Hasta la victoria, quizás: Cuba’s broken economy

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The Economist. Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm your host Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. On certain corners of the wellness Internet, you'll see all manner of claims made about peptides. Simply buy them and inject them and you'll be stronger, better, faster with a glossier coat. We pick through the flimsy science behind a weird cottage industry. And did you know that Chuck Norris used to season his meat with pepper spray? Our obituaries editor looks back on a poor boy from Oklahoma who couldn't speak very well, who became a totem for all that is manly and the subject of endless goofy gags. But first, America's daring raid in January to nab Nicolas Maduro from Venezuela didn't just have big implications for that country. It was the last remaining patron of Cuba, a destination for lots of its oil. Since that lifeline was cut off, Cuba has been sputtering closer and closer to a full stop. Which is exactly where hawks in the Trump administration, principally Secretary of State Marco Rubio, wanted to be. They don't get subsidies anymore, so they're in a lot of trouble. And the people in charge are in they don't know how to fix it, so they have to get new people in charge. Cuba's people have long deserved a better run government and economy. Question is whether that's what they might get.

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Life in Cuba was already hard before the Americans intervened in Venezuela. The regime's economic ideology and American trade embargo have just devastated the island. And Trump's new pressure campaign has made things harder still.

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Sarah Burke is our bureau chief for Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean.

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People are queuing hours to try to find fuel. There are shutters on empty state run shops. And the monthly salary, which barely bought anything anyway, buys even less now. Cuba's economy right now is at Trump's mercy.

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And we have talked on the show quite a bit about how hard life has been in Cuba. Talk me through why and how things got worse.

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The Americans put on an effective oil blockade. So Cuba produces maybe around 40% of oil that it needs itself. But the rest it got from Venezuela at a very steep discount. Mexico and Russia. And that all stopped when Trump threatened tariffs on any country that would supply the island with oil. And the consequences have just been this cascade of dramatic things. It makes it much harder to provide electricity. And then Canada and Russia, who send the most tourists to Cuba, cancel flights because there is no fuel for airlines to refuel when they're in Havana. So you see these glitzy hotels that are empty, hospitals have cut some services, and much of the country sits in darkness at night. And when you talk to Cubans, and I was there a couple of weeks ago, they just say things are worse than the early 1990s when the last patron, then the Soviet Union, collapsed. And we should be clear that ordinary Cubans are suffering way more than the regime. And there have been some protests about the economic difficulties they're facing, but fears of reprisal keep many, many people quiet.

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But to your mind, is it easy to unpick the effects of America's latest intervention from mismanagement that came before it?

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No. I mean there's a combination, right, And a cumulative effect. So the American embargo hasn't helped, but Cuba's government has to take a huge amount of the blame here. Cuba's economy has long been one of the world's weirdest and poorest. So it was originally totally centralized, this Soviet reliant system that has basically out of necessity had to evolve into a hybrid. So the Cubans have over time allowed more private employment, private businesses to start, but they still insist on keeping control of the overall planning of the economy. But that state run economy basically doesn't work. There's a great example in that sugar Exports fell by 90% between 1990 and 2010. And the government still sets the prices and owns most firms, commands almost all the economic resources and misallocates them. So you see that exports have decreased over time and domestic debt is inflated away and it's a mess. And so part of the US Strategy has just been to attack the remaining sources of dollars that Cuba has. And one of those, a big one, is sending Cuban dol doctors abroad to other countries. So the US has put the end to that. It's also a cut off fuel and tourism is crippled. So the government really has no money now at all.

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So in a sense, what America seems to want to do is working. It's taken a largely broken system and just shattered it.

5:48

Well, it depends what you're trying to do. But yes, the aim, I think, of the Americans is to put the Cuban government in such dire straits that they come to the table and give whatever Donald Trump decides he wants from Cuba. You can discuss whether the means will work and also whether they're justified. A lot of Cubans said to me, just really cruel, we're the ones who are suffering much more. But whatever view you take of that, it does seem to be working to some extent insofar as the Cubans have said that they are talking to the US and the Cubans announced this week that actually includes Raul Castro, who is Fidel Castro's brother, and in theory has no formal position, but actually is the veto of everything that happens on the island still. And so what I think the Americans have said they seem to want, and they've gone a bit back and forth about this, and it's a bit opaque, is to start with the economy. So get the restructuring of state enterprises, give more opportunities for American businesses, creating a credible monetary system, a long list of demands that there be a more free economy. So now we basically have to wait and see what these talks result in. The Cuban regime is not easy to change, and they've dealt with the US For a long time and they think they can probably kick the can along the road, I suspect, and drag these out. But Donald Trump is obviously a whole different fish, so we'll have to see how that works and whether in fact he wants anything that improves the life for the Cuban people or just gives a better deal to American firms who might be interested in Cuba. The Cubans have already ceded some ground at least. They've basically had to hand off the monopoly they had on importing oil, because private businesses are now the ones who can do that for their own needs. And the other thing they've said is that they're going to open up for Cuban exiles, mainly those in Miami who were important part of Donald Trump's base. So that they can invest in the country as well. We'll have to see whether that comes to pass.

