Havana

Havana is the Cuban city setting for Dark times for Cuba’s economic experiment. The Planet Money episode uses Yaser Gonzalez Cabrera’s City Cleta bike-tour business in Havana to make Cuba’s macroeconomic crisis concrete: phone calls are unreliable, blackouts interrupt daily life, fuel shortages reduce movement, and foreign tourists have largely disappeared from the business.

The episode also places Havana inside the brief tourism boom created by Cuba’s partial opening. Barack Obama’s 2016 visit, foreign visitors, global brand events, films, and concerts made the city look like a destination that private entrepreneurs could build around, but the source later shows that same tourism dependence becoming a vulnerability when sanctions, oil stress, and the pandemic hit.

Connections

• Cuba - country context for the crisis.
• Yaser Gonzalez Cabrera and City Cleta - local tourism-business case.
• Tourism-Dependent Small Economy and Constrained Market Reform - concepts explaining why Havana’s private tourism boom was fragile.
• Oil Dependency Blackout Risk - energy shortage effects visible in daily city life.