Look, with total respect for your resonant experience in Cuba on an emotional level—because I had similar experiences too, at my first government solidarity marches in the same country 20 years ago—I would caution you against drawing broad conclusions about Cuba‘s system and its efficacy from what sounds like a short, state-sponsored visit. Does the Cuban system nail it in some ways? Absolutely. Prenatal care, literacy, some aspects of the medical system, material support for the arts and people who make art (until that art crosses an arbitrary line that invites censorship). Does that mean the system works for everyone and there is no exploitation or oppression? Absolutely not.
Surveillance in Cuba doesn’t look like what Americans are conditioned to consider as surveillance—it looks a lot more like the dangerous “report on your neighbor” systems that the current regime in the U.S. has rolled out vis a vis immigration and abortion—and it doesn’t serve technocrats. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Privilege isn’t allocated based on access to generational wealth and financial markets but rather the government—but that doesn’t mean there aren’t neighborhoods in Havana where functionaries and their families (there is certainly a generational aspect to that!) live in luxury with plenty of water while the brigades where you stayed with have little. Statistically and anecdotally, racism remains a huge problem—Black Cubans are underrepresented in positions of power and influence across the board, and face their own version of stop and frisk at far higher rates.
It’s not just the blockade that does that, though the blockade is obviously a cruel and wrong-headed policy and should be fought in every way possible. It’s *also* the Cuban system as they’ve implemented it. I would encourage you to read M. Gessen, to sit with the artwork of Tania Bruguera and other artists who’ve pressed the wrong buttons, with whose tactics or conclusions you may not agree, but whose writing and art will certainly offer a more rounded perspective on a very complicated place.
To be clear, I am not a fan of the U.S. political or economic system, and am clear eyed about the many, many people who suffer here. If you want to have a conversation about who benefits and loses in systems of market-based exploitation versus bureaucratic oppression, this trip is a great place to start. But I would venture that to relate a government-sponsored trip to Cuba as reflective of anything like a whole truth—governments propagandize! That’s part of what they do to maintain power!—may assuage feelings of nihilism but doesn’t serve the broader pursuit of more equitable systems of resource allocation.
thank you for your response, I will be sure to look into some of these artists and writers you mentioned. I will reiterate that the purpose of my delegation was to support ending the US blockade on Cuba, which is a cruel policy of collective punishment and genocide. I don't feel it's my place as a US citizen to say what's best for Cubans, they deserve democratic self-determination without the added pressure of another nation's genocidal program designed to force them into regime change.
And ending the blockade should absolutely happen, total agreement on self-determination and the absolute cruelty of that policy. Just cautioning against a broad romanticization of Cuba that I've seen taking root in the American left recently. Conflating socialism with the Cuban system is pernicious because Cuban socialism relies on totalitarianism, and I can't say it better than Gessen, who wrote, "Totalitarianism, that most horrible of inventions of the twentieth century, is one of the greatest crimes against humanity. But it should not discredit the ideas of common welfare and basic fairness that make up socialism. Totalitarianism can weaponize any ideology; socialism is no more essentially totalitarian than capitalism is essentially democratic."
I was able to sit down and read this article just now and I do have to say it is really poorly written, lazy journalism. Gessen mentions "authoritarianism" about 50 times without providing any examples of this supposedly happening in Cuba. It's also honestly pretty offensive to compare the USSR to Nazi Germany; again, without mentioning any events or policies to back up that equivalence. Feel free to send me something written with more integrity, I'm always happy to read more critical perspectives, but respectfully this is sloppy as hell
That article was not a journalistic piece intended to prove that Cuba is an authoritarian or totalitarian state, but rather to argue, intellectually, why the leftist movement for more equitable resource allocation should not hand wave away the fact of leftist authoritarianism just because “socialism is good no matter the cost.”
There is tons of evidence that Cuba, a country with no freedom of dissent where the same regime has been in power through “democratic” elections for sixty years, is easily classifiable as an autocracy or totalitarian state. If you’re interested in seeing proof (and from legit sources not the US state department) it’s easily findable.