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It's sort of hard to avoid the parallels with Iran, with this notion of if you make things shaky enough, then the people will handle the regime change.

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Indeed, And I think at least several people think that was the aim of the Americans. But that's as we see in Iran. Probably not going to happen in Cuba either. Cubans have been locked up for coming out to the streets. And the other thing is a huge number of the young people who are the ones most likely to protest have left the island over the past few years. And so what you have is a very old population, which makes it by dint of that demographic base, less likely to protest. There's a different parallel that might be more instructive, which is Venezuela. So one of the things that seems to be taking shape in the American plan for Cuba is that the Castros don't necessarily go. This is something that Marco Rubio has built his career on, that he wanted to get rid of the Castro regime from Cuba. He's the son of Cuban immigrants to the United States. But now, if you see what's happening, it might be that they demand the president, who's not a Castro, go and actually leave the Castros and their relations intact on the island, including potentially putting one of their relations in charge.

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Quite apart from the question of whether a deal with America will make life a little bit better for Cubans, how will they feel about that? In particular, the Castros take charge again?

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Well, again, it depends on which Cuban you talk to. But essentially, Cubans were hoping that maybe out of all of this and the hardship and the pressure, they would get some form of change. And so if there's some form of economic liberalization, that will definitely benefit them. But I think they'd also like to see the back of their regime. But what lots of people said when I was there is they don't want to see it in a way that causes chaos. They want there to be some negotiated transition, not some taking out of certain people that just leads collapse. So there's still a bit of hope. But as this drags on and as they see what's happened in Venezuela and as they see what happens in Iran, I think that sense of hope is somewhat fading.

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Thanks very much for joining us, Sarah.

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Thanks, Jason.

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Do you want bigger muscles? Would you like lush hair? Would you like a beautiful, glowing complexion? Well, you can have those now, thanks to peptides. You can buy them in little vials from China and you can inject them into yourself. The problem is that they are untested, unregulated. They may be contaminated and there's no science behind them at all. So that's what we're here to talk about today.

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Now, Natasha Lohta, our health editor, you and Tim Cross, our senior science writer, have been diving into this world of peptides. What drew you in?

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Well, they just seem to be everywhere. They're the newest generation of performance enhancing drugs and one of the things I was keen to do was see just how easy it is to get hold of them. So I picked a peptide. I picked one called BPC157.

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What's that do for you?

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Well, it's one half of something called the Wolverine stack. And allegedly, if you take these two drugs together, it boosts your body's ability to recover from damage, just like the man with the claws in the spandex.

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Also probably does wonders for your nails, I would imagine. So, simple as that. Couple of clicks and you owned it.

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Yeah, it was like ordering a screwdriver off Amazon. There are dozens of these sites, lots of them. Some have reviews on sites like trustpilot. They offer next day delivery. So I used the Economist's credit card and two days later I got sent this for those people who are listening. It's a little vial of BPC157. It's maybe an inch tall. It says research only 5 milligrams. And then you just pick a part of your anatomy and start injecting.

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At this point, I should, as the health editor, recommend that none of our listeners or viewers actually do this, because this is not a safe thing to do. And the only reason, of course, that you can buy these online is because they're exploiting a loophole whereby they can sell them as research chemicals.

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It actually says on it, not for human consumption, research only, but the site I bought it from, they sell syringes, they sell the water, and they have these little tutorial videos showing you exactly how to do all this stuff.

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And it's all being normalized as well by really high profile figures like Joe Rogan, like RFK Jr. The health secretary in America, so committed

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to getting to the bottom of this and gonzo journalist extraordinaire. You shot it up.

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I did not. Chewed it up. No. I'm with Natasha on this. It's really fascinating the extent to which at least some people are willing to buy untested chemicals on the Internet and inject them into their own bodies. Biologically, a peptide essentially is just a word for a biological molecule that's too small to count as a full on protein. Online. What it's come to mean is this whole constellation of drugs. There's like a peptide for all seasons. There are some which are meant to give you a sort of skin glow up. There are some which boost your muscle power, allegedly. Some which are supposed to sharpen your brain. So it's become this entire scene.

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I mean, they're biological, biologically active molecules, so they could definitely do something. And of course GLP1 drugs are peptides and so is insulin.

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And quite a lot of this actually is people wanting cheap semaglutide.

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Yeah, exactly.

