They are of course heavily sanctioned by the US for stuff that happened in the ancient past. That will not affect natural resources but it will affect the equipment to harvest them.
People have been harvesting fish from the ocean for thousands of years. They have been making bread for even longer.
Sanctions are not why Cuban's aren't able to eat. Cuba can and does trade with the rest of the world.
Cuban's can't eat because of how poorly their government allocates resources. This is the problem with all centrally planned economies - they eventually stop being run well.
It’s astonishing the amount of excuses people give for the extremely corrupt, dysfunctional, and undemocratic Cuban government.
It's shocking the lack of credit you're extending to the decade's long embargo for doing it's job of keeping Cuba poor.
Still, plenty of it out there, at this point it's more due to local disfunction more than anything.
Also, of course the extra effort that go to constrained sectors can't be expended for food production.
And a lot of the world follows US sanctions.
Calling "commies bad" is oversimplifying the situation. Ps China is a centrally planned economy that is the biggest in the world now.
But really the US should stop these sanctions. It's crazy that they still exist.
"From 1978 and for three decades afterward, China moved from central planning and autarky to a market-oriented economy."
I have heard from some Cubans they would love to see the embargo lifted just to expose how many of the problems are created by the government/army.
The United States has threatened to stop financial aid to other countries if they trade non-food items with Cuba… Despite the existence of the embargo, Cuba can, and does, conduct international trade with many countries, including many U.S. allies; however, U.S.-based companies, and companies that do business with the U.S., which trade in Cuba do so at the risk of U.S. sanctions.
Cuba was settled 6,000 years ago according to Wikipedia - long before importing goods was even a concept. They did not, and still should not need to import anything to feed their population. The resources are misappropriated by their government - it's that simple.
Cuban's rely on the government to ration/provide ingredients to make bread. And just like the USSR, the government eventually fails to provide and the population - who became entirely dependent on the government - are left with no alternative means to support themselves. It's a tragedy that has bestowed damn near every single communist nation that has ever existed.
There is no valid excuse for not being able to make enough bread.
There's also the fact that it's far cheaper to ship goods to Cuba from the US then it is to ship goods from Europe or China. This means that even if they can buy some goods, they're often much more expensive then it needs to be.
The origin of the sanctions goes back decades, to Cuba's land reform, where the government took back land from private corporations, such as United Fruit Company, who then lobbied the US to go after Cuba on their behalf.
Of course they can't make competitive CPUs. That's perfectly understandable. But provide ingredients for bread?
Growing a little grain is possible with ancient technology, but a lot of people starved back then, as they do now when agriculture is practiced without oil, pesticides, herbicides and advanced (keeping in step with population growth) machinery.
[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/04/Winter_W...
20 LOOT the economy.
30 ANNOY the US enough to get sanctioned.
40 BLAME every economic problem on US sanctions.
50 GOTO 20
Cuba is an island nation that has full political and trade relations with industrialized countries around the world. Plenty of other island nations have no trouble in their agriculture sector. Cuba's inability to make their economy work has everything to do with their lack of democracy and excess of Marxism, and nothing to do with their neighbor, the US. We have seen food shortages after Marxist takeovers pretty much everywhere that has suffered that fate.
Wheat simply does not grow in the tropics (though as I pointed out elsewhere, the Brasilians are developing this).
This is echoed by contemporary left-wing thinking in "the West." Small business is often championed while "big pharma", "big tech", "banking" and other industry giants are derided and viewed as shady at best, criminal at worst (note I'm not calling all left-wingers communists! I'm just saying that this dichotomy in left-wing thought is very common... heck, it's even common among many right-wingers).
I'm not defending communism by saying that, while "black markets" undoubtedly exist, small trade is not typically looked at as "black market capitalism." As I understand it the idea isn't to prohibit trade itself but to "control the means of production" in an attempt to achieve prosperity by removing the profit motive from industry.
- North Korea
- Cuba
Three communist and socialist countries with starving populations.
North Korea trades freely and shares a border with China. Venezuela has no sanctions applied to it by the US.
We can now easily rule out sanctions as the cause of their woes so what is the other common factor between these countries?
Actually: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctions_during_the_Venezuela...
We actually have a really nice unintentional experiment. The Biden administration removed sanctions from Venezuela, they still had starvation after sanctions were removed.
The dictator managed to get food while the country was starving however: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDebIITJ1x0