Why Cuba is the Fastest Dying Country on Earth

0:00 The island of Cuba is currently facing the worst

0:02 existential crisis that it has ever faced in its history.

0:05 You've maybe missed what's going on here with all

0:07 the other chaotic things going on in the news right now.

0:10 But over the past 5 years,

0:12 Cuba has witnessed the most rapid population collapse that any

0:15 society has experienced so far in the 21st century.

0:19 At the start of the decade in 2020,

0:21 Cuba was reported to have had a population of around 11.2 million people.

0:25 Since then, it's been estimated by independent observers

0:28 that as many as 2.75 million Cubans have left the island,

0:33 meaning that nearly 1 in every four Cubans

0:36 have probably left the country in only 5 years.

0:40 An utterly catastrophic emptying out of the island's people.

0:43 The Cuban government itself officially claims a much

0:46 lower number of people who have left since 2020.

0:49 But even their own likely downplayed data claims that 14%

0:53 of the island's population have left the country over these past 5 years.

0:57 Even if that official data was true,

1:00 it would already be the second fastest rate of population

1:02 decline experienced by any country in the world this decade,

1:06 only behind the rate experienced in Ukraine,

1:09 a country that has been actively at war

1:11 for years and being massively invaded by its neighbor.

1:14 [music] If the official data is already that bad,

1:18 the truth is probably much worse and closer

1:20 to the independent analyses that are being done.

1:23 The Cuban government now officially claims that the population

1:26 on the island has shrunk from 11.2

1:29 million people in 2020 to around 9.7 million people as of the start of 2026.

1:35 While the independent analysis conducted by Juan Carlos Elzibu Campos,

1:39 a leading Cuban demographer, estimates that it's actually probably declined

1:43 closer to around 8.25 million people instead.

1:47 One of the biggest things that all of these people

1:49 have been fleeing from has been a similarly rapidly collapsing economy.

1:53 Since 2018, the Cuban economy has declined by at least 15%.

1:58 And that's according to official Cuban government data.

2:01 Since the CO 19 pandemic began,

2:03 inflation in the country has absolutely skyrocketed.

2:07 In 2019, the Cuban peso traded at a value of 20 to1 to the US dollar.

2:12 But by November of 2025,

2:14 it was trading at 450 to1 to the US dollar at the informal rate instead,

2:20 implying an annualized inflation rate of around

2:22 68% every year for six [music] straight years,

2:26 which has been verging on hyperinflation and wrecking Cuban savings.

2:31 The Cuban Observatory for Human Rights, an NGO based abbron in [music] Spain,

2:35 has recently estimated that an astonishing 89%

2:39 of the Cuban population now lives in extreme poverty,

2:43 while 7 out of 10 Cubans are having to skip at least one meal per day.

2:47 Only 3% are capable of finding the medicine that they require atarmacies.

2:52 12% of the working age population is presently unemployed,

2:55 while a whopping 78% of Cubans they surveyed reported that they either

3:00 wanted to leave the country themselves or knew someone else who did.

3:04 Wages and the cost of living in Cuba have gotten to a point

3:07 where life on the island is almost impossible for the vast majority of people.

3:11 The official average monthly wage in Cuba based

3:14 on the government's own data is just 6,56 pesos a month,

3:19 which is about the same as just a little

3:20 over 14 US a month at the informal [music] rate.

3:24 And yet, a carton of 30 eggs on the island currently cost 2,800 pesos,

3:30 equivalent to 43% of the average monthly wage.

3:34 Even a kilo of rice and a kilo of beans, the typical staple diet in Cuba,

3:39 currently cost the average worker in the country

3:41 about three full days worth of their labor.

3:44 Gasoline shortages across the island have become

3:46 chronic and too expensive for most to afford.

3:48 as well.

3:49 Drivers frequently have to wait weeks now

3:52 just in order to acquire a rationed allocation

3:54 [music] of 40 L or 10 1/2 gallons of gas that now costs about 46 US,

4:01 which is usually several times their own typical monthly wage.

4:05 The highways across the country have emptied out.

4:07 People in the rural countryside beyond the big cities have gone back

4:10 to using horsedrawn carriages and carts because of the lack of fuel.

4:14 While public transportation, even within the big cities,

4:17 has effectively grinded to a halt,

4:19 there is also an increasingly chronic electricity and energy

4:23 shortage that has been suffocating the island as well.

4:26 Mass blackouts have become routine occurrences since [music] 2020.

4:30 With no fewer than five nationwide

4:32 blackouts taking place just across [music] 2025,

4:36 during the blistering heat of the summer,

4:38 electricity across most of the island will flicker

4:41 off for at least 4 hours a day.

4:43 Now, while some of the lesser populated provinces outside of the major

4:46 cities can sometimes go up to 20 hours a day without power,

4:50 affecting everything from air conditioning to fans to refrigerators,

4:55 Cuba is currently producing about 25% less power than

4:59 it did just 6 years ago back in 2019,

5:02 based on research published by Ricardo Torres,

5:05 a Cuban economist affiliated with the American University,

5:09 which is why the blackouts sweeping across the island have been increasing.

5:12 in frequency.

5:14 The big reason why is because the vast majority of Cuba's electricity

5:18 is generated by oil with outdated and worn out Soviet era diesel generators.

5:23 While the island's imports of oil have been dwindling and dwindling,

5:27 roughly 83% of Cuba's electricity is generated

5:30 through burning oil at these diesel plants,

5:33 while 60% of Cuba's oil demand has to be imported from abroad.

5:37 Historically, until very recently,

5:40 Venezuela was providing Cuba with the lion's share of its

5:42 imported oil supply that it needed to keep the lights on.

5:46 In 2021, Venezuela was providing Cuba with more

5:49 than 100,000 barrels of oil per day,

5:52 enough to satisfy about 80% of their domestic

5:54 needs and more than they actually needed.

5:56 But as Venezuela's own economic crisis began getting worse,

6:00 their exports of oil to Cuba declined by nearly 34s

6:04 to only 16,000 [music] barrels of oil per day by 2025.

6:08 And now, after the US military captured

6:10 Venezuela's president through a raid in early January,

6:13 the Trump administration is threatening to sever even

6:16 this last drip of oil that's coming into the country,

6:19 too, threatening even more oil shortages and blackouts

6:23 on the island in the near future.

6:25 Since capturing Venezuela's president,

6:27 the Trump administration has been clear in their threats

6:29 that the communist regime in Cuba could well be next.

6:33 Within hours of the raid that captured Maduro, Trump and his secretary of state,

6:37 Marco Rubio, himself, the son of Cuban exiles, had this to say.

6:43 So, uh, yeah, Cuba really isn't in a good spot right [music] now.