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Online.

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But there's hundreds of these peptides now and so it's not a simple question of do they work or don't they?

13:44

Yeah, my guess would be there are hundreds. And so five or six will prove to be really useful. We just don't.

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We just don't know which ones.

13:56

So in a sense though, same as it ever was. Right. It's just out in the open now instead of dodgy characters in the gym.

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Yeah. What's fundamentally different is that the sort of performance enhancing drugs that have been used in the past, at least these have been tested in humans. What we don't know with any of these peptides is what kind of risks we're taking with our body. And there is multiple levels of that. There's a question of purity, whether what you're getting is actually what it says on the label. Someone I spoke to in the course of this was explaining they'd had something tested and they had found a whole range of people, other things in this bottle, including a derivative of ecstasy and a weed killer. And Then there's the question of even if you do have this effective molecule, BP157, which is stimulating blood vessel growth, it's like, well, is that a healthy thing to do? Right? Is that gonna trigger a cancer down the line? These are questions completely unanswered.

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I mean, for me, I think what's so different about it is the way in the old days, if you wanted to buy steroids, you needed to know a guy who knew a guy at the gym. And now the Internet lets you directly link the Chinese factories where most of these things are made, with the resellers who supply the influencers online. If you wanted to look up what steroids do in the old days, you would have to ask your gym buddies. Now you have things like PubMed, where every biological paper is just sat there on the Internet for anyone to read. So there's this sort of weird mix of like plausible biological speculation that then shades into wishful thinking, that then shades into sort of outright delusion. And people talk about this and they mix and match these drugs and say, I'm going to reduce, rejuvenate my mitochondria. It looks like science, but there are

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a whole series of phrases used for it, bro. Science is one of them. This kind of folk pharmacology.

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Pharmacology is my favorite and surely something ending in maxing.

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Absolutely.

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But it's all bullshit and people can

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read into the scant literature what story they want to hear.

15:47

Exactly. And the Internet's allowed you to shortcut this whole regulatory process that exists for drugs to protect people from the potential downsides.

15:50

What are regulators doing about this if it's clearly such a mess?

15:59

I mean, there's a range of things that are going on in America. They've gone the other way and they're saying, we want a safe supply of some of these peptides, so we're going to allow compounding pharmacies to make them. Britain, other countries are cracking down on manufacturing sites, some of the online websites, but there's very little action on the social media channels. There is a giant marketing exercise. It's incredibly easy to make money selling these drugs. And so you have to just not take at face value anything that you read online about them.

16:02

I think there's a broader point as well, which is that even if you could trust the people online, and I'm not saying you can, I think Natasha's completely right. There's a reason why we have clinical trials. It costs a billion dollars and takes 10 years to bring a drug to market. And the reason is fundamentally we don't understand the human body well enough to look at a drug, predict what it will do, and know all its side effects. And we've learned this the hard way. So they might be right that something plausibly has benefits, they might be right that it really has benefits, but they can't know how to balance those benefits against those drawbacks without going through the enormous, expensive hassle of doing a proper clinical trial on these things. And there are hundreds, so it'll just never get done.

16:37

I really understand this motivation to want to enhance or improve yourself. And medicine does stop at a point of saying, well, we've tested these molecules to allow us to judge whether they fix a condition that you have or cure a disease or whatever.

17:14

Well, this is it. I think part of what this phenomenon reflects is the notion that the public at large thinks that medicine moves too slowly and it stops before it gets to the things that are important to me, such as a glowing complexion or whatever it is. And so that the unregulated market, where there is a whisper of some science, is a perfectly sensible place to go to get what the fullest expression of modern medicine will actually get for you.

17:32

So, yeah, and the people who put that point most forcefully are the Silicon Valley crowd. So their argument would be, no one's doing this science. The medical establishment is too slow and too cautious. We'll do it on ourselves and let you all know what the results are and this will be good for humanity.

17:58

But that doesn't tell you anything. It just tells you that one person who's had an intervention and they may have been doing half a dozen other things, you know, had a result. And if the problem is this deep and Silicon Valley is this concerned about it, then they need to find ways of at least advancing the knowledge of these peptides in ways that are helpful. There's lots of things you could do that would at least reduce the potential harm. And that's, I think, what we're both worried about.

18:12

Tim, Natasha, thank you both very much for joining us.

18:39

Thank you.

18:41

Thank you.

18:42

When Chuck Norris dipped a toe into Hollywood in the early 1970s, he went for elocution lessons.

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Ann Roe is the Economist's obituaries editor.

