Transcription
Imagine waking up in a country where the power has been out for 22 hours straight. Not because of a storm, not because of a natural disaster. The lights are out because your country ran out of oil. The water pumps don't work because they need diesel to run. The food in your refrigerator, the little food you have, is spoiling. You go to the hospital and surgeons are operating by flashlight. You go to the store and the shelves are a kind of quiet that feels almost accusatory. You walk outside and the garbage has been piling up for weeks because there's no fuel for the trucks. Because this is Cuba right now.
In the year 2026, and the question I want to ask today is not the one most Western media is asking. They're asking, is communism failing? They've already decided that answer is yes. They're asking, will the regime collapse? As if that's the only story worth telling. But those questions as framing devices are actually designed to close down thinking rather than open it up. They're designed to tell you what to feel before you understand what you're seeing.
I want to ask a different set of questions entirely. What is actually happening in Cuba layer by layer? Who benefits from the narrative you're being fed? What does this moment reveal about the nature of American power in the 21st century? What does it reveal about the limits of revolutionary governance? And perhaps most importantly, what does Cuba's story tell us about the world that ordinary people everywhere are being asked to live in?
My name is Jung Changchin. I spent decades studying education systems, political economies, and the ideological architectures that shape how societies organize themselves and how they collapse. I've worked across China, North America, and developing world contexts. And today I want to offer you a perspective on Cuba that you are almost certainly not getting from your regular news feed.
Let's start with the facts because the facts themselves are remarkable. Cuba, an island of roughly 10 million people, though that number has been shrinking fast, is currently experiencing what analysts are calling the worst humanitarian and energy crisis since the early 1990s. In some parts of the country, people are living without electricity for up to 20 hours a day. The national electric grid has collapsed multiple times in 2026 alone. Hospitals have had to suspend operations, schools are closed, public transportation has largely stopped, garbage has accumulated in the streets of Havana, water systems have broken down because the pumps that move water through pipes require diesel fuel that no longer exists in sufficient quantities.
In May of 2026, Cuba's Ministry of Energy and Mines announced something extraordinary. The country had simply run out of oil and diesel. Not running low, run out. The sugar harvest, historically Cuba's economic backbone, the engine of its revolutionary economy, had its worst result in over a century, less than 150,000 tons, less than half of the previous year's already pitiful total. An economist at the University of Havana described it bluntly. Sugar production practically no longer exists. Close to 89% of Cuba's population is estimated to be living in extreme poverty. Around 70% have skipped meals because they couldn't afford food. Only 15% of Cubans can consistently maintain three meals a day. Authorities themselves acknowledge that only 30% of essential medicines are available. The rest must be found on a black market that most Cubans can't afford. And the population is leaving. Between 2021 and 2024, Cuba lost more than 12% of its population to emigration. In fiscal year 2024, US Customs and Border Protection recorded over 217,000 encounters with Cuban migrants trying to enter the United States. People are fleeing on homemade rafts, through Nicaragua, through dangerous jungle routes, not because they are lured by American propaganda, but because the island as a livable place is increasingly failing them.
These are the facts. And if you get your news from mainstream Western outlets, they will use these facts to tell you a very simple, very satisfying story. Communism doesn't work. The Cuban regime is evil. American pressure is justified. And all that remains is to wait for the regime to fall, so that freedom can arrive. That story is not wrong exactly, but it is profoundly incomplete. And the incompleteness is not accidental. It is the point.
Let me give you the layer that almost nobody discusses, the architecture of economic strangulation. Cuba's energy system is almost entirely dependent on imported petroleum. Historically, that petroleum came primarily from Venezuela, which had agreed to provide Cuba with roughly 70,000 barrels of crude oil per day, at heavily discounted rates. This arrangement was ideological, strategic, and practical. Cuba sent medical personnel and security advisers to Venezuela. Venezuela sent oil. It was a barter of revolutionary solidarity. When Venezuela's economy began collapsing under the weight of falling oil prices, mismanagement, and its own set of US sanctions, those oil deliveries became irregular and then insufficient. Cuba began struggling with intermittent blackouts starting in 2024. The grid was aging. Most of it dates to the Cold War era, with major expansion in the 1980s, and there were no resources to modernize it.
Then, in early 2026, the United States did something that hasn't been done since the Cuban Missile Crisis. It enacted an effective fuel blockade on Cuba. American forces, following the US military intervention in Venezuela that ousted Nicolas Maduro, cut off Venezuelan oil exports to Cuba entirely. They began seizing oil tankers, including ships from Mexico's state-owned Pemex that were heading to Cuba, threatening the originating countries with tariffs if they resisted. The United Nations Human Rights Office described the blockade as a serious violation of international law and an extreme form of unilateral economic coercion. The UN World Food Program was actively providing food assistance to 1.5 million Cubans when this crisis deepened. Hurricane Melissa had already struck in 2025, damaging water infrastructure that was already in ruins from hurricanes Oscar and Rafael in 2024. The UN found that the blockade threatened Cuba's food supply, disrupted water systems, and compromised hospitals. It hampered even the WFP's own relief efforts.