6:46 And with an aggressive US government breathing down

6:49 their neck after the successful Maduro operation in Venezuela,

6:52 a lot of analysts have started predicting

6:55 that the communist regime on the island in power

6:58 continually for the past 67 years is now

7:01 the closest it has ever been to finally collapsing,

7:05 accomplishing one of the United States's

7:07 longest held geopolitical goals for decades.

7:11 But people have also been predicting the Communist Party's

7:14 imminent collapse in Cuba for a long, long time now.

7:18 At least going back to the end of the Cold

7:20 War when the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s.

7:24 And yet, it's always somehow managed to endure

7:26 and hang on despite all of these outside people's expectations.

7:31 The Communist Party's [music] control of Cuba has made it

7:34 a thorn in the side of America for generations now.

7:37 the successive president after president since the Eisenhower

7:40 administration has never been able to solve.

7:43 The island is essentially one of the final remaining relics

7:46 of the Cold War [music] that's still left behind in the world today,

7:50 including its tense relationship with the United States.

7:54 Cuba is arguably the only true surviving

7:57 Marxist Leninist state left over from the Cold

7:59 War that never collapsed or significantly pivoted

8:02 its ideology in the same kind of way that other surviving states that claim

8:05 to be communist today did like North Korea

8:08 which went down the radical path of its

8:10 own unique ju nationalist ideology or China, Vietnam and Laos which have all

8:15 adopted significant economic and free market reforms

8:18 that have introduced vibrant private businesses

8:21 that Cuba has still never done in resistance.

8:23 did.

8:24 And all of this is despite the fact that the world's last pure Marxist

8:28 Leninist state exists just 90 miles away

8:32 from the most capitalistic country on Earth,

8:34 the United States, who has been embargoing all trade

8:38 with Cuba and sanctioning [music] it for decades now.

8:42 In order for you to understand how Cuba got

8:44 to what is potentially the brink of collapse today,

8:47 why the relationship between Cuba and the United States has remained so tense,

8:51 even this long after the end of the Cold War,

8:54 and how the orthodox communist regime in Cuba has

8:57 somehow managed to survive against all of the odds

8:59 into the present day and defied everybody's previous predictions

9:03 of collapse and why this time might actually finally be different.

9:08 It helps to begin with just a little bit of backstory.

9:12 Immediately before the communist revolution took place in Cuba,

9:15 the country was ruled by this authoritarian dictator known as Fulgensio Batista,

9:19 who was genuinely widely unpopular and also backed

9:23 by the United States because he did America's bidding,

9:26 often to the detriment of his own people.

9:28 Batista was a colonel in the Cuban armed

9:30 forces who served as the president of Cuba

9:32 once between 1940 and 1944 and then ran again for a second term in 1952.

9:38 When he faced almost certain defeat in that second election,

9:41 he launched a military coup and [music] seized power through force instead.

9:46 After which he almost immediately suspended the Cuban

9:48 Constitution and revoked most of the country's civil liberties,

9:52 including the right for anyone to strike.

9:54 then in order to shore up his shaky and illegitimate position.

9:58 But he still aligned himself closely to the US

10:00 government as a foreign benefactor along with Cuba's own

10:04 wealthy landowning elites who owned the island's largest sugar

10:07 plantations which was Cuba's number one trading commodity for centuries.

10:12 Batista was also very closely connected to the American mafia and in exchange

10:17 for bribes he basically gave taxexempt [music] status to mafio owned casinos,

10:21 racetracks, brothel and nightclubs across the country which was

10:24 an open secret across Cuban society throughout the later 1950s.

10:29 [music] Eventually, due to him basically opening up the entire country

10:32 to the Americans and other foreigners in exchange for blatant personal bribes,

10:37 it reached a point under his rule where about 70%

10:40 of all the arable land in the country was owned by foreigners,

10:44 including most of the island's most valuable asset, its sugar plantations.

10:48 And perhaps the most infamous example of Batista's personal

10:51 corruption and openness of bribes while he was dictator.

10:54 An American telephone conglomerate literally presented him

10:57 with a golden telephone during a ceremony to thank him for raising the prices

11:01 of telephone usage within Cuba to ridiculous levels.

11:05 Batista was openly willing to be personally

11:08 bribed and enriched in exchange for making his fellow Cubans have to pay more

11:12 for basic services provided by American companies.

11:16 enduring him with absolutely zero loyalty

11:18 from his own people and consistently making

11:20 him appear to be nothing but a corporate Americanbacked stoogge [music] to most.

11:26 As his unpopularity grew within Cuba,

11:28 Batista consistently [music] and increasingly

11:30 resorted to the military censorship

11:32 and repression to keep the Cuban people's anger under control,

11:35 [music] even establishing his own secret

11:37 police force that conducted massive violence,

11:40 torture, and even public executions.

11:43 Throughout Batista's dictatorial rule,

11:45 it's believed that up to 20,000 Cubans were

11:48 killed while countless others were jailed or tortured.

11:52 And throughout all of this, the US

11:54 government appeared indifferent to the suffering

11:56 of the Cuban people so long as they

11:58 got what they wanted out of Cuba economically.

12:00 Throughout Batista's rule in Cuba, there was a saying that the US ambassador

12:04 was the second most powerful man on the island.

12:07 He effectively controlled the flow of arms to Batista's regime,

12:10 which he needed in order to repress

12:12 his own people and defend his position of power.

12:15 In exchange for increasing the US arms deliveries,

12:17 the ambassador would demand more generous

12:19 conditions for US businesses on the island.

12:22 Batista along with his backers in Washington were so repressive

12:26 and unpopular in Cuba that large segments of the population began turning

12:30 to the radical revolution being led by Fidel Castro and Shau

12:34 Var and their gorillas as a solution to their plight instead.

12:38 On the final day of the year in 1958,

12:41 Castro's revolution was finally successful and Batista fled the country

12:45 on New Year's Day of 1959 for the Dominican Republic,

12:49 which at the time was ruled

12:50 by fellow US backed right-wing dictator Raphael Trujillo.

12:55 Along with him, Batista also paged most of the Cuban treasury's assets

12:59 to the tune of as much as $700 million worth of cash and fine art,

13:04 which immediately kneecapped Castro's incoming

13:07 revolutionary government that overthrew [music] him.

13:10 Nonetheless, Castro was dramatically popular with most

13:13 of the Cuban people at the time,

13:15 both for having overthrown the oppressive and hated Batista regime

13:19 and for his own personal charisma and sense of presence.

13:22 Many of Cuba's old elites who were close

13:25 to the Batista regime immediately began fleeing the country,

13:28 [music] especially to South Florida.

13:30 While Castro himself initially insisted that his revolution

13:34 was not actually communist in nature, attempting instead to present at least

13:38 a nominal restoration of democracy in Cuba.