Again, I’m not a propagandist for capitalism or unaware of the horrible ways the U.S. has behaved re: Cuba (financial support for dissidents on the list). I’m saying what you see on a government sponsored trip is akin to someone who’s into banking being feted on Wall Street and talking the American dream in market-adjacent industries. It’s just one part of the tapestry of truth, it’s not the whole. Cubas socialism really works for some (I think it’s great in the countryside, where there’s less government surveillance and a barter economy can cover more bases materially). I wrote a book on post-Fidel Cuba which you could read if you wanted (it feels a little dated both in terms of my thinking and it came out in 2014, so, a lot has happened). There are other resources, too. Cuba is wildly politicized and propagandized on both sides, it’s hard to find good neutral fact-driven reading. My point is that I don’t think falling for propaganda of any kind serves the greater movement toward more just resource allocation or better implementation of socialist systems.
What a beautiful piece. I was actually also supposed to be with you folks at CIJAM as part of the Canadian delegation, but had to pull out at the last second as life with a toddler makes these trips that much harder to pull off. Your text fills me with some regret, and a lot of excitement for my return to Cuba in November with my Tennessee born wife and child.
I first visited Cuba in 2022 with my younger brother, with stays in cities (Havana, Matanzas, Varadero) and the more impoverished countryside (Canasi, Sancti Spiritus…etc.) and you’ve elegantly captured what I felt at the time as a dispirited Marxist. I would add that not only was the trip special for giving me a sense of what life in a revolutionary country is like, but I think there is also value in us sharing with Cubans what life in our capitalist countries is like. The Cubans I met could not believe that COVID-19 was still spreading in Canada at that time (and worse than in Cuba) and were shocked to learn that my Montreal roads were comparable to theirs due to organised crime having a monopoly on our construction industries here (they were aghast that we had organised crime in Canada). It was an illuminating reminder that the narratives we hear about Cuba are often just as false as the ones they hear about our countries sometimes.
Thanks again for sharing. Like you, I will also never forget wandering around Habana Centro late at night and being shocked by the sight of parks and plazas that didn’t have to also function as the only place for our most vulnerable to live and die in.
Mmmm… I’m glad, truly glad, that you had that experience in Cuba.
But I wonder if you know — the May Day march, today, is a kind of fiction.
If it looked like a sea of people to you, know that it once ran deeper, fuller, louder.
These days, the true people of Cuba — the ones who carry the weight of quiet rooms and thinning dreams — they no longer stand behind that march.
Not under Díaz-Canel. Not after the faith faded from the revolution like paint on old concrete (like most of the revolutionary slogans around there, Patria o Muerte)
I am Cuban.
I have lived twenty-two of my twenty-four years within that aching island.
What I say, I have lived.
And I understand, from your distance — from your place in a country that always stood with its back turned, arms crossed —
how you might see it with softer eyes. I’ve heard how they teach you about us:
about the embargo,
about a proud defiance.
How your books tilt the table to portray Cuba with disdain , besieged, waiting.
But from where I stand,
your words read like an apology written by someone born in the house of the oppressor,
a kind of absolution for a wound inherited rather than chosen.
Cuba needs change.
And sometimes I fear I won’t live long enough to see it.
There is so much that’s been veiled — misinformation draped like linen over a broken window.
Take the so-called medical internationalism.
They say it’s free. It isn’t.
The government pockets the lion’s share of what those doctors earn.
They are traded — like coins or rainwater — for diesel, for favors, for silence.
I hate writing this. I found your post through the same friend who once held your words gently.
She liked it — but she knew I wouldn’t.
I hope you felt something whole while you were here.
But if you ever return,
don’t stand beside the marble steps and rehearsed slogans.
Go to the people.
Ride the buses.
Stay with the young, the students, the ones still learning how to dream.
this was so lovely and put things i’ve been feeling in the pit of my stomach into words.
I loved your words about the felt absence of collective happiness, thank you!
