You also need to be mindful of the situation in Cuba before the revolution, where the people felt that their country was becoming a satellite of the US, and losing control over its own destiny.
There is no justification for what they did.
The embargo has created a dearth of medical supplies & knowledge, has negatively impacted nutrition, lack of resources, lack of tourism dollars, and provides a bogeyman for the regime to blame for all its ails. It has helped repress and impoverish the people more than anything else. The United Nations General Assembly has passed a resolution every year since 1992 opposing it.
It's possible that, like China, the oppressive effects of Communism could have been lessened (even if just a little) under the benefits of trade with a Capitalist democracy. Medical crises would have been dealt with quicker, and they would have had more cash on hand from tourism to invest in agriculture (or at the very least, import more food).
And you may feel differently about this, but I think the ban on travel really sucked ass for Cuban families who couldn't visit their relatives, and the bans on transfer of money to family members in Cuba. But that's not really a regime thing, that was just the US being dicks.
Cuba is towards the top of that list, by life expectancy, caloric intake, GDP per capita, literacy, child mortality.
Cuba has a lot of problems... But still it turned out far better then, say, Haiti, or Honduras ever will be, despite all the benefits of open markets. This is consistently missing from the narrative.
Other countries had brief experiences with more pro market governments (even if by necessity as opposed to ideology, such as in Brazil), or now in Argentina.
The results have always been positive, but we seem destined to be governed by populist left wing governments.
Cuba was at the top of the list by the end of the 1950's, when its US-backed dictator had turned it into one of the leading developed nations in the world. Then the Castro regime comes in, and things don't go very well, but the Soviet Union floats it along for a few decades. Then things go down hill real fast.
Almost any regime that didn't have such an antagonistic relationship with the US would probably have done better. But it's clear the US was intentionally hurting them in order to pressure some sort of additional revolution so they could install a new dictator. That never happened, so the US forced them to suffer the continued loss of US trade. We could have lifted it during the 90's famine (the OAS lifted its embargo 30 years prior), but still no. I don't see why anyone would downvote my parent comment; the UN has been agreeing with me for 25 years.
If you're one of the educated white folks whose family lost a plantation or Havana mansion, I can understand you hate the Castros. It's like getting kicked out of Paris and 60 years later the city is literally crumbling. For a while it was like a civilization trapped in amber but infrastructure has gone over the line into complete decay.
On the plus side is good education, good health care, not a lot of crime, until recently a guarantee of a job that would keep body and soul together.
The Castros still have > 50% popular support, they have managed to maintain control of the country and the armed forces despite all their failures, foreign military adventures, withdrawal of Russian support, constant pressure from the USA.
It's a very mixed bag but not the one-sided disaster we constantly hear about from people who make a cottage industry of selling that story (someone has got the US to spend $500m on broadcasts to Cuba no one can receive, and that's just one example).
Moving to a more liberalized economy and attracting foreign investment without causing social unrest, giving up control will be a challenge, and the fact that all the educated people want to leave will not make it easier.
these were interesting http://fusion.net/story/116226/historic-poll-top-25-findings...
http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2016/03/21/2157021/the-us-and-cub...
http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/cuba-after-obama...
https://medium.com/@dtemkin/spending-the-last-week-in-cuba-w...
It would be also very interesting to know from where you get that figure that more than 50% of the population support the Castros as that data is famously unavailable.
for the record, it's an effed system and economy and a poor country, just not quite as effed as people would like you to believe. people flock to the US from Mexico too, and that's without the wet foot/dry foot policy giving Cubans automatic asylum.
if they do get decent Internet it will be a pretty good tech hub due to the education. Americans might even flock there for a cheap, beautiful and fascinating place to live. Cubans actually have the full US cable/media package via el paquete and eat it up.
while you're at it, read up on the Fanjuls, some of America's greatest recipients of corporate welfare, and why US sugar prices are a multiple of world prices. if you love free markets, best thing we could do for poor countries is not blockade them while subsidizing politically connected moguls. (who profit from boycott and generated the constant anti-Castro drumbeat and policy...until they decided they'd rather do business with Cuba)
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2001/02/floridas-fanjuls-2001...
https://www.aei.org/publication/protectionist-sugar-policy-c...
If the United States had a wet foot/dry foot policy with the rest of Central America, it would be absolutely flooded with asylum seekers. It's already flooded with illegal aliens risking their lives, paying coyotes to smuggle them across the Mexican border - imagine what would happen if they were automatically legalized.
The oppressive effects of communism were lessened because China lessened communism by introducing free market reforms. It wasn't just trade with capitalist nations that improved the welfare of China and its people, it was becoming more capitalist a nation itself.
In a single year (1978-1979) new party leader Deng Xiaoping led economic reforms to the PRC, signed an accord with Jimmy Carter for the US to officially recognize the PRC, and attracted new business from Boeing and Coca-Cola. More reforms followed soon after. But it is absolutely clear that they thought the Capitalist model was what worked and they wanted a form of it, and used trade with the US as its beginning.
I make this distinction about the US influencing them because without the successful model (and attractive potential partner) of the US, the push for a market economy may not have worked.
Cuba could have done the same, except we were still giving them the finger.