13:42 Nonetheless, the US government was still intensely

13:45 worried about what Castro's rise to power in Cuba meant for their lucrative

13:48 and exploitative business interests on the island.

13:51 So, the Eisenhower administration began preparing

13:54 the top secret Bay of Pigs invasion operation

13:57 to use CIA trained Cuban exile anti-Castro

14:01 paramilitaries to invade the island and topple Castro,

14:05 ideally from Washington's perspective,

14:07 enabling them to claim at least some degree of plausible deniability.

14:11 A few months after the Bay of Pigs plan began being set into motion,

14:15 American-owned oil refineries on Cuba refused to accept Castro's

14:19 demand that they begin processing oil from the Soviet Union,

14:23 which led to Castro nationalizing and expropriating

14:25 their assets over the summer of 1960,

14:28 which led to the US halting their imports of Cuba's sugar,

14:32 which led to Castro retaliating by nationalizing even more US-owned

14:36 assets in the country in a spiraling tit fortat trade war.

14:40 After JFK assumed the presidency in early 1961,

14:43 he inherited the Eisenhower administration's planning

14:45 for the Bay of Pigs operation, which he decided to ultimately authorize in April

14:50 of that year, a few months later, and which would quickly prove to be

14:53 a catastrophic overplaying of Washington's own hand.

14:58 The day before the roughly 1,000man strong force

15:01 of Cuban exile paramilitaries hit the beach in Cuba,

15:04 the US Air Force began bombing strategic

15:06 Cuban airfields in order to weaken their defenses.

15:09 and Castro finally publicly declared himself a Marxist

15:13 Leninist for the first time in response.

15:16 The next day, the Cuban exile paramilitary

15:18 stormed the beaches at the Bay of Pigs.

15:21 But in order for the whole plan to work,

15:23 it required the aerial support of the US Air Force,

15:26 which never ended up materializing after it

15:28 almost immediately began going very badly for them,

15:31 undermining Washington's own goal of maintaining plausible deniability.

15:35 The entire invasion force was either killed or captured.

15:39 And the hundreds who were taken prisoner

15:40 were taken to a sports stadium in Havana

15:42 where they were publicly and flamboyantly interrogated

15:45 and heranged by Castro himself on live television.

15:49 All of which simply ended up skyrocketing Castro's popularity

15:52 in Cuba as a symbol of resistance against American imperialism.

15:57 All the Bay of Pigs invasion ended up

15:59 doing was to rapidly speed up Cuba's transformation

16:02 into a Marxist Leninist one party state and push

16:05 it directly into the lap of the Soviet Union.

16:08 Because almost immediately after it,

16:10 Castro had both the legitimacy and the power to declare the country

16:14 a socialist state that would no longer hold any open elections.

16:18 And this right here is part of how

16:20 the Communist Party of Cuba has managed to hang

16:23 on a power in Cuba for decades longer than

16:26 nearly every other communist regime was capable [music] of.

16:29 In countries across Eastern Europe, like East Germany or Poland or Romania,

16:33 their communist governments were forced upon them

16:35 by an outside invader, the Soviet Union.

16:38 By contrast, Cuba's communist revolution was the result of an entirely

16:43 natural domestic homegrown popular revolution

16:46 that almost immediately gained strong legitimacy

16:49 after the US government instantly and clumsily began attacking it in order

16:54 to maintain their privileged and exploitative business interests on the island.

16:58 [music] Of course, forever since then, relations between Cuba and the United

17:02 States have remained extremely negative and tense.

17:05 [music] The US government severed its relations with Cuba

17:08 the same year as the Bay of Pigs incident in 1961.

17:11 And then in the following year, the US declared a full [music] and comprehensive

17:15 trade embargo against Cuba that has blocked virtually

17:18 all imports and exports between the two nations

17:20 ever since with the sole exceptions being on food,

17:24 medicine, and humanitarian goods.

17:26 running continually for the past 64 years now,

17:29 even for decades after the Cold War ended,

17:32 it has evolved into the longest running trade embargo of modern history,

17:36 and has contributed greatly to the crushing of the Cuban economy.

17:40 Since the Cold War ended, and starting in 1992,

17:43 the UN General Assembly has voted no

17:45 less than 33 consecutive times every single year

17:49 to adopt a resolution calling for the US to finally end its embargo on Cuba.

17:55 The US naturally has simply voted against the resolution every single time.

17:59 Though during the most recent vote in October of 2025,

18:04 165 of the UN member states voted in favor of the resolution.

18:08 While the US along with key allies like Israel, Ukraine, Argentina, Hungary,

18:12 Paraguay, and North Macedonia were the only ones to vote against it.

18:16 The Cuban government and the UN have officially estimated

18:19 that over its entire length of more than six decades now,

18:22 the embargo has inflicted between 130 and 148

18:27 billion US in cumulative damage to the island's economy,

18:31 and it has continually been used as a tool

18:34 by the US government to try and pressure regime change.

18:38 In 1963, following all of the drama associated with the Cuban missile crisis,

18:42 the US government also froze all of Cuba's assets in the United

18:46 States and outlawed virtually all financial

18:48 transactions between the two countries as well.

18:51 Being completely blocked off from the US and its global alliance system,

18:55 Cuba needed an outside patron in order to survive.

18:59 And for decades until the end of the Cold War,

19:01 that outside patron was the Soviet Union,

19:03 who provided cheap subsidized oil to Cuba

19:06 that they could use for fuel and electricity,

19:08 while Cuba provided the Soviet Union with cheap sugar and a strategic

19:12 foothold in the Western Hemisphere [music] to project power from.

19:16 Only 90 m away from the US mainland.

19:19 Castro's Marxist Leninist regime in Cuba, while authoritarian and undemocratic,

19:23 was also capable of accomplishing some great things on the island.

19:27 They were able to rapidly improve the literacy rate in Cuba from only

19:30 about 68% when they took over to 96% within only a couple of years.

19:36 They also implemented a state-run universal health

19:38 care system free to all Cuban residents

19:41 with well-trained doctors and the highest number

19:44 of doctors per capita in the entire world which

19:47 eventually evolved into an influence engine

19:49 of the Castros of their own as they could

19:51 export their well-trained doctors and medical brigades abroad

19:54 in exchange for resources they needed like oil,

19:57 food, and medicine back home that they couldn't get from the United States.

20:02 At the same time, however,

20:04 that doesn't mean that there weren't also a lot of people

20:06 in Cuba who were pissed off at the new system of government.

20:10 Castro seized and nationalized tens of thousands

20:13 of small private businesses across the country,

20:16 effectively outlawed all private businesses

20:18 and enterprises and redistributed the large agricultural

20:21 lands and estates that were owned by the prior wealthy elites and foreigners.