And here's the thing I want you to sit with for a moment. None of this is a secret. It is documented. It is acknowledged by major international bodies. The UN has said it. Human rights organizations have noted it. Even some American newspapers have reported it. And yet, in the dominant narrative, the Cuban government remains solely responsible for the suffering of its people, and the United States is understood as a force for liberation.
Now, and this is crucial, so please stay with me. I am not saying the Cuban government bears no responsibility. It bears enormous responsibility. I'll come to that. But the refusal to hold the United States accountable for the consequences of its deliberate economic warfare on a civilian population is a form of intellectual dishonesty that we need to name clearly. When we apply the logic consistently, deliberately cutting off a country's fuel supply, knowing it will cause hospital shutdowns, food spoilage, water system failures, and mass starvation-level food insecurity, that is not a sanctions regime. That is collective punishment. International law has words for it. The fact that it is being done to a government we disapprove of does not make it something other than what it is.
Now, let me talk about the Cuban government itself, because this is where I want to be very precise. The Cuban revolutionary government, in its origins, its ideology, and its actual record, is one of the most complicated political phenomena of the 20th century. And when I say complicated, I mean that in the most literal sense. It cannot be understood through simple categories.
In its early decades, the Cuban Revolution produced genuine achievements that were, by the standards of the developing world, extraordinary. Cuba built one of the most effective public health systems in Latin America. Its literacy rates, infant mortality rates, and life expectancy figures consistently outperform countries with far greater per capita income. It developed a medical education system that exported doctors to dozens of countries, not as a commercial venture, but as genuine solidarity. Cuba trained physicians from across the global south. Its sports programs, its music, its arts, all reflected a society that, despite its poverty and isolation, was investing in human development in ways that neoliberal economies routinely failed to. These achievements were real. They are not propaganda. Even institutions broadly hostile to the Cuban government acknowledge them.
But the same system that produced those achievements also constructed one of the most comprehensive surveillance and repression apparatuses in the Western Hemisphere. The Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, neighborhood-level informant networks, monitor dissent at the most granular level of daily life. Political prisoners have been held in Cuban jails for decades. In 2021, when Cubans took to the streets in the largest protest in over 20 years, protests that were fundamentally about economic suffering and a lack of basic freedoms, the government used live ammunition against its own people. Roughly 1,500 people were arrested. Hundreds were subsequently sentenced to years in prison. In 2024, as Cubans protested again over blackouts and food shortages, the government deployed police formations to clear protesters by force, cut internet access to Havana to prevent organization, and arrested people. A court in Camagüey sentenced a woman to 15 years in prison for streaming images of protest on Facebook. The tribunal called it enemy propaganda. In 2025, Amnesty International documented 529 arbitrary detentions. It documented 39 deaths of prisoners in Cuban prisons. Torture is not an accusation. It is a documented finding by international human rights organizations operating under rigorous standards.
In response to protest over the blackouts, Cuban First Secretary Miguel Díaz-Canel appeared on state television in military fatigues and announced that protesters would be processed vigorously under our revolutionary law. He blamed counterrevolutionaries from abroad. He said the government would not tolerate unrest. This is not the behavior of a government fighting for its people. This is the behavior of a government fighting for its own survival at the expense of its people.
And so here we have a situation that requires us to hold two things simultaneously. Something our current media environment is almost pathologically unable to do. The United States is waging economic warfare against a civilian population in violation of international law, and the Cuban government is repressing its own people in response to legitimate grievances. These are not competing truths. They're both true at the same time, and understanding Cuba requires holding both without letting one cancel the other.
I want to zoom out now because I think that Cuba is actually a window into a much larger set of dynamics that are reshaping the world. The story of Cuba is, at its core, the story of what happens when a small, poor country in the backyard of the world's most powerful military and economic superpower tries to build a fundamentally different social model. It doesn't matter whether you think the Cuban model was right or wrong, good or bad, sustainable or not. What matters is that the attempt itself was never allowed to be made on anything like a fair basis.
From the moment of the revolution in 1959, the United States worked to undermine Cuba through assassination plots, economic embargo, military invasion, the Bay of Pigs, and a sustained campaign of destabilization that has lasted over 60 years. The CIA's attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro are not conspiracy theory. They are documented history acknowledged by the US government itself, cataloged in congressional reports. The economic embargo imposed in 1962 and progressively tightened is the longest-running unilateral trade embargo in modern history.
