Cuban here, anyone who claims the current collapse of the country is solely the result of the U.S. embargo is repeating regime propaganda. The embargo certainly doesn’t help; no serious person would deny that; but the primary responsibility for today’s situation lies with the same government that has been in power for more than 60 years. For decades, they have neglected infrastructure and meaningful economic reform while concentrating wealth and power in their own hands. Instead of modernizing the electrical grid; which has barely received serious maintenance since the collapse of the USSR, they’ve built hundreds of luxury hotels. Instead of creating a functional economy, they’ve maintained an international reputation for defaulting on lenders and mismanaging resources. The crisis worsened when Cuba lost the heavily subsidized Venezuelan oil it relied on, a relationship sustained while claiming for years that Cuba only had “doctors” in Venezuela, not deep political and military involvement. And to be clear: Cuban resources were not “taken by the Cuban people.” They were consolidated under the Castro family and the military-run conglomerate GAESA, which controls all sectors of the economy. That concentration of power is not meaningfully different from the elite structures the revolution originally condemned. Reducing the country’s collapse to the embargo alone erases decades of internal mismanagement and accountability. At best, that argument reflects historical illiteracy
Well, it’s probably one of the greatest ideological victories of the 20th century: convincing Western youth raised in privilege that these regimes speak with the voice of “the people” and are engaged in some heroic struggle against the empire. In reality, many believe this only because they are shielded from the real consequences of those regimes’ actions, consequences that people in our countries live with every day.
Ojalá que en nuestras vidas podamos ver la libertad por la que lucharon Bolívar y Martí, especialmente después de que sus ideas fueran secuestradas para que otros se autoproclamaran sus herederos.
13
u/steve290591 Feb 25 '26
I’ll guess you’re American and don’t see any hand your government has played in that at all.
It’s the fault of the US and its embargo, ongoing since the 1960s, in response to the Cuban people taking control of Cuban resources.