20:26 Unlike other communist leaders in places like East Germany and North

20:29 Korea that strictly didn't allow any of their citizens to leave,

20:32 Fidel from time to time actually allowed waves of disgruntled

20:36 Cubans who were angry with his way of governance

20:38 to leave the island as a sort of blowoff valve

20:41 to relieve pressure and reduce the internal resistance to his government,

20:45 filtering out the island's demographics

20:47 to being mostly loyalists who still remained.

20:50 In the immediate aftermath of the revolution's success in 1959,

20:54 an estimated 250,000 Cubans,

20:57 most of them disgruntled former business owners and land

21:00 owners who were associated with the former Batista regime,

21:03 left the island within a few years by 1962.

21:06 Most of them across the Florida Straight

21:08 to Miami and the South Florida region more broadly.

21:11 Then between 1965 and 1973, the US government organized the so-called

21:16 freedom flights between Cuba and Miami, a program that was funded by the United

21:20 States and authorized by Castro that flew

21:23 hundreds of chartered flights full of additional Cubans

21:26 who wanted to migrate to the United States.

21:27 [music] Over the years that the Freedom

21:30 Flights ran for, an estimated 300,000 additional

21:33 Cubans [music] were flown out of the country and into Miami and South Florida,

21:37 who were all granted expedited pathways to US citizenship after

21:41 they lived in the country for just a single year.

21:44 All of this mass migration of Cuban

21:46 exiles who were disaffected with the communist regime

21:49 on the island into South Florida permanently

21:51 altered the region's demographic trajectory to this day.

21:54 And it's why there can sort of be an argument

21:56 that there are in reality two different Cubas today.

22:00 The Cuba on the island of Cuba and the new Cuba in South Florida.

22:04 And there have been many, many additional waves of Cuban migration to South

22:08 Florida since the 1960s and 70s as well.

22:11 In 1980, following a downturn in the Cuban economy,

22:14 thousands of Cubans attempted to gain asylum status by taking

22:17 refuge on the grounds of the Peruvian embassy in Havana,

22:20 which led to Fidel announcing that anyone who

22:22 wanted to leave the country could do so freely.

22:25 The Cuban-American community in South Florida

22:27 then assembled a hastily put together flotilla

22:30 and began fing thousands of Cubans to America from the island's Mariel Harbor,

22:34 which gave this particular exodus its name, the Mariel Bole lift.

22:39 Finel is also known to have opened up his prisons and mental institutions during

22:43 this specific exodus and sent thousands

22:45 of prisoners and patients he didn't want along

22:47 with the rest who were all taken into South Florida by the boat lift

22:51 along with thousands of others who wanted

22:53 to leave for economic or political reasons.

22:55 Within a few months another 125,000 more

22:59 Cubans were transported to the Miami area

23:02 before the US and Cuban governments mutually agree to put a stop to it.

23:06 All of this history of Cuban migration into South Florida has since made it

23:10 the most Cuban area in the world anywhere outside of the island of Cuba itself.

23:14 Today, roughly 2 million people in the Miami

23:17 metropolitan area are of Cuban ancestry.

23:20 They're the largest single ethnic group present in the Miami area now,

23:23 and they make up about a third of Miami's total population.

23:27 When you consider that Habana itself has an estimated

23:30 metropolitan population of around 2.15 million people now,

23:33 the Cuban population in Miami is actually about the same size.

23:37 And since Miami's Cuban population is growing faster than Havana's is,

23:41 it's conceivable soon that Miami will actually

23:45 become the largest Cuban city in the world.

23:48 When you further consider this more recent population

23:50 exodus from Cuba that's been happening since 2020,

23:53 South Florida as a broad region now has about a quarter

23:57 of the same Cuban population as the island of Cuba itself has.

24:00 [music] Which is why I said earlier

24:02 that South Florida has basically become a second Cuba.

24:06 And it's through this lens that I would argue that the Cubans are one

24:09 of the world's peoples that were also divided

24:11 along ideological and political lines during the Cold War.

24:15 like the Germans, Koreans, and Vietnamese all were as well.

24:19 And just like those other peoples,

24:21 the Cubans became divided between a hyper communist system on the island

24:24 of Cuba and a hyper capitalist system in their enclave in South Florida.

24:30 One of Miami's nicknames today is the capital of Latin America.

24:33 And there's a lot of good points of evidence to back that claim up.

24:37 Because of the large Cuban population in Miami and other Latino groups,

24:41 around 70% of the city's population

24:43 [music] speaks Spanish as their primary language,

24:46 which makes Miami the only one of America's [music] top 10

24:49 largest metropolitan areas that is both

24:52 majority Spanish-sp speakaking and ethnically Latino.

24:55 Miami also has by far the largest GDP and economy

25:00 of any majority Spanish-sp speakaking city in the world today,

25:03 giving it the legitimate authority to claim the title

25:05 as the Spanish-sp speakaking world's most economically valuable city.

25:09 Miami, all on its own,

25:11 currently has more than double the GDP of the entire island of Cuba combined,

25:16 and it's arguably becoming the most capitalistic city,

25:19 not just in Latin America, but even in the United States.

25:23 Since 2020, the Miami area has gained another nickname, Wall Street South,

25:27 because of all of the New York

25:28 City-based financial companies and institutions that have

25:31 relocated or shifted their operations there due

25:34 to the lower taxes and more businessfriendly environment.

25:37 It's been estimated that more than $1 trillion worth of assets

25:40 have been shifted from New York City to Miami just since 2020,

25:45 including the headquarter relocations of more than 50 major investment firms.

25:49 And a big part of why that's been happening is

25:52 the foundation of Miami as a bastion of exiles from Cuba,

25:56 who happened to be the most capitalistic minded Cubans who left the communist

26:00 system on the island over generations and made Miami basically the capitalist

26:05 alternative to the island of Cuba in the same way that West

26:08 Germany was to East Germany or South Korea still is to North Korea.

26:14 When the Soviet Union suddenly collapsed in 1991,

26:17 the communist regime in Cuba lost

26:19 their historical benefactor and supporter and entered

26:22 into what the government has called the special period throughout the 1990s.

26:26 In a flash, Cuba lost all of their Soviet era subsidies

26:30 and privileged oil imports that have been propping up the economy for decades,

26:34 which led to their imports and exports

26:36 crashing by more than 80% and their economy

26:39 losing about a third of its value over just a couple of years by 1993.

26:44 Then, as now, there was a lot of speculation that this was

26:48 inevitably going to become the end of communism on the island.

