Remittances: The wound that runs through us all

I have come to realize that discussing remittances in Cuba is akin to touching an open wound, following the previous post I made on this topic and reading the comments from both sides. Not because of the topic itself, but due to everything it entails: pain, hardships, guilt, resentment, helplessness...

It’s not an economic issue; it’s an existential one. It’s the X-ray of a country where living has become an act of daily resistance.

In any normal country, remittances would be a supplement. In Cuba, they are a condition for survival. Not because people are lazy or dependent, but because a government model has destroyed the basic relationship between work and life. Today in Cuba, working does not guarantee eating, getting medical care, moving, or even dreaming.

Those who receive remittances are not privileged; they are individuals with a lifeline in the midst of a shipwreck. And those who do not receive them are no less worthy; they are the ones swimming without a float in an increasingly dark sea.

But they are both in the same broken boat.

Many times, there is a defense of those who do not receive remittances as if they were victims of those who do, but within that perspective, there is something deeper and sadder: a mentality instilled over decades by the Cuban regime itself, typical of communist systems, which consists of projecting resentment towards those who manage to have a little more. Instead of questioning why almost no one has the basics, people learn to view with suspicion those who prosper, those who receive help, those who manage to find solutions, as if they were guilty of an injustice that is, in fact, structural.

Because even those who do not receive direct money from abroad benefit indirectly from that flow: in the small and medium-sized enterprises (mipymes), through resellers, those who bring medicines, those who sell food, those who rent, and those who provide services that only exist because money comes in from outside.

Today in Cuba, a significant portion of what can be bought, obtained, or "resolved" outside of the State exists thanks to remittances. Without them, there would be no "more justice": there would be absolute scarcity. There would be no informal market, no alternative medicines, no small businesses, and no support networks. Only emptiness would remain.

Those who send money from another country often do not live in abundance either. They send from a place of sacrifice, from guilt, from a sense of dislocation. They send because they left, but they never truly left. Because Cuba and your loved ones remain etched in your skin.

Remittances are not a luxury; they are a transfer of pain. They are money transformed into absence, into family separation, into years that do not return.

Now, there is also another equally painful debate: those who advocate for banning remittances as a form of punishment for the regime, and those who oppose it because they know that the punishment does not fall on those in power, but rather on ordinary people.

Those who call for cutting remittances often do so out of desperation, legitimate anger, and the belief that the cycle of dependency created by the system must be broken. They are not monsters; they are seeking a radical solution to a radical problem.

And those who oppose it do not do so out of convenience, but because they know that today remittances do not sustain the State; they sustain families. Cutting off that flow does not weaken the power structure, but rather the sick, the elderly, the child, those who have no other source. And also those who receive nothing, but depend on that informal ecosystem to survive.

Both sides, at their core, share the same feeling of powerlessness: no one wants to continue supporting a country from exile, but no one wants to condemn their own people to hunger to provoke an uncertain change.

And all of this happens among Cubans. Among those who are inside and those who are outside, but who remain the same country, the same history, the same wound. It is not a war between enemies; it is a painful conversation within a nation fractured by decades of bad political decisions.

The problem is that this dilemma should not exist. No healthy nation relies on emigration to survive. No legitimate model turns its citizens into its primary export.

Remittances should not be a political weapon or a permanent lifeline. They should be what they are in any part of the world: a gesture of love, not an economic structure imposed by institutional failure.

And as long as work within Cuba does not provide for a dignified living, any debate about remittances will always be a discussion among victims, never about the actual responsible parties.

Because in the end, both those who want to cut ties and those who defend them areCaught in the same tragedy: debating how to survive within a system that should never have forced its people to struggle for survival, and also how to allow those outside to survive, supporting from afar their families who remain inside, and often even friends, acquaintances, and people they assist in times of critical economic or health need.

There lies the cruellest part of the drama: not only a country that cannot support its own, but also an exile that cannot let them go without feeling as if it is dropping them.