The exit from communist Cuba

 NY Post:

This rueful joke has made its way around Cuba for decades: A foreign tourist, soaking up what he thinks are the advances of the communist revolution, stops a kid in the street for a chat.

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” the visitor asks.

“A foreigner,” answers the young Cuban.

Morbid humor has long been the staple of communist regimes, from Czechoslovakia to the Soviet Union, from China to the once-prosperous Caribbean island of Cuba.

People who have lived through communism, with its alternating bouts of horrors and tedium, say it is one way to deal with such surreal surroundings.

But today, the joke meant to pour scorn on Cuba’s miserable conditions has become reality: Between 2022 and 2023, 10% of all Cubans have fled their socialist paradise to live elsewhere.

That’s more than one million people, and most of them have come to the United States, courtesy of President Biden’s open-border policies and the miserable record of his “border czar,” Vice President Kamala Harris.

They’re not just washing ashore in Florida; many, many Cubans are showing up at the southern border and waltzing right in.

These sad demographic facts were announced last week by Juan Carlos Alfonso Fraga, the head of the Cuba’s National Statistics and Information Office, at what The Miami Herald described as a “somber moment” during a session of the rubber-stamp National Assembly.

It gets worse: The flight of 1,011,269 desperate Cubans contributed the lion’s share to the island’s massive drop in population, but wasn’t the only factor.

Deaths far outnumbered births in Cuba in 2022 — 405,512 deaths versus 284,900 births.

It appears that the woeful medical conditions on the island with “free health care,” combined with such hopelessness that couples no longer want to have children, have also shrunk Cuba’s population.

To make matters even more dire, the country’s socialist leaders have decided to double down on central planning, cracking down on what little of the private sector exists in Cuba, the Herald reported.
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Communism is a failed ideology that fails everywhere it is tried.  It requires a government willing to destroy incentives to produce and leads to a desperate flight from the counties that insist on it.