26:51 In 1994, in the midst of this crisis over

26:54 a period of 5 weeks during particularly intense rioting in Cuba,

26:59 Fidel once again announced that anybody who wanted

27:01 to leave the country could do so freely without hindrance,

27:05 which triggered another mass exodus of around 35,000 Cubans who assembled

27:10 makeshift rafts and attempted to float over the Florida straight to America.

27:15 This exodus ultimately became a sort of turning

27:18 point in America's relationship with Cuban exiles and refugees.

27:22 Struggling to deal with the political consequences of this particular exodus,

27:26 the Clinton administration reformed America's migration policy regarding

27:30 Cuba through the new wet feet, dry feet policy,

27:33 which set it so that Cubans caught in the waters by the Coast Guard between

27:36 the two countries would be summarily returned back

27:39 to Cuba or sent to a third country.

27:41 While Cubans who made it to the shore on land in the US would receive

27:45 a chance to stay in the US and pursue

27:47 permanent residency and citizenship following a year's time.

27:51 Conflict between the Cuban and US governments reached

27:53 a new high point throughout the 1990s as well,

27:56 where the Cold War effectively never ended like

27:59 it did in most other parts of the world.

28:01 In 1996, an organization made up of Cuban-American exiles

28:05 in South Florida called Brothers to the Rescue were

28:08 using small private Cesta aircraft to take flights over

28:11 Cuba to drop anti-Castro propaganda leaflets across the island.

28:15 In February of that year,

28:17 a Cuban Air Force Mig 29 fighter aircraft shot down two

28:21 unarmed Cestnas that were taking part in one of these operations,

28:24 [music] killing all four of the Cuban-American exile participants who

28:28 were on board and sharply spiking tensions in the process.

28:32 Then the next year in 1997,

28:34 an anti-communist militia of Cuban-American exiles based

28:38 in South Florida organized a series of bombing

28:40 attacks against various hotels in Havana

28:43 in an attempt to undermine Cuba's resurgent tourism industry.

28:47 One foreign tourist from Italy was killed

28:49 in the bombings and 11 others were wounded.

28:52 A man named Louise Pada Curilles

28:54 later admitted to having organized the bombings,

28:57 a Cubaname exile and former CIA officer.

29:01 Pada had also previously helped organize the Bay of Pigs

29:04 invasion in 1961 and was widely considered to have

29:07 been responsible for the bombing of a Cuban commercial airliner

29:11 back in 1976 that had killed 73 people on board.

29:15 And he was later briefly jailed in Panama

29:18 in 2000 for allegedly plotting an assassination attempt on Castro.

29:22 In 2005, Pada entered the US under

29:25 a false passport and was granted political asylum status,

29:29 which further strained tensions as the Cuban government

29:32 consistently requested his extradition to stand trial in Cuba,

29:36 which the US consistently rejected until Pada died peacefully

29:40 at old age at 90 years old in 2018.

29:44 And then in 1998, five Cuban intelligence officers were

29:48 arrested by American authorities in Miami on charges of espionage,

29:52 who later became known as the Cuban 5.

29:55 After consistently denying that the captured men were intelligence agents,

29:59 the Cuban government finally acknowledged them 3 years later in 2001,

30:04 claiming that they were only spying on the Cuban-American exile

30:08 community in South Florida rather than on the US government itself.

30:12 Most of the men would be held in prison for the next decade and a half

30:15 until the Obama administration later negotiated a prisoner

30:18 exchange for them with the Cuban government.

30:20 And all the while, the US trade

30:23 embargo on Cuba continued as Cuba floundered around

30:26 trying to find new trade partners to replace

30:29 the Soviet Union in the Eastern Block with.

30:32 Near the end of the decade in 1998,

30:34 the communist regime in Cuba finally gained a new lifeline after

30:38 Hugo Chavez and his socialist party won the presidential election in Venezuela.

30:43 Quickly stepping up to largely fill in the gap

30:45 that was left behind by the Soviets.

30:47 Chavez's administration in Venezuela began supplying Cuba with a new source

30:51 of heavily subsidized oil again in exchange for thousands of doctors with Cuba's

30:57 well-trained medical brigades along

30:59 with their intelligence and security services both

31:02 to help spy on their own people and to guard their leadership.

31:06 At the peak of this cooperation between the two countries between 2008 and 2015,

31:10 Venezuela was supplying Cuba with approximately

31:13 100,000 barrels of subsidized oil per day.

31:16 that met more than half of Cuba's oil import

31:18 needs and underpinned Cuba's faltering

31:21 electricity generation and industrial output.

31:23 While nearly 30,000 well-trained Cuban doctors

31:27 and medical technicians served in Venezuela,

31:29 Cuba also gained the capability to resell

31:32 the subsidized oil that they were receiving

31:34 from Venezuela to China for higher prices than what they had paid for it,

31:38 which gave them a rare avenue to acquire hard foreign currency in defiance

31:42 of the US financial and trade sanctions that were still placed upon them.

31:47 And meanwhile, tensions between Cuba and the United States remained locked

31:50 in the old Cold War mentality throughout the Clinton and George W.

31:53 Bush administrations until, for a brief moment,

31:57 things looked like they might finally begin changing after

32:01 decades during the later years of the Obama administration.

32:04 In December of 2014, Obama and communist Cuba's second president, Raul Castro,

32:10 Fidel's younger brother, who had taken over in 2006 after Fidel grew ill,

32:15 shocked the world with a dual announcement

32:17 on television that Cuba and the United

32:20 States would be fully restoring diplomatic ties

32:22 again for the first time since the 1960s.

32:26 While all of his predecessors had

32:28 demanded immediate political and economic concessions

32:31 from the Communist Party of Cuba in exchange for a normalization of ties,

32:35 which were always refused, Obama was the first US president who

32:38 calculated instead that immediately establishing closer economic,

32:42 cultural, and political ties with Cuba,

32:44 even without any upfront concessions from the Communist Party,

32:47 would gradually result in a moderation

32:49 of the Communist Party's platform over the long haul.

32:52 Anyway, almost immediately after their joint address,

32:55 both countries reopened their embassies for the first time in 53 years.

33:00 A few months later, in 2015,

33:02 Obama removed Cuba from America's state sponsors of terrorism list.

33:07 And in 2016, he loosened up US

33:09 restrictions on Americans ability to travel to Cuba,

33:12 enabling US airlines to resume regular air service to the island

33:15 and for US cruise ships to port in Cuban harbors,

33:19 which all opened up a massive surge in US tourism

33:22 to Cuba again and a big new source of foreign

33:25 currency for both the government and small local entrepreneurs like

33:28 taxi drivers and restaurant tours who began catering to them.

33:33 in just a single year in 2015.

33:35 Because of all of this, Cuba's economy grew by more than 4%.

33:40 And it was a boon for US businesses as well.

