In Cuba, every one lives on $20 a month.
Except there’s nothing to buy and even traveling within the country costs six months to a year’s wages.
And all the free stuff is only a reminder of what is lacking.
Che Guevera wanted to abolish currency altogether but Castro realized the economy would grind to a complete halt without some means of economic exchange so that insane idea was nixed.
But everything else implemented left Cuba worse off and the only thing worse there is the scale of the brutal repression of tiny freedom movements on the island.
Communism has its own logic - and because it wasn’t imposed by Soviet troops makes it feel like a parody of the Latin American caudillo state.
Only caudillos didn’t care what their people did as they long as they could steal the spoils. Castro cared about what people shouldn’t do and he still managed to steal from them.
Cuba is a country trapped in a time warp in more ways than one. Its like a world time has passed by in which nothing will change. That makes all the fulsome and disgusting international praise of Castro distant from the island’s real state of affairs.
The bottom really fell out with the collapse of the USSR, which had heavily subsidized Cuba to hide the failure. When that spigot was turned off, we started receiving many Cubans who weren’t even political refugees - they were economic refugees, and some politicians wanted to change our policy towards them (where any that reached US soil could automatically stay) to reflect that.
Blaming the US was absurd because we had an embargo, not a blockade; the rest of the world could (and did) trade with Cuba, and they simply had nothing of value to make such trade beneficial to the average Cuban.
Some of those praising Castro today point to the healthcare and education; this may have been an improvement over the Batista government but hardly compensated for everything else they sacrificed (freedom & social mobility, for instance). Like Nigeria, they now have educated people who can only find work tilling fields...