The Cuban Dream Dies by Cuban Hands

By Noah Rothman

Friday, May 29, 2026

 

Long after the Soviet Union sacrificed its romantic appeal among enthusiasts for Marxian revolutionary struggle — what with its Stalinist crimes, its own imperial ambitions, and its skepticism toward the “liberationist” movements of the 1960s — Communist Cuba remained an object of the global left’s affections. You can still hear some of that old tenderness in the bluster deployed by the regime’s last defenders. But there is an increasingly elegiac quality to their table-pounding.

 

There can be no denying the hardships that Cubans face, all of which are attributable to machinations in Washington, according to the “socialist newsweekly,” The Militant. Sure, there are a misguided few who would welcome market-oriented reforms. And yet, the newsweekly says, “The big majority understand that there is no future for working people in Cuba without fighting along a course of working-class solidarity against the U.S. rulers’ attempts to reimpose its domination and plunder of the country.”

 

“Cuba has always been a symbol of resistance to American imperialism,” Common Dreams contributor Jawad Khalid brooded. If the Trump administration’s pressure on the regime culminates in military action, they will have “underestimated” the “fighting spirit” of the country and the degree to which its “entire civilian population” is “mobilized for resistance.” The Cuban national motto “says it all.” Khalid concludes, “Homeland or death, we will prevail.”

 

The far-left magazine Jacobin recently published an interview with the Cuban regime’s ambassador to the E.U., Juan Antonio Fernández Palacios, who fueled the delusions to which the magazine’s readers cling. “After all these years of building socialism, we have not been able to achieve everything we dreamed of achieving,” Palacios conceded. But Cuba remains “a symbol of resistance.” Its “doctrine is the war of the entire people, urban and rural alike,” he warned. “That is how the revolution was made: guerrilla warfare from the mountains and, also in urban areas, the action of revolutionary movements.”

 

That is an articulation of the insurgent-warfare doctrine formalized by the French philosopher Régis Debray. He called it “focoism,” after the agile bands of guerrillas (“focos”) who successfully toppled Cuba’s dictatorial Batista regime in 1959. Marxian revolutionaries spent the last half of the 20th century attempting to export the model into which Che Guevara and Fidel Castro stumbled. It’s understandable why a theory of revolutionary violence, which proposes that whole societies can crumble at the feet of tiny militant sects, would appeal to radicals who are themselves few in number. But the Cuban revolution’s unique circumstances were not replicable. “Focoism” failed.

 

The universalism inherent in the international proletarian revolution died with the Cold War. The Cuban regime’s last remaining principle is its hostility toward the U.S.-led world order that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall. To the socialist dreamers out there, the consequences of that hostility — Cuba’s crippling poverty, its stratified society, and its retreat from the world stage — are badges of honor. But for the Cuban people and, increasingly, the Cuban regime itself, vestigial anti-Americanism has become an unaffordable luxury.

 

The Trump administration is squeezing the economic vice it yoked around the island’s throat. Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro is gone and, with him, the subsidized oil that his Chavista regime used to subsidize Cuba’s existence. The sanctions regime Washington has imposed on Havana is the most restrictive Cuba has ever experienced. The country is in a state of economic freefall, and its leaders are desperate for relief.

 

In a desperate bid to assuage Trump, Havana allowed Cubans abroad to invest in private enterprises on the island. The regime freed more than 2,000 political prisoners in April, the second such amnesty this year and the largest in some time. The head of the CIA, John Ratcliffe, met with senior Cuban officials in Havana this month — a trip the regime acknowledged as a peace overture.

 

None of it has persuaded Trump to pull his foot off the gas. Nor are the Cuban people likely to be mollified by half measures or the empty bluster of the Castro regime. In a clear-eyed dispatch from inside Cuba, Left Voice contributor Pablo Oprinari paints a dire portrait of life on the island.

 

The “garbage crisis” is pernicious, he writes. The people trudge through it in the streets, set it alight for warmth, and dig through it for sustenance. Most “survive only by receiving remittances from relatives abroad” or by taking whatever hours the small number of private enterprises are offering workers. Teachers and doctors would “rather work 12 or 14 hours in a bar,” which explains the shortage of both. But the few fortunate private-sector workers in Cuba don’t have it nearly as good as the country’s leadership caste — a cadre that conspicuously excludes “people of African descent.”

 

Although Oprinari blames the “imperialist blockade” for Cuba’s stratified society, that stratification and the embourgeoisement of the country’s wage earners are an existential threat to the revolution. “In the wake of this and growing inequality, a social base favorable to the restoration of capitalism is emerging,” he warns.

 

Only the Cuban revolution’s true believers can still