33:43 For a couple of years, Cuba was one of Airbnb's fastest growing markets,

33:48 while executives from Marriott and PayPal accompanied Obama's

33:52 personal visit to Cuba in March of 2016

33:55 when he became the first sitting US president to visit the island in 88 years.

34:01 Obama's opening up to Cuba was massively popular

34:04 with both Cubans and the broader American public.

34:07 But as it would turn out, this new policy would only end up lasting for a couple

34:11 of years because the successor to the US presidency,

34:14 Donald Trump, would effectively end and reverse everything.

34:18 For Trump, railing against Obama's friendly

34:20 policies towards Cuba and promising to reverse

34:23 them was a campaign tactic to appeal

34:25 to conservative Cuban-American voters in South Florida,

34:28 a demographic long opposed to the continuation

34:31 of communist rule in their ancestral homeland,

34:33 both for ideological reasons and also because

34:36 much of their or their ancestors property had

34:39 been expropriated and seized following the revolution

34:42 that they wanted to be fairly compensated for.

34:44 Many high-profile Cuban-American politicians like Marco Rubio

34:48 and Ted Cruz were staunchly opposed to the Obama

34:52 administration's policies of openness with the regime in Cuba

34:55 without demanding any major political concessions from them.

34:58 And Trump's strategy of attempting to appeal to their demographic

35:01 in the 2016 election ultimately proved to be highly successful

35:05 for him as 54% of the Cuban-American voters in Florida

35:09 chose him compared to only 41% who voted for Hillary Clinton.

35:14 This ended up proving to be politically decisive for Trump

35:17 in Florida and likely handed him the entire nationwide election.

35:21 Florida just barely voted more for Trump than Hillary in 2016.

35:25 With 49% of the state's overall vote to Trump and 47.8% [music] to Hillary,

35:31 Trump only won in Florida by a little more than 112,000 votes.

35:36 Out of more than 9 million total votes cast nationwide,

35:41 Latinos overwhelmingly voted in favor for Hillary with 71%

35:45 of their total compared to just 28% who voted for Trump.

35:49 Cubanameans in Florida, however,

35:51 were one of the very few Latino demographics in the country

35:54 that voted significantly more in favor of Trump during the election instead.

35:59 And had they voted more in line with the broader Latino community nationwide,

36:03 their vote would have shifted from plus 73,442 in favor

36:07 of Trump to plus 242,921 in favor of Clinton,

36:12 which in other words would have been enough to have shifted

36:15 the entire state and all of its 29 electoral votes over to Clinton,

36:19 which would have handed the entire general

36:21 election and the presidency to Clinton instead.

36:24 So basically, the CubanAmerican support for Trump in Florida

36:28 effectively handed him the presidency in [music] 2016.

36:31 And Trump rewarded them for their loyalty by immediately doing

36:34 what he promised them when he entered into office in 2017,

36:38 adopting a renewed hardline approach to the communist regime in Cuba

36:42 with the ultimate goal of full-on regime change and reversing

36:47 all of Obama's policies that had attempted to open up

36:49 and normalize relations with the Castros still being in charge.

36:54 Trump immediately began restricting the ability

36:56 for Americans to travel to Cuba again.

36:59 And he eventually placed a cap on the amount of remittances

37:02 that US citizens were able to send to Cuban nationals.

37:05 Before Trump's cap, Cubanameans could essentially send however

37:08 much they wanted to their relatives on the island.

37:11 But Trump capped the maximum limit to just $1,000

37:14 per [music] person per quarter or $4,000 per year instead,

37:19 sharply reducing the amount of cash inflows that were coming to the island.

37:23 Later in 2017, multiple staff members at the US Embassy in Havana began

37:28 reporting mysterious neurological symptoms and illnesses

37:31 that later became known simply as Havana syndrome.

37:35 No cause for Habana syndrome has ever been publicly confirmed,

37:38 but the US government has suspected the Cuban government of being involved.

37:42 And after the report started happening,

37:44 the State Department severely reduced their staff at the embassy in Havana

37:48 and expelled most of the Cuban staff from the Cuban embassy in Washington,

37:52 which essentially brought visa processing between them to a screeching halt.

37:57 By 2019, American visitors to Cuba were blocked

38:00 from staying in most hotels in the country.

38:03 Most air and cruise travel between the countries was halted again.

38:06 Western Union was pressured into ending their wiring services to the island,

38:10 and the Trump administration was already

38:12 attempting to interrupt Venezuela's oil shipments

38:14 to Cuba through targeted sanctions

38:16 on the carriers that were transporting the oil.

38:19 In the final days of the first Trump administration,

38:21 right before Biden took over office,

38:23 the Trump administration also readded Cuba back

38:26 to the State Department's list of state sponsors of terrorism.

38:30 again.

38:30 The most severe consequence of which was wrecking Cuba's ability to participate

38:34 in the international financial structures

38:36 that are dominated by the United States.

38:40 All of these renewed American sanctions on Cuba,

38:42 plus the crippling trade embargo that had

38:45 continually been in place since the 1960s,

38:48 inflicted billions of dollars worth of damage

38:50 on the Cuban economy with the explicit

38:52 purpose of attempting to encourage either regime

38:55 change or regime moderation on the island.

38:57 And at the same time,

38:59 the CO 19 pandemic wrecked whatever was left of Cuba's tourism

39:03 industry just after it had started

39:05 growing again during the Obama administration.

39:08 Foreign tourists to the island plummeted from millions in 2018

39:11 and 19 to virtually nobody across 2020 and 21,

39:16 costing the country billions of additional dollars in lost tourism revenue.

39:20 And as Cuban-American families stopped visiting because

39:23 of the new restrictions and the pandemic,

39:25 the value of their remittances also collapsed from $3.7

39:29 billion in 2019 down to just $1.1 billion in 2021.

39:35 And on top of all of these externally induced problems,

39:38 the Cuban economy itself was still saddled with the inefficient structural

39:43 problems that are associated with most centrally planned economies as well.

39:47 Food production in Cuba completely collapsed during this time period,

39:51 both due to a lack of cash for farm equipment and fertilizer,

39:55 but also because of inefficient government set price controls on produce

39:59 that left Cuban farmers with no real incentive to actually work and produce.

40:04 The Cuban armed forces themselves are also known to control a sprawling

40:09 conglomerate in the country that's best known by its acronym GASA,

40:13 which according to reporting by the Miami Herald

40:15 currently controls at least 40% of the Cuban economy

40:19 and $18 billion worth of secretive stashed away

40:23 assets that have been hidden from the Cuban public.

40:26 Gaya controls most of Cuba's hotels, gas stations,

40:29 supermarkets, and the whole currency exchange business,

40:32 which are all of the most profitable industries on the island.

40:35 The Communist Party of Cuba has long blamed all

40:38 of the island's problems on the US government and the trade embargo.

