Our Socialists in Havana

National Review Online

Thursday, March 26, 2026

 

If there is one thing communist regimes have excelled at over the years, it is creating showcases to gull sympathetic Western visitors.

 

It was in this spirit that Cuba mustered a single luxury hotel with a gas generator for the latest in a long train of useful idiots.

 

A motley collection of activists with the China-linked anti-war group Code Pink, as well as a handful of far-left influencers, descended on Havana set on convincing the long-suffering Cuban people that they’ve never had it so good. Sure, a rolling nationwide blackout spoiled some of the fun, but this crew still managed to blame the United States for the Cuban regime’s deficiencies.

 

“I cannot believe how cruel this U.S. policy is,” Current Affairs editor Nathan Robinson marveled while surveying the darkened landscape from the balcony of his five-star redoubt. “We could stop this.” That’s the message the Cuban handlers of the “Nuestra América Convoy,” which was designed to “show the world that Cuba is under siege,” wanted.

 

Perhaps Robinson didn’t know that Cuba’s rolling blackouts are an endemic feature of life on that island. They predate the extradition of Nicolás Maduro, whose criminal regime was propped up by Cuban military and intelligence officials in exchange for privileged energy exports. Indeed, even oil-rich Venezuela’s power grid struggled for years amid a “brain drain” and “corruption,” and Cuba is beset by the same problems. These issues are a predictable outgrowth of socialist maladministration.

 

The Cuban regime and its fellow travelers insist, as they always do, that the capitalist world’s refusal to prop up their economy is the source of all their woes. The truth is that the system established by Fidel Castro and buttressed for decades by Soviet beneficence has never prioritized its own people. The Cuban government has preyed on its own people and sought to frustrate American geostrategic interests all over the globe.

 

Since its founding in 1959, communist Cuba has exported militancy throughout the developing world — from Latin America to sub-Saharan Africa to the Middle East. In the 1960s and ’70s, it was the destination for “dozens of planes each year” that were hijacked in America and “diverted by criminals and cranks” to Havana, as the author Jason Burke observed. Its militants have inspired and supported anti-American terrorists and anti-Western regimes across the globe, from West Germany’s Baader-Meinhof gang (a.k.a. the Red Army Faction) to the Iranian regime — the revolutionary founders of which were, for a bunch of theocrats, surprisingly enamored with Marxist thought.

 

Contrary to the propaganda, Cuba is one of the more racially segregated societies on earth, with high-status employment opportunities reserved for those with lighter skin and straight hair. Cuba has some of the worst “income inequality” on the planet. That is a feature of all officially “classless” societies, but the disparity between haves and have-nots is especially pronounced in Cuba. Deforestation, unsustainable mining and farming practices, and rampant pollution ensure that Cuba is home to a variety of ongoing environmental disasters. Not that this matters to the apologists for the Castroite regime.

 

The clock now may be ticking for the political project they so adore. Cuba is feeling the strain of both its system’s dysfunction and the additional pressure Washington has put on the regime’s functionaries. In early February, Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel signaled his willingness to engage with the United States, no doubt motivated by the mortal terror that President Trump’s January 3 raid on Caracas instilled in Havana’s communist cadres.

 

The regime has, so far, offered mostly symbolic gestures toward reform. The Trump administration should demand real changes bringing greater economic and political openness, toward the goal of the eventual end of the regime. There is no reason to settle for the “Delcy Rodríguez model” here — Venezuela can give the U.S. oil, but Cuba has nothing similar to offer President Trump.

 

If such a U.S. push were to succeed, it would be of immense benefit to the Cuban people — and a profound disappointment to the likes of Code Pink.