Look, with total respect for your resonant experience in Cuba on an emotional level—because I had similar experiences too, at my first government solidarity marches in the same country 20 years ago—I would caution you against drawing broad conclusions about Cuba‘s system and its efficacy from what sounds like a short, state-sponsored visit. Does the Cuban system nail it in some ways? Absolutely. Prenatal care, literacy, some aspects of the medical system, material support for the arts and people who make art (until that art crosses an arbitrary line that invites censorship). Does that mean the system works for everyone and there is no exploitation or oppression? Absolutely not.
Surveillance in Cuba doesn’t look like what Americans are conditioned to consider as surveillance—it looks a lot more like the dangerous “report on your neighbor” systems that the current regime in the U.S. has rolled out vis a vis immigration and abortion—and it doesn’t serve technocrats. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Privilege isn’t allocated based on access to generational wealth and financial markets but rather the government—but that doesn’t mean there aren’t neighborhoods in Havana where functionaries and their families (there is certainly a generational aspect to that!) live in luxury with plenty of water while the brigades where you stayed with have little. Statistically and anecdotally, racism remains a huge problem—Black Cubans are underrepresented in positions of power and influence across the board, and face their own version of stop and frisk at far higher rates.
It’s not just the blockade that does that, though the blockade is obviously a cruel and wrong-headed policy and should be fought in every way possible. It’s *also* the Cuban system as they’ve implemented it. I would encourage you to read M. Gessen, to sit with the artwork of Tania Bruguera and other artists who’ve pressed the wrong buttons, with whose tactics or conclusions you may not agree, but whose writing and art will certainly offer a more rounded perspective on a very complicated place.
To be clear, I am not a fan of the U.S. political or economic system, and am clear eyed about the many, many people who suffer here. If you want to have a conversation about who benefits and loses in systems of market-based exploitation versus bureaucratic oppression, this trip is a great place to start. But I would venture that to relate a government-sponsored trip to Cuba as reflective of anything like a whole truth—governments propagandize! That’s part of what they do to maintain power!—may assuage feelings of nihilism but doesn’t serve the broader pursuit of more equitable systems of resource allocation.
thank you for your response, I will be sure to look into some of these artists and writers you mentioned. I will reiterate that the purpose of my delegation was to support ending the US blockade on Cuba, which is a cruel policy of collective punishment and genocide. I don't feel it's my place as a US citizen to say what's best for Cubans, they deserve democratic self-determination without the added pressure of another nation's genocidal program designed to force them into regime change.
And ending the blockade should absolutely happen, total agreement on self-determination and the absolute cruelty of that policy. Just cautioning against a broad romanticization of Cuba that I've seen taking root in the American left recently. Conflating socialism with the Cuban system is pernicious because Cuban socialism relies on totalitarianism, and I can't say it better than Gessen, who wrote, "Totalitarianism, that most horrible of inventions of the twentieth century, is one of the greatest crimes against humanity. But it should not discredit the ideas of common welfare and basic fairness that make up socialism. Totalitarianism can weaponize any ideology; socialism is no more essentially totalitarian than capitalism is essentially democratic."
https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/what-bernie-sanders-should-have-said-about-socialism-and-totalitarianism-in-cuba
I was able to sit down and read this article just now and I do have to say it is really poorly written, lazy journalism. Gessen mentions "authoritarianism" about 50 times without providing any examples of this supposedly happening in Cuba. It's also honestly pretty offensive to compare the USSR to Nazi Germany; again, without mentioning any events or policies to back up that equivalence. Feel free to send me something written with more integrity, I'm always happy to read more critical perspectives, but respectfully this is sloppy as hell
That article was not a journalistic piece intended to prove that Cuba is an authoritarian or totalitarian state, but rather to argue, intellectually, why the leftist movement for more equitable resource allocation should not hand wave away the fact of leftist authoritarianism just because “socialism is good no matter the cost.”
There is tons of evidence that Cuba, a country with no freedom of dissent where the same regime has been in power through “democratic” elections for sixty years, is easily classifiable as an autocracy or totalitarian state. If you’re interested in seeing proof (and from legit sources not the US state department) it’s easily findable.