This context matters enormously when we try to evaluate the Cuban government's failures because it is genuinely difficult to know what Cuban socialism would have become if it had been allowed to develop under normal conditions. We know that the Cuban government made terrible decisions of its own. The concentration of economic power, the suppression of private enterprise, the failure to modernize the agriculture system, the grotesque inefficiencies of central planning, the political repression that alienated precisely the educated professional class whose skills a developing economy needs most. These failures are real and they are internal. But we also know that the external pressure, the embargo, the sanctions, the financial restrictions, the designation on the state sponsors of terrorism list, has systematically closed off every avenue by which Cuba might have been able to reform and modernize its economy.
When Trump added Cuba to the state sponsors of terrorism list in January 2021, it meant that banks around the world that did business with the United States, which is most banks, refused to process transactions with Cuba. Cuban businesses couldn't get insurance. Shipping companies faced enormous risk. The effect was a financial isolation that compounded every internal dysfunction with an external wall. And then in 2026, the decision was made to impose an actual physical fuel blockade in the middle of a humanitarian crisis against a civilian population. The United States sent $6 million in aid via the Catholic Church while simultaneously enforcing a blockade that the UN said was threatening Cuba's food supply. Think about that for a moment. $6 million in aid, a blockade that the UN called a serious violation of international law, both at the same time.
Now, I want to talk about something that the Western media conversation almost never addresses. What Cuba reveals about China and what China reveals about Cuba's possible futures. China is the world's most significant example of a communist party maintaining political monopoly while achieving capitalist-style economic development. Whether you call it socialism with Chinese characteristics or something else entirely, the fundamental reality is that the Chinese Communist Party liberalized its economy in the 1980s in ways that the Cuban Communist Party never did. And the results, in terms of material development, were transformative.
Cuba, under Soviet patronage, had a version of this available to it. There were moments, particularly after the Soviet collapse, in the 1990s, when Cuba's special period forced some liberalization, when the government could have chosen a more market-oriented development path while maintaining political control in the way China did. It chose not to, or rather, it made incremental moves in that direction, but always retreated back to central control when it felt politically threatened.
I want to say something about the Cuban people specifically, because they get lost in these geopolitical abstractions. Cubans are not a passive backdrop to a Cold War drama. They're not simply victims waiting to be liberated, nor are they simply dupes of a revolutionary government. They're a people, complex, resourceful, resilient, creative, and increasingly fed up. The protests of 2021, when tens of thousands took to the streets across the country, were not orchestrated by Miami exile groups or by the CIA, whatever the Cuban government claimed. They were a genuine eruption of popular frustration after decades of accumulated grievance.
Let me talk about what I think this moment reveals about American foreign policy in the 21st century. There is a concept in political science called humanitarian intervention. The idea that military or economic force can be justified when it is deployed to protect civilian populations from repressive governments. This concept has been used to justify NATO's intervention in Libya, the invasion of Iraq, and a range of other actions that in retrospect produced outcomes far worse than the situations they were supposed to ameliorate.
What is happening in Cuba is something different and in some ways more troubling. It is not framed as humanitarian intervention. It is framed as geopolitical pressure, as a tool to achieve regime change by creating economic conditions so severe that either the regime collapses or the population revolts. It is the deliberate engineering of a humanitarian crisis as a political instrument. The Center for Strategic and International Studies noted with some understatement that the Trump administration risks wrongly calibrating the balance between creating enough pressure to force concessions and societal collapse. They noted a possibility of a major exodus from the island if the regime falls, a refugee crisis that would dwarf what has already occurred, while the elderly and sick who cannot flee will be left to face even more acute food, fuel, and medical shortages.
This is a considered deliberate policy. It is not the product of ignorance about its consequences. The consequences are the policy. And yet, when international bodies, the United Nations, human rights organizations, the academic community describe this policy in terms of its humanitarian impact, the response from American officials is to invoke Cuba's human rights record as if one justified the other, as if the existence of Cuban political prisoners means that American policy makers bear no responsibility for the consequences of an oil blockade on civilian life. This is the logic that has produced misery across the global south for generations. It is a logic that says the ends justify the means, that people are acceptable casualties in service of geopolitical goals, and anyone who objects is a defender of authoritarianism.
I want to close with what I think is the most important question. As we watch Cuba, we are watching a kind of historical laboratory. Not for the question of whether socialism works. That question is too simple, too blunt, too ideologically loaded to generate useful insight, but for the question of what happens to small countries caught between their own governance failures and the overwhelming power of geopolitical forces beyond their control.