold War that ended thirty years ago. That’s what the embargo did. It did that, among other things.

In 1960, the United States took economic action against Cuba, first focusing on the energy and agricultural sectors. Later, restrictions were expanded into a comprehensive trade embargo that has been in place for more than 60 years, the longest of its kind in modern history, according to the majority of international trade scholars. The initial reasoning was simple, if brutally ambitious: economic pressure strong enough to overthrow the Castro regime or spark a popular uprising, resulting in regime change and, in Washington’s words, democracy.

After 65 years, the Havana government has outlasted ten U.S. presidents. The embargo hasn’t. Depending on which administration is in power in Washington and what domestic political calculations make the policy useful at any given time, it is constantly renewed, tightened, loosened, and tightened again.

Depending on your point of view, the record of what the sanctions have actually accomplished can be either quite straightforward or quite complex. Regime change was the intended outcome, but it was never accomplished. On this issue, academics from a wide range of political backgrounds have come to a near consensus. Changes in U.S. sanctions policy had quantifiable effects on Cuban GDP growth, foreign investment flows, and financial stability, but none of these effects translated into the political transformation the sanctions were intended to bring about, according to a February 2025 analysis based on econometric data spanning three decades.

Instead, they created economic suffering that was mainly felt by common Cubans rather than the government they are subject to. Critics have been pointing out this fundamental contradiction for decades, but it hasn’t had much of an impact on U.S. policy. This gap is between who the policy targets and who actually absorbs its consequences.

The Obama administration provided a brief but insightful glimpse of what an alternative strategy might entail. Around 2015, restrictions on travel and remittances between Cubans and Americans were loosened, commercial aviation connections were reestablished, postal service—which had been halted since 1960—was resumed, and diplomatic relations began to resume in a manner not seen in fifty years. The subsequent data was instructive. By 2018, the total amount of trade, remittances, and visitor spending between the United States and Cuba had increased to $4 billion.

In particular, remittances turned out to be one of the most stable and economically significant aspects of that exchange. They went straight to Cuban families instead of via state institutions, increasing the capacity of the private sector in ways that may have done more to encourage market activity in Cuba than six decades of pressure had. The thaw was short-lived. Most of it was undone by the Trump administration between 2017 and 2020, and within days of Trump’s inauguration in 2025, Cuba was once again listed as a state sponsor of terrorism.

Even when attempting to evaluate the policy objectively, it is difficult to avoid feeling the particular annoyance of seeing this cycle recur. The discussion in Washington usually focuses more on domestic politics, especially the political influence of Cuban-American voters in Florida, than it does on an honest assessment of the results of the 65-year sanctions.

For its part, the Cuban government has spent decades constructing its own narrative around the embargo, using it as a handy external justification for economic setbacks that aren’t solely the result of U.S. policy. The decisions made within Cuba’s centrally planned economy bear some of the blame for the island’s circumstances. There is a real embargo. For some in Havana, it’s also a helpful tale. It is possible for both to be true at the same time.

The econometric evidence does, however, make it abundantly evident that engagement—including remittances, visitor spending, and trade in goods—produces economic effects inside Cuba that cannot be reversed by tightening sanctions. Simply by fostering more private economic activity and increased connectivity to the outside world, persistent engagement over time might have a greater impact on Cuba’s political and economic trajectory than any additional pressure.

It’s also possible that Washington has never had the political will to test that theory on a large scale and won’t for a while. Havana’s architecture is constantly falling apart. The embargo continues to be renewed. And with every decade that goes by, the question of what it was all really for becomes more difficult to answer.