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They really didn't show. Because if his voice carried at all above the exploding buildings and the piled up car crashes and the rain, rapid gunfire, all he was usually saying was let's party or Showtime or something of that ilk, he knew he was no Lawrence Olivier or Dustin Hoffman. He wasn't even a Sylvester Stallone. He wasn't at all like John Wayne, who had been his boyhood hero. He didn't have that heft of virtuous behavior. But that was wasn't the reason that a billion people a week worldwide by his estimate, were watching his films or his television series. Martial arts was something he was incredibly expert at. He'd had long training over the years, ever since the day when he was in the Air Force in South Korea doing his national service in the 50s. And he realized that there was a judo hall nearby and he just wandered in, feeling a bit lost. And after one session he was hooked. It took him a while to find his feet there and lose them as well. But at the end he got completely hooked in it to the degree that he became world champion at Karate in 1967. He also became an 8th degree black belt in taekwondo, which is very rare. He set up even his own martial arts series of lessons, which was called Tun Kuk do, vaguely a pun on his name, which was a mishmash of all the other sorts of marglade he'd learned, which included, included jiu jitsu, judo and so on. Now, this transformation of his life always surprised him. It was a lasting surprise and a lasting mystery, except that as a Christian, he thought that God had probably organized it because he was born to a very poor family in Ryan, Oklahoma. The family kept moving around, first to Texas and then to California. He said they moved 13 times in 15 years. His parents eventually divorced because his father was an alcoholic. He went on terrible binges with whiskey. And it seemed that there was no particular life opening up for Chuck Norris there. At school. He was very, very shy. The situation at home weighed heavily on him. He had no aptitude for sport and sometimes he would go whole days without speaking. But as he used to tell underprivileged children, he'd had two parts in his boyhood. He could have chosen either a positive or a negative route out. The negative one meant that he was convinced that he was nobody. He would never get anywhere. And so he, he would probably take up drinking like his father. The positive route would be that he would find some activity that really intrigued him, excited him, and he would set goals in it and he would progress towards those and he would always be pushing forward. And that was the one he had chosen. Look, he would tell the children, look what had become of him now. In fact, what he'd become was somebody who was the savior of everybody. People saw him as a man who could solve every problem and who was possessed of extraordinary strength. There were a lot of memes going about, one of which was that Superman when he was young wore Chuck Norris pajamas, that the bogeyman, when he went to bed would check the closet for Chuck Norris, that the flu had a jab against Chuck Norris every year. And perhaps the favorite one, that Chuck Norris didn't do push ups, he did earth downs. His last attempt at rescuing everybody was to publish a book called Black Belt Patriotism, which recommended that America should return to the ideals of the founding fathers, that is morality and civic responsibility. He wanted to see these imposed on children in school. He wanted to make sure that the family was the basis of society and that America was once again sort of strong in virtue and the country that the rest of the world inevitably looked up to. So he had come rather a long way from the poor boy in Oklahoma who didn't dare speak in school. And he'd also come quite a long way from the kickboxing champion. He'd become the savior of the nation in quite a few people's eyes and even in seemed in his own. And in his very last days, he might have been cheered to know that he was being widely tipped as the only man who completely single handed could reopen the strait of hormones.

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And row on Chuck Norris who's died aged 86. That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. The show's editors are Chris Impey and Jack Gill. Our deputy editor is Sarah Larnyuk and our sound designer is Will Rowe. Our senior creative producer is William Warren and our senior development producer is Rory Galloway. Our senior producers are Henrietta McFarlane and Alize Jean Baptiste. Our producers are Jonathan Day and Anne Hanna and our assistant producer is Kunal Patel. With extra production help this week from Benji Guy, we'll all see you back here tomorrow for the weekend. Intelligence. This week we'll be looking into Ibogaine, a powerful hallucinogenic drug that has a strong and growing fan base in America. What's unusual about it is not that its most vocal advocates want the government's blessing for its use. It's who those advocates are. We look into why Red State America sees the drug as a lifeline for communities trying to drag themselves out of a years long opioid crisis.

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This economist podcast is sponsored by Bill, the intelligent finance platform that helps businesses and accounting firms scale with proven results with AI powered automation. Bill isn't just moving money, they're simplifying financial operations. For nearly half a million customers, Bill has securely processed over a trillion dollars in transactions. That's proven infrastructure. Ready to talk with an expert? Visit bill.comproven and get a $250 gift card as a thank you. That's bill.comproven. terms and conditions apply. See Offer page for details. Investing with Schwab is like spending a Saturday at a great farmer's market. You can fill your reusable tote with a bit of everything. Maybe you go for some free range, self directed investing, or perhaps you pick up a few farm fresh trades while you peruse. You can even get help from a dedicated advisor. That's full service wealth management. Mix, match and change your mind whenever you want. Because at Schwab, you can invest your way no matter your goals or appetite for investing, Schwab has everything you need all in one place. Visit schwab.com to learn more.

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