So, yes. I think it might just happen that buying banana from somewhere keeps them poor. These are so well known cases that I somewhat suspect you asked the question as a softball.
Then they don’t get masacred to force others to labour on the banana plantations, and their democraticaly elected leaders don’t get overthrown by the CIA.
Maybe they find other ways to thrive, maybe not. Banan is not the only thing they could grow, and growing things is not the only way to make an economy work.
This is not an abstract economy problem from a econ 101 textbook. History cannot be rolled like that back and “what-if” is not a question we can answer.
What we know is that violence has been commited with the direct goal of securing said banana supply.
It depends. In ideal conditions it wouldnt, but there's all sorts of ways that a large country like the USA (or its corporations) can keep a smaller country (and/or its poorer citizens) in poverty while trading with them, to their own advantage. e.g. Banana Replublics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_republic), third world debt in the 80s/90s, poor people being pushed into growing cash crops instead of food ( https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/behind-africas-famin...)
> It's like, if you complained about the lack of consumer products in Cuba, how could you discuss that without bringing up the sanctions the US has placed on them for decades?
Keep in mind Cuba is free to trade with 192+ countries all around the world. Easy to blame everything on the embargo, harder to take a long hard look at the systemic corruption, incompetence, generalized theft and human rights violations plaguing the country.
> Keep in mind Cuba is free to trade with 192+ countries all around the world.
Is that the case? I don't know a lot about how the blocade works but Wikipedia says "the United States has threatened to stop financial aid to other countries if they trade non-food items with Cuba" and "US-based companies, and companies that do business with the US, which trade in Cuba do so at the risk of US sanctions."
Just looking at Cuba-EU trade (so more for the second category):
> Cuba’s main export goods are agricultural products, beverages, tobacco and mineral fuels, for which there is no preferential trade regime.
> The main export goods from the EU to Cuba are food, chemicals products, plastics, basic metals and their manufactures, machinery, household appliances and transport equipment.
Yes, absolutely. Cuba not only trades with the EU, but also regularly with Canada, another major US ally and does so without legal or political consequences for either Cuba or Canada. The embargo was a shameful disaster of U.S political policy in how it was applied, but also in its PR damage, because it let a grossly corrupt, authoritarian regime spend several decades justifying its nearly every failure on this one U.S political measure with the help of useful idiot supporters in the U.S and elsewhere. The embargo never stopped Cuba from being much better off. It's own rigid, backwards ideology and self serving leaders did.
This is incorrect. Cuba is under secondary sanctions by the US. Any entity that trades with Cuba is liable under US Federal law to get it's assets seized. Granted it doesn't happen as often as it used to, but it's still the law on the books.
Since most countries ask for US dollars in order to trade and that these have to be held by US entities, you're basically guaranteed to have assets that can be seized.
US dollars don't have to be held by US entities. There are US dollars held on balance sheets around the world by non-US entities. During the cold war, the Soviet Union held USD in non-US accounts.
Countries don't ask for US dollars in order to trade. Although it is common for some goods to be priced in US dollars, companies (rather than countries) will price and trade in whatever currency suits them, often with assistance from banks providing foreign exchange services. The banks don't need to be US banks, and goods priced in USD do not need to be paid for in USD if you go through an intermediary, which is common practice.
US dollars can only be held in proper by US entities. All US dollars are either actually held by a bank, which has a US entity responsible for those US dollars, or as an IOU for another US entity. Despite them being on the balance sheet of a non-US entity, they are ultimately in custody of some entity under US law, unless we're talking about literal cash.
> Countries don't ask for US dollars in order to trade. Although it is common for some goods to be priced in US dollars, companies (rather than countries) will price and trade in whatever currency suits them, often with assistance from banks providing foreign exchange services. The banks don't need to be US banks, and goods priced in USD do not need to be paid for in USD if you go through an intermediary, which is common practice.
Countries do ask for US dollars in order to trade. You can notionally trade in another currency, but the value of this currency is related to the number of US dollars it can buy, and eventually that is what ends up happening. Some countries will set up currency swap mechanisms in order to allow for trade without relying on the dollar, but these are few and far between. It is generally not possible to do such trade without at some level going through the US dollar. This is a natural consequences of the fact that the US dollar is the only dominant reserve currency, meaning that it is by far the currency with the largest trade surplus. The structural reasons for this trade surplus, which I won't get into, are the reason why international trade ends up with the US dollar. For these reasons, the threat if being banned from using the US dollar, if your assets aren't seized, is sufficient to greatly dissuade trade.
Cuba is not the only example of this. American secondary sanctions on Iran led to the cancellation of contracts between European companies and Iranian companies en masse, and were cited as the reason why it happened.
> The parent comment stands up. The embargo is not a reasonable explanation for the poor circumstances of the Cubans.
Cuba has a GDP per capita of 9500$ USD nominal (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...) - which is above the average for Latin America and the Cardibbean. We can look at Iran for an example of a country under an identical sanctions regime, which suffered a 50% fall in GDP. The thesis that most of its economic problems come from the sanctions regime seems strong, as the closest analog suffered a halving of GDP and because it is nonetheless economically a strong performer for the region.
If you look at a microscopic level, the lack of access to specific products is a common theme in Cuban economic problems, and this is certainly attributable to the sanctions regime.
