Cuba Prevents Cubans from Obtaining U.S. Auto Imports

Cuba maintains tariffs averaging between $20,000 and $56,000 on imported motor vehicles resulting in practically no such impots, and a Cuban journalist, Rafaela Cruz, claims there is no rational basis for those tariffs and instead wonders if the Cuban Government’s reason(s) could be one or more of the following:

• “Maintain the monopoly in the hands of a few privileged people, on both sides of the Florida Straits, who get rich from car traffic.
• It is not in their interest to improve the mobility of Cubans.
• They do not want people to become economically independent from the State.
• Castroism wants to protect the state company because its political power and social influence are correlated with the importance and relevance of these companies.
• They do not want them to send cars from Miami for the use of the people, as they prefer that they send dollars for the use of the Government.
• They need to torpedo private economic development in order to maintain the current extractive structure.”[1]

Recently the Biden Administration eliminated any U.S. reason for the absence of such exports/imports, and Rafaela Cruz asserts that this absence is due to  the previously mentioned Cuban “tariffs, bureaucracy, cruelty and treachery.”

=========================

[1] Cruz, Lifting the veil of the US embargo, the true blockade of Cuba is discovered, Diario de Cuba (June 1, 2024); Cruz, Why doesn’t the Cuban Government allow the massive importation of vehicles from the US?, Diario de Cuba (May 19, 2024).