Again, I’m not a propagandist for capitalism or unaware of the horrible ways the U.S. has behaved re: Cuba (financial support for dissidents on the list). I’m saying what you see on a government sponsored trip is akin to someone who’s into banking being feted on Wall Street and talking the American dream in market-adjacent industries. It’s just one part of the tapestry of truth, it’s not the whole. Cubas socialism really works for some (I think it’s great in the countryside, where there’s less government surveillance and a barter economy can cover more bases materially). I wrote a book on post-Fidel Cuba which you could read if you wanted (it feels a little dated both in terms of my thinking and it came out in 2014, so, a lot has happened). There are other resources, too. Cuba is wildly politicized and propagandized on both sides, it’s hard to find good neutral fact-driven reading. My point is that I don’t think falling for propaganda of any kind serves the greater movement toward more just resource allocation or better implementation of socialist systems.
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/07/cuba-autoridades-deben-liberar-personas-injustamente-encarceladas-eliminar-leyes-represivas/
What a beautiful piece. I was actually also supposed to be with you folks at CIJAM as part of the Canadian delegation, but had to pull out at the last second as life with a toddler makes these trips that much harder to pull off. Your text fills me with some regret, and a lot of excitement for my return to Cuba in November with my Tennessee born wife and child.
I first visited Cuba in 2022 with my younger brother, with stays in cities (Havana, Matanzas, Varadero) and the more impoverished countryside (Canasi, Sancti Spiritus…etc.) and you’ve elegantly captured what I felt at the time as a dispirited Marxist. I would add that not only was the trip special for giving me a sense of what life in a revolutionary country is like, but I think there is also value in us sharing with Cubans what life in our capitalist countries is like. The Cubans I met could not believe that COVID-19 was still spreading in Canada at that time (and worse than in Cuba) and were shocked to learn that my Montreal roads were comparable to theirs due to organised crime having a monopoly on our construction industries here (they were aghast that we had organised crime in Canada). It was an illuminating reminder that the narratives we hear about Cuba are often just as false as the ones they hear about our countries sometimes.
Thanks again for sharing. Like you, I will also never forget wandering around Habana Centro late at night and being shocked by the sight of parks and plazas that didn’t have to also function as the only place for our most vulnerable to live and die in.
Mmmm… I’m glad, truly glad, that you had that experience in Cuba.
But I wonder if you know — the May Day march, today, is a kind of fiction.
If it looked like a sea of people to you, know that it once ran deeper, fuller, louder.
These days, the true people of Cuba — the ones who carry the weight of quiet rooms and thinning dreams — they no longer stand behind that march.
Not under Díaz-Canel. Not after the faith faded from the revolution like paint on old concrete (like most of the revolutionary slogans around there, Patria o Muerte)
I am Cuban.
I have lived twenty-two of my twenty-four years within that aching island.
What I say, I have lived.
And I understand, from your distance — from your place in a country that always stood with its back turned, arms crossed —
how you might see it with softer eyes. I’ve heard how they teach you about us:
about the embargo,
about a proud defiance.
How your books tilt the table to portray Cuba with disdain , besieged, waiting.
But from where I stand,
your words read like an apology written by someone born in the house of the oppressor,
a kind of absolution for a wound inherited rather than chosen.
Cuba needs change.
And sometimes I fear I won’t live long enough to see it.
There is so much that’s been veiled — misinformation draped like linen over a broken window.
Take the so-called medical internationalism.
They say it’s free. It isn’t.
The government pockets the lion’s share of what those doctors earn.
They are traded — like coins or rainwater — for diesel, for favors, for silence.
I hate writing this. I found your post through the same friend who once held your words gently.
She liked it — but she knew I wouldn’t.
I hope you felt something whole while you were here.
But if you ever return,
don’t stand beside the marble steps and rehearsed slogans.
Go to the people.
Ride the buses.
Stay with the young, the students, the ones still learning how to dream.
Look for the real Cuba.
You’ll know it when it doesn’t speak in slogans.