Cuba Under Embargo: the Macro Impact

America's embargo against Cuba has obviously had a broad and serious impact on the island's economy, but nobody has said exactly why it is obvious.
We hear that food is rationed and that medicines are scarce, and yet Cuba's life expectancy is just as good as America's. Newspapers report that cars in Cuba are over 50 years old, and yet new hotels welcome thousands of wealthy foreigners each week. The supposedly obvious economic harm of the embargo has never been independently quantified, and ...