Erika Barris

For Yasser's bike business, this was awesome.

He was giving bike tours to people from everywhere.

His customers were Mexicans and Colombians and Italians.

tourists from the United States.

The Rolling Stones held a monster concert in this country where rock and roll had once been restricted.

Many hundreds of thousands of Americans and their dollars went to Cuba around that time, including me.

I was there, too.

And so was our producer on the show, Luis Gallo.

Oil from its friends, tourists from its frenemy.

But of course, that all came to an end.

That's after the break.

So in the heyday of Cuba's flirtation with its frenemy, capitalism, the country leaned all the way into tourism.

In the 20-teens, tourism was supposed to be the people's capitalist growth engine.

But to make money, more and more Cubans were going into tourism.

People were converting homes into hotels, opening restaurants.

Yasser was leading his bike tours.

Cuba's economy was growing in large part because of one industry, tourism.

The first big shock was sort of a slow moving one.

Venezuela's economy started to fall apart.

So starting in 2016, the country sent less and less oil to Cuba.