Cuba at a crossroads: economic reforms and a surge in the number of Cuban-Americans visiting their homeland are beginning to change life in this Communist dictatorship.

• Author: Burnett, Victoria
• Position: INTERNATIONAL

When Alejandrina Hernandez flew from her home in Miami to her native Cuba last spring, she took a lot more than a few changes of clothes for the vacation. She also lugged more than 100 pounds of food, clothing, and medicine for her family and other Cubans whose relatives in the United States paid Hernandez to bring the much-needed supplies.

Arnol Rodriguez, who left Cuba 11 years ago and lives in Rochester, N.Y., brought seven suitcases with him on a recent trip back. His bags contained everything from test kits for his diabetic brother to shoes, clothes, chocolate, a PlayStation 2, two hard drives, and a DVD player.

Hernandez and Rodriguez are part of a surge in Cuban-American visitors to Cuba since 2009, when President Obama lifted travel restrictions for those with family in Cuba. People made an estimated 400,000 trips to Cuba from the U.S. in 2011--more than at any other time since the U.S. cut ties with Cuba's Communist regime half a century ago. And those visitors are having a huge impact even if Washington remains wary of re-establishing ties.

Trade Embargo

"In Washington, the whole debate over normalizing relations in Cuba is dead in the water," says Philip Peters, a Cuba expert at the Lexington Institute, a policy group in Arlington, Virginia. "Meanwhile, in Miami, Cuban-Americans are normalizing relations one by one."

Official relations between the U.S. and Cuba have been frozen since the Cuban Revolution in 1959, when Fidel Castro and his band of guerrillas overthrew the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista (see timeline, p. 14).

At the height of the Cold War between the U.S. and the Communist powers, Castro aligned Cuba with the Soviet Union, embracing its repressive political system, state-run economic model, and hostility toward the U.S. He also nationalized, without compensation, American businesses in Cuba. In response, Washington imposed a trade embargo that remains in effect today.

Soviet aid kept Cuba's economy afloat until the early 1990s. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Cuba went into economic free fall.

Castro and his brother, Raul, who took over Cuba's presidency in 2008 when Fidel's health declined, have long blamed the U.S. embargo for the woes of Cuba's state-run economy. And though the Communist regime has been credited with progress in education and health care, Cuba remains a totalitarian state that stifles dissent, holds political prisoners, and violates basic human rights. The press is controlled by the state, and most Cubans have only very restricted access to the Internet.

There are often food shortages. (The joke in Cuba is that if education, health care, and sports are the revolution's three greatest achievements, its three greatest failures are breakfast, lunch, and dinner.) Government salaries average about $20 a month--even for doctors and teachers.

Those who work in tourism and earn tips in U.S. dollars and those with relatives abroad fare better: There are 1.8 million Cubans in the U.S. who fled in waves after the revolution. They live mostly in Florida and New Jersey, and they send more than $900 million a year to their families in Cuba.

Economic Reforms

Raul Castro has implemented some reforms. But they fall far short of the full embrace of the free market that the U.S. says Cuba needs. In his first weeks as president, he allowed Cubans--those who could afford it--to buy cellphones, computers, and DVD players for the...