For ordinary Cubans, Obama's historic visit is already fading and the future looks sadly familiar

One month on since US President Barack Obama’s historic visit, Cuba has just held its seventh Communist Party congress

An 1950s American classic car drives past the Hotel Inglaterra in central Havana (Getty)

Before the 1959 revolution, the tiny town of Soroa in a rainforest-covered valley in Artemisa province was one of the American mafia’s favourite playgrounds. They built a kitschy Hawaiian-style hotel and pool in the middle of nowhere – but Fidel Castro and friends interrupted the party before work on the casino was finished, taking over the resort in the interests of the state.

Since then, almost nothing has changed. But in the hills above the town, some of the forest has been hacked back to expose rich red earth, and for locals, the green coffee plant shoots emerging from the soil are a fittingly fragile metaphor for their hopes of a new beginning.

One month on since US President Barack Obama’s historic visit, Cuba has just held its seventh Communist Party congress. More than 1,000 party members from across the island met in Havana to discuss the island’s future, with its economic roadmap at the front and centre of talks.

But despite the enthusiastic lip service about reform that President Raul Castro impressed upon Obama in March, the party congress has made it clear that Cuba’s revolutionary vanguard is not willing to let their socialist state make the transition to a market-style economy any time soon.

“This is basically setting the future of Cuba,” said Carmelo Mesa-Lago, an economics professor at the University of Pittsburgh.

While there were promises at the last party congress in 2011 to take measures to free up private enterprise and boost economic growth, Cuba’s economy is still in desperate need of a shot in the arm; according to the Communist Party’s own newspaper, Granma, only one fifth of 2011’s planned reforms have actually been implemented.

A boom in privately-owned restaurants and legions of new tourists drinking the country dry of beer show that change is taking root in Cuba’s more visited areas, but in sleepier spots like Soroa the government is still in control. Of the crops farmed by the descendants of slaves and people with aboriginal Taino heritage in Artemisa province – who are among Cuba’s poorest demographic groups – up to 90 per cent will go straight to the state.

Beatrice Soroa, who bears the same name as the town and of French coffee plantation owner Jean-Pierre Soroa who owned her ancestors, avoids the midday heat under an open shelter made from royal palm tree next to her one room, windowless home, constructed from the same wood. Reggaeton comes in through tinny radio speakers, powered by a nearby solar panel recently installed by the German government’s development aid agency. There is a television set from the Eighties perched on a precarious-looking stool.

“It wasn’t my idea, but it was free, and the solar panel means I have light and sometimes TV. But the next hurricane....” She nudges the bolted down panel with the toe of her green government-issue wellington boots, which are a familiar sight all over the island. “It’ll be gone. I did try to tell them.”

Even if a hurricane doesn’t come along, whether these initiatives – the government still has a monopoly on the fuel, fertiliser, seeds and tools needed to start cultivating crops, but will subsidise those who want to grow coffee – will yield results remains to be seen. Botched Soviet-style collectivisation was a major factor in decimating Cuba’s economy, and the country was reliant on sugarcane exports for decades. Cuban leaders’ latest idea is re-energising the flagging coffee industry, since it’s a higher-value export crop, but Cubans themselves are limited to 57 grams of coffee a fortnight, with the rest sold mainly to Japan and the Netherlands through state agency Cubaexport.

Although the government is pinning its hopes on coffee, the Cuban stuff – dark roasted, smooth and sweet – deserves its high price tag. It is hard to grow in this part of Cuba without enough natural shade from the island’s sun, as French colonists who abandoned their Artemisa plantations in the mid-1800s realised. And since almost everything they harvest will go to the state, as Ms Soroa points out, the problem that plagues every sector of Cuba’s centrally-planned economy is also apparent here: no one is incentivised to work that hard.

“No one grows up here without knowing about the gap between what the government says and does. No one really bothers listening,” she added. The detente in relations with the US is a particularly nifty bit of razzle-dazzle on the part of the Cuban government: There had been hope, before the three-day party conference began, that the island’s leaders would announce that they are passing on the torch to the younger generation of reforming politicians.

Instead, 84-year-old Raul Castro declared he would be staying in the post of party secretary for a second term, as would several other ageing revolutionaries currently in senior roles. The decision means Castro and his political allies will remain powerful, even after he steps down from the presidency in 2018.

Castro told delegates that he wants to move “slowly but surely”, and that Cuba won't administer “shock therapy”, despite the growing popular frustration at the country’s economic performance. This is partly because the state’s finances are so weak – the state has a monopoly on foreign trade and must therefore bear the cost of all imports, which private sector businesses demand. Even so, Cuba’s reforms to date have been slow compared to countries that have made the transition to market-driven economies before it, such as China and Vietnam.

On Tuesday the party congress made an effort to quell the discontent by announcing that some cooperatives and small businesses will be allowed to buy wholesale from producers rather than through the government, but the move – which only applies to businesses previously owned by the state – is a gesture that won’t satisfy those already frustrated by the government dragging its feet.

State figures show that private employment is at just 23 per cent, up from 18 per cent in 2011, and there are indicators that the number of self-employed people running their own businesses is stagnating. Reported self-employment rates were down from a peak of 504,600 in May 2015 to 496,400 in January of this year.

The “economic problem” is Cuba’s top priority, said Carlos Alzugaray, a Cuban diplomacy analyst based in the US. “But there is a particular juncture in Cuba right now, which I call a generational transition. And we need to create the institutions that will help that new generation to govern the country effectively.”

While on the surface Cuba appears to be changing rapidly, meaningful effects are not yet trickling down to most of its people, or their pockets. Ms Soroa is blunt about the prospects for her town, which is starting to see tourists stop by on their way from Havana to Pinar del Rio, tobacco country.

“Tourists think it’s beautiful here, they stay with the rich cattle farmers on the other side of the valley, or the government tours take them to the old mafia hotel,” she shrugs. “So what?”