During a busy lunch rush at Havana, a Cuban restaurant in Arcata, Executive Chef Lisvany Ortega sat at a small wooden table, the pulse of salsa music echoing in the background. Between bursts of activity from the kitchen, he shared the story of how he journeyed from Old Havana to this quiet corner of Northern California.
Ortega began working in the restaurant industry at 17, hopping from kitchen to kitchen in Cuba before making his way to Mexico, then Miami and finally landing in California. It was a longtime friend and fellow Havana native who invited him to join the staff at Havana restaurant.
“Everyone is leaving Cuba,” Ortega said. “Because there are no opportunities, there is no security. Over there, if you want to open a business like this one, you do it, and every day you wake up and go to sleep with the fear that they will knock on your door and take your business.”
Ortega explained that maintaining a business in Cuba is difficult. There is a cap on how much money a proprietor can earn, and that limit can change overnight. If a business does too well, the Cuban government often imposes additional fees and taxes that ultimately force it to close. People are rarely given a reason; it just happens.
While Ortega lived through the daily struggle of working in Cuba’s unstable restaurant industry, Shona Baum, a co-owner of Havana restaurant, witnessed the country’s unraveling from the perspective of an American running a business in its capital. She and William Gónzalez Martí co-owned a restaurant called California Cafe in Cuba, where chefs fused Cuban and American cuisine. After a few years, they had to close the business due to the change in economy.
Baum first visited Cuba during the Obama era in 2015. She spent five years living there, running the restaurant and witnessing firsthand the island’s rapid political and economic deterioration. “Once Trump became president, within less than a year there were a lot of political and economic problems that made it much harder to run a restaurant,” Baum said.
After Fidel Castro’s death in 2016, leadership passed to his brother Raúl Castro. Then in 2018, Miguel Díaz-Canel became president. This transition sparked early hopes for reform that, according to Baum, quickly faded. “Everyone thought he would be better and more change-oriented, but they just kept doing more and more repressive things,” she said.
Díaz-Canel did expand private business opportunities in Cuba, allowing people to own small businesses. However, these ventures remained tightly controlled by the government. There are no free markets or franchise opportunities, and the imposition of high taxes and fees continued.
These restrictive government actions made it hard for small businesses to survive. The economy became extrememly cash oriented and people often waited in line for hours at the bank, only to find that the bank had run out of hard currency.
In 2017, Trump announced plans to restrict the “people-to-people” travel licenses that encouraged contact between citizens of the two countries. People-to-people licenses allowed Americans to legally visit Cuba, as long as they spent their time interacting directly with Cuban society through educational and cultural activities, not just leisure tourism. Closing this avenue greatly slowed tourism in Cuba. The lack of American tourists deeply affected the economy, especially for businesses like California Cafe that served a wide variety of travelers.
“Then COVID hit and everything was squashed,” Baum said.
To join the International Monetary Fund, Cuba had to adopt a single currency when the pandemic hit. In January of 2021, Cuba ended its dual-currency system, unifying the Cuban peso (CUP) as the sole currency and eliminating the convertible peso (CUC). While intended to simplify the economy, the move triggered inflation and hardship due to sudden price increases.
“When I would go down to visit, the currency plummeted,” Baum said, offering the example that a sandwich that had once cost $10 was now only $3.
The shift to the moneda nacional, or national currency, caused logistical chaos. The CUP, which had previously traded at 23-25 pesos per dollar, had fallen to 4,000 pesos per dollar. When foreign visitors paid in dollars, the conversion was so extreme that some items would cost only pennies, so making change became nearly impossible.
Ortega’s eyes welled with tears as he spoke about Cuba. He says he misses his family and his homeland, but recognizes the lack of opportunity there. “The politics and more the things that have happened in Cuba, the communism. You cannot say anything that they don’t like because they jail you, it’s all bad and they do it without right,” Ortega said.
Both Ortega and Baum shared that there is no credible journalism in Cuba because the government does not allow it. Even on the internet, it is difficult to find verifiable news about the country, as independent journalism does not thrive there. Ortega said that government-approved tourist guides only show visitors what the regime wants them to see, painting a misleading picture of Cuban life.
“They have done away with beautiful Cuba … the more the years pass, the more it collapses,” Ortega said.
Though his heart aches for Cuba, Ortega finds peace in his new routine — crafting dishes like arroz con pollo that remind him of his mother and his early cooking days in Havana. Now, he serves them in another community, thousands of miles away.
Maryanne Casas-Perez (she/her) is a journalism student and the editor-in-chief of El Leñador at Cal Poly Humboldt.
This article appears in From Garden to Table in the Hall.