40:41 And yet, reporting by the Miami Herald

40:44 on GA's secretive operations and assets has revealed

40:47 that they have plenty of cash on hand

40:49 to cover all of Cuba's most vital expenses,

40:53 including the $43 million that's required per year

40:56 to cover access to the 63 priority medications that have

40:59 been limited in Cuba and the $250 million per

41:03 year that's required to operate and maintain Cuba's electricity grid.

41:07 They simply don't and have continued hoarding the limited

41:10 assets that are available in Cuba for themselves

41:12 [music] to the detriment of everybody else who's

41:15 not closely connected to the Communist Party itself.

41:18 In the 5 years up to 2023, Cuba's once vaunted sugar industry collapsed by 68%.

41:26 Its fishing industry by 53%, its broader agricultural industry by 52%,

41:31 and its manufacturing industry by 41%.

41:35 On top of the near total collapse in the tourism industry,

41:38 which Gasea had misallocated most of their investment capital into over

41:42 more pressing industries that could have benefited the Cuban people more,

41:46 like agriculture and medicine.

41:48 All of this, near the end of Trump's first term,

41:51 was the beginning of Cuba's current existential crisis,

41:54 as the lack of foreign earnings led to a collapse

41:57 in the government's ability to provide most basic services.

42:00 Biden then ran on a campaign

42:02 criticizing how Trump's policies had negatively affected

42:05 Cuban families and promised to revert back

42:08 to the Obama era of normalization again.

42:10 But then after he assumed the presidency in 2021,

42:14 he basically just didn't do anything for years that kept nearly

42:16 all of Trump's maximum pressure policies on the island still in place.

42:21 Wary of the outsized political influence

42:23 of the Cuban-American exile community in South

42:26 Florida that has always favored a tough foreign policy approach to Cuba,

42:30 Biden remained fearful throughout his presidency

42:32 of doing anything much different than Trump,

42:35 lest he upset them and risk losing Florida again in the 2024 election.

42:40 Biden eliminated Trump's restrictions on the amount of remittances that could be

42:44 sent to Cuba and some of the travel restrictions for US citizens,

42:48 [music] but he also maintained the first Trump administration's

42:50 designation of Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism,

42:54 which continued in snaring Cuba's ability to access the global financial system.

42:59 It wasn't until Biden was imminently about

43:01 to leave the presidency on the 14th of January,

43:04 2025, that he finally decided to remove Cuba from the list.

43:08 But it was too little, too late.

43:10 Just 6 days after Biden did so,

43:13 Trump returned back to office for a second term and immediately

43:16 readded Cuba back to the list the very day he assumed office.

43:20 [music] With virtually all of the Trump

43:22 era restrictions on Cuba remaining in place throughout the Biden era and the CO

43:26 19 pandemic wrecking the island's nassent tourism industry,

43:30 Cuba was also stricken by the crippling economic crisis in Venezuela,

43:34 which resulted in the Venezuelans sending less

43:37 and less of their subsidized oil to Cuba's way.

43:40 Remember that as recently as 2021, the Venezuelans were still sending Cuba

43:45 approximately 100,000 barrels of oil per day.

43:48 But by 2024, the final year of the Biden presidency,

43:52 they were only sending Cuba about 32,000 barrels of oil per day instead.

43:57 And by 2025, it had declined even further to just 16,000 barrels per day,

44:03 which exacerbated Cuba's shortage of foreign exchange currency and contributed

44:06 to the increasing pace of fuel

44:08 shortages and electricity blackouts across the island

44:11 as they struggled to find replacements willing to trade with them

44:14 in the face of the US economic and trade embargo and sanctions regime.

44:18 Struggling to cope with the scale of all

44:21 of these crisis [music] striking the island

44:23 at the same time that were triggering

44:25 blackouts and shortages of basic food and medicine.

44:28 Largecale anti-regime protests erupted across Cuba over the summer of 2021

44:34 that were met by the Communist Party with harsh repression.

44:37 Hundreds of protesters were arrested and at least

44:40 710 of them were later charged with crimes,

44:43 including [music] serious charges like sedition that carried lengthy

44:47 prison sentences of up to 30 years behind bars.

44:51 The scale of the crisis,

44:53 the biggest since the collapse of the Soviet Union for the island

44:56 and the Cuban government's own repression and crushing of descent,

45:00 is what led to the unprecedented exodus

45:02 of people away from Cuba across the 2020s.

45:05 [music] In 2020, Nicaragua significantly

45:08 loosened visa restrictions for Cuban nationals,

45:11 [music] which led to Cubans by the hundreds

45:13 of thousands taking flights to Nicaragua and then

45:15 traveling by land north towards the US

45:18 southern border and entering throughout the Biden administration.

45:21 The latest episode in the Cuban government's apparent willingness

45:25 to export [music] its dissenters away from the country.

45:28 Throughout Biden's presidency,

45:29 an estimated 850,000 Cubans entered into the United States.

45:34 [music] And then came the return of Trump again in 2025

45:39 and the return back to his even stricter policies on Cuba.

45:42 Trump's handpicked Secretary of State is Marco Rubio, the son of Cuban exiles,

45:47 who is the product of South Florida's Cuban-American exile community.

45:51 He has been a lifetime hawk on America's policy

45:54 towards the communist regime in Cuba and his ultimate

45:58 geopolitical project has been the toppling of the communist

46:01 party from power in Cuba once and for all.

46:04 As Secretary of State, he is now the highest ranking US government

46:07 official of Cuban ancestry in the country's history.

46:10 [music] And while simultaneously serving as Trump's national security adviser,

46:14 he is arguably the most powerful secretary

46:16 of state in American history since Henry Kissinger.

46:20 He is incredibly influential in the second Trump administration [music]

46:24 and the primary force that's driving the administration's policy towards

46:27 Cuba and showing even more support than they did

46:30 for Trump in the previous elections in 2016 and in 2020.

46:34 Cubanameans in Florida voted even more overwhelmingly

46:37 in favor of Trump again in 2024.

46:40 despite Biden's best attempts to appease them

46:43 with 68% of their total voting Trump,

46:47 an even higher ratio than white men who voted for Trump in 2024.

46:52 All of which has given the Trump administration the full

46:55 legitimacy to finally attempt and accomplish the capitalist Cuba's decadesl long

47:00 dream of toppling the communist from power in the island

47:04 of Cuba with a military operation that ousted Maduro from Venezuela.

47:08 One of Trump and Rubio's goals has been to eliminate the remaining

47:12 trickle of oil that was still flowing into Cuba from the country,

47:15 which will probably plunge the island into an even

47:18 greater electricity and fuel crisis than it was suffering before.

