The prominent Cuban writer and journalist Amir Valle, who has been exiled in Berlin since 2006, published a video on his Facebook profile in which he describes Cuba as a "private estate of the Castros," "where people are dying of hunger," using data from ECLAC to argue that the island is currently the poorest country in Latin America, even falling below Haiti.
The video emerges following the controversy sparked by Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro, grandson of Raúl Castro known as "The Crab," who in an interview with USA Today published on July 6 offered to negotiate directly with Donald Trump the future of Cuba.
Valle rejects the notion that this management is a spontaneous act. "He is simply playing the role assigned to him by the masters of power, namely his own family, in the task of negotiating the price of that private estate of the Castros, which is Cuba," states the writer.
The starting point of their analysis is the 2025 Statistical Yearbook of ECLAC, which places Cuba's per capita GDP at only 1,082.8 dollars, compared to Haiti's 2,136 dollars and a regional average of 10,212.2 dollars. "For those who did not believe in the Haitianization of Cuba, Cuba is now poorer than Haiti," it states definitively. ECLAC also projects a decline in Cuba's GDP of -6.5% in 2026, the worst contraction in the region that year. Independent analysts even place it in double digits.
Valle directly blames the regime's decisions for the disaster, not the U.S. embargo. He points out that the 176 economic measures the government is now announcing should have been implemented years ago, and that the reason they weren't is that Fidel Castro feared Cubans would discover freedom by producing their own wealth. "Fidel turned off the tap, condemning Cubans to depend on Big Brother for even the air they breathe," he says, quoting George Orwell: a system where everyone is equal, but some are more equal than others.
The writer depicts a picture of the resources that have flowed into Cuba without resulting in well-being. According to his calculations, the country received billions of dollars annually in remittances, tourism, and through the "rental" of doctors, a business that the regime presented for decades as internationalist "solidarity." The external debt accumulated with Russia, China, Spain, Brazil, and other countries amounts to 29 billion dollars.
The central question raised by Valle is where that money went. Between 2008 and 2022, medical missions generated more than 120 billion dollars, of which over 64 billion are missing without GAESA accounting for it, he argues. “We are talking about a farm where people are dying of hunger while Gaesa, the Castro's big business, has 18 billion dollars discovered in banks outside the island,” he states.
The regime's investment priorities —the writer points out— reinforce this argument: according to data from the ONEI cited by Valle, Cuba allocates nearly 34% of its GDP to hotels while health receives between 9% and 12%, resulting in a collapsing healthcare system that the regime attributes to the embargo.
The crisis described by the writer is documented by independent sources. The Cuban Observatory of Human Rights estimates that 89% of Cubans are living in extreme poverty, and a survey from May 2026 revealed that 1 in 3 families reported that one of their members went to bed hungry.
Valle concludes with a historical comparison that captures the extent of the failure: "A farm that, sadly, in 1959 was the third most powerful economy in Latin America and today, according to the Cepal report, has surpassed Haiti in poverty and is now the poorest country in all of Latin America."
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