It takes a special skill to run a country at a per capita GDP of $250 in 2025. Practically medieval.

*$243 is average monthly salary. Gonna have to hand in my poasting license. On safer ground, I visited in 2017, and spent a few days off the beaten track mostly due to transportation failures. I've also spent time in the Russian Far East hinterland. Both shockingly poor. But only Cuba manages to achieve a food shortage on a tropical island paradise.

Here's some photos from the Russian and Cuban hinterland, away from the flashy state projects in the capitals, the tourist resorts, etc etc. This is off the main street of Khandyga (which is on Google street view now!!), a port, river crossing, and road transport access point to an area the size of Europe. This is right outside Myaundzha, a town built as a communist paradise with large factories, coal mines, and a power plant (mostly derelict now). This is the government monopoly food dispensary in Corral Nuevo, a small town just a few miles outside the tourist hot spot of Matanzas, and one we only visited because the electric train from Havana terminates near here, 5 miles short of Matanzas, because the tracks have been allowed to degrade so badly despite this being an ostensibly viable railroad. This is the bridge on the same block, originally built prior to the revolution, and now completely unsafe even as a pedestrian bridge, because like everything else, steel is a state run "enterprise". I don't write this to revel in the desperation of these people. They are effectively imprisoned in societies that treat them as property of the state, that appropriate any productive surplus, that treat their poverty as a feature, not a bug.