47:22 With other countries like Mexico and Russia unlikely to step

47:25 in and fill the gap because of political pressure from the United States,

47:29 the pressure on Cuba is therefore still building,

47:32 but it's unclear whether or not it'll be enough to truly crack it.

47:36 While it's also unclear if the pressure could become too great

47:40 and cause a catastrophic state collapse scenario like over in Haiti.

47:44 Cuba is unlike Venezuela in the sense that the Communist Party has

47:48 maintained its grip on power in the island for nearly seven decades now.

47:52 It managed to survive the retirement and death of Fidel

47:56 Castro when power passed to his younger brother Raul.

47:59 and he managed to survive when Raul passed

48:01 the presidency to a handpicked successor in 2018,

48:04 Miguel Diaz Canel, who remains Cuba's current leader

48:08 and the first non-Castro head of state since the late 1950s.

48:12 Nonetheless, Ro Castro is still alive for the time

48:16 being and maintains a significant level of control,

48:19 influence, and power behind the scenes.

48:22 At the elderly age of 94 years old, however,

48:25 his remaining time in our world is likely not much longer,

48:29 and a potential succession crisis behind the scenes

48:31 in the Communist Party looms once he's gone.

48:35 It remains unclear how and if communism can continue surviving in Cuba

48:40 without the leadership of the first generation of Castros still continuing it.

48:45 For the moment, the Trump administration seems unwilling

48:48 to use military force in Cuba to encourage regime change

48:52 the same way they have done so in Venezuela

48:54 and the same way they have threatened to do in Iran.

48:57 There is probably a high degree of fear of applying too much pressure on Cuba

49:02 right now and causing it to completely

49:04 collapse in a Haiti style scenario which would

49:07 skyrocket rates of Cuban migration to the United

49:10 States even further than it's already been

49:12 these past few years which would greatly complicate

49:15 the Trump administration's domestic migration agenda and policy.

49:19 What's most likely to continue happening between

49:21 the US and Cuba instead is a continuation of the decadesl long trade embargo

49:25 and financial sanctions choking Cuba's ability to trade.

49:29 A continuation of severing Cuba's few remaining sources of oil

49:32 imports to further the island's electricity and fuel supplies.

49:36 and a holding out for hope in Washington that the Communist

49:39 Party will eventually agree to become pragmatic and negotiate with the US

49:44 on moderating their economic policies

49:46 and their political authoritarianism [music]

49:48 and in so doing allowing more private businesses access to US companies,

49:53 restoring some of the value of expropriated assets and property

49:57 over the decades to the Cuban-American community in South

49:59 Florida and to US businesses and releasing some political prisoners

50:05 in exchange for American 's loosening up of the sanctions,

50:08 the oil restrictions, and the embargo terms.

50:11 [music] The Communist Party of Cuba is currently

50:13 in the most dire crisis that it's probably ever been in.

50:17 And while it might end up finally collapsing or relenting

50:20 to America's pressure under the weight of this crisis,

50:23 like many people have been predicting,

50:25 it also might continue defying everybody's expectations,

50:29 and [music] continue on existing regardless,

50:32 just as it somehow managed to do so far.

50:35 In a way, sort of like North Korea, just like what happened to Cuba in the 1990s

50:40 when the Soviet Union collapsed and lost their primary supporter,

50:43 North Korea went through the same thing that resulted in a deluge

50:47 of expert analysis that predicted it would

50:49 result in the country's imminent [music] collapse.

50:51 And yet, North Korea somehow kept on surviving just like Cuba did anyway.

50:56 But if you thought that Cuba's experiences have

50:59 been catastrophic in the aftermath of the Cold War,

51:01 and they have been, North Korea's experience in the 1990s

51:05 after losing the Soviet Union was downright apocalyptic.

51:08 For most of the decade,

51:09 the country was ravaged by one of the worst economic collapses

51:13 in modern history that accompanied one of the worst famines in modern history.

51:17 As well, the North Korea's centrally planned system couldn't adequately address.

51:22 As many as 3 and 12 million North Koreans

51:25 would die during this horrific famine throughout the 1990s.

51:29 As much as 15% of [music] the entire

51:31 country's population and all as the government attempted everything

51:35 it could do to cover up its scale and hide it from the rest of the world.

51:38 [music] The famine and the crisis within

51:41 North Korea throughout the 1990s was exacerbated

51:44 by the first change in leadership in the country's history in 1994 when the Kim

51:49 dynasty's founder Kimmel Sun died after having

51:52 ruled for the past 45 years and passed on power to his son Kim Jong-il

51:57 establishing the first dynastic succession in North Korea.

52:00 Kim Jong-il's incompetent mismanagement of the famine

52:04 greatly exacerbated the scale of the tragedy.

52:06 And for [music] the next 17 years until his own death,

52:09 he would continue on advancing his father's cult of personality even further

52:14 and rule North Korea with every bit as iron of a fist.

52:18 To this date, Kim Jong-il, the middle Kim ruler,

52:22 is still officially regarded by North Korea's legal

52:24 system to be the country's eternal general secretary.

52:28 still serving in death alongside of his father who was

52:31 similarly designated as the eternal president upon his own death.

52:35 Kim Jong-il like his father is still heralded

52:38 as nearly a god in the country along with his own son who would eventually take

52:43 the country over himself in the third succession in 2011.

52:47 And I think that understanding Kim Jong-il and how he

52:49 continued molding North Korea into the bizarre necro hereditary dictatorship

52:54 that it is today is a major lesson in what

52:57 can happen with truly unchecked power in the modern world.

53:01 And so I made an entire new documentary exploring the dark

53:05 world and life of Kim Jong-il and the most outlandish

53:08 things that he did while ruling North Korea for decades

53:11 in my brand new original documentary series that I'm calling Mad Kings,

53:16 which will take deeper dives into the terrible personal lives

53:20 and erratic policy decisions of recent megalomaniacal and eccentric dictators.

53:25 But because of the inherently violent

53:27 and controversial details surrounding Kim Jong-il,

53:31 including details and depictions of multiple

53:33 acts of terrorism that he ordered across

53:35 the 1980s and '90s and one of the worst famines in human history,

53:39 my documentary investigating his reign would never [music] work

53:42 on YouTube because it would instantly become demonetized and age restricted,

53:47 which means that YouTube's algorithm that's

53:49 based around showing you ads would never

53:51 actually be incentivized to show the video to you or to promote it.

53:55 I deal with very large numbers of my videos

53:57 on YouTube getting demonetized and age restricted as they already are,

54:01 including one of my more recent videos that cover

54:03 the ongoing events taking place in Darth Fur.

54:06 And that's why I'm uploading all of my documentaries at Mad Kings,

54:09 including this one on Kim Jong-il, exclusively to Nebula instead.

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