Cuba AT A CROSSROADS: What do rising tensions with the U.S. and an economic slide mean for this Communist nation on the cusp of change?

• Author: Smith, Patricia
• Position: INTERNATIONAL

For young people in Cuba, the past few years have been a roller coaster ride.

There have been many exciting changes, bringing hope for the future. In a poor country where virtually no one owned a cellphone a decade ago, they've become common. The government has set up hundreds of public Wi-Fi hotspots that allow Cubans to use their phones to access the internet. In 2016, to mark the easing of relations between Cuba and the United States, then-President Barack Obama made a historic visit to the Communist nation. Then last year, the Castro family that had ruled Cuba for more than half a century relinquished power.

But there have also been a number of discouraging setbacks. The long-feeble Cuban economy has hit a serious slump, and shortages of food and other essentials have soared. And President Trump, who took office in 2017, views Cuba much differently than Obama did.

"For a lot of people, that was very hopeful, Obama's visit to Cuba," says Mario Mirabales Reina, a 16-year-old from Havana. "But it seems like it didn't result in anything."

The U.S. and Cuba sit just 90 nautical miles apart, but they have long been separated by deep ideological, political, and economic differences. For more than 50 years after Fidel Castro led the Cuban Revolution, relations between the two countries were frozen. In 2014, the U.S. and Cuba began to slowly normalize relations, a key foreign policy goal of the Obama administration.

But the thaw was short-lived. For the past few years, President Trump has been rolling back many of the Obama-era measures that expanded travel and business ties, saying they've helped support an authoritarian regime. In June, the Trump administration announced new restrictions on Americans' ability to visit Cuba, including prohibiting cruise ships from stopping there.

"The recent changes and the improved relations with the U.S. had created a sense of hope," says Richard Feinberg, a Cuba expert at the University of California, San Diego. "But now the economy is in crisis, and international relations have suddenly soured. I think the term 'whiplash' captures it well from the Cuban point of view."

The hostilities between the U.S. and Cuba date back to the Cold War. In 1959, Fidel Castro and his band of armed guerrillas overthrew U.S.-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista (see key dates, below). Soon after, Cuba aligned itself with the Soviet Union's Communist government, and Castro started cracking down on political dissidents. In 1960, he began seizing the assets of U.S. companies like Coca-Cola without compensation, and...