Obviously, I believe the situation of cutting off fuel entering the country has to have had a negative impact. However, what has been featured in the press—the piles of garbage and the humanitarian catastrophe—did not start in January. That has been going on for years. In 2015 Moscow offered Havana $1.5 billion to help rebuild Cuba's electrical power grid; they had to come up with 10%. The response of the Cuban government to Moscow was that they had other priorities. Their other priorities, as we heard earlier, were to build high-rise luxury hotels with their own generators. You can see the photographs, if you search the Internet, of entire towns that are dark from the lack of electricity, except for the luxury hotels built by the military. They have their own generators. That is the reality.
In July 2021, there were mass protests in Cuba. One thing was people's desire for freedom. The other was that you had a propaganda apparatus claiming that they were going to develop their own sovereign vaccines. At the same time, there were no vaccines being distributed in Cuba, even while Russian and Chinese vaccines, in addition to those of Moderna and Pfizer, were being distributed through the rest of Latin America. The Cubans were losing family members, who were being buried in mass graves. The propaganda, the happy talk, was how they were going to have, in a short while, these sovereign vaccines. That was one of the factors that frustrated the Cubans enough that they took to the streets.
In August 2021, the regime responded by allowing the Chinese COVID vaccine into the island, but that took hundreds of thousands of Cubans taking to the streets. They were fired upon. There are still over 1,200 political prisoners in Cuba. Many of them were engaged in those protests. Others were farmers who were trying to provide their produce to Cubans on the ground. The Cubans would rather import it from the United States than allow Cuban farmers to generate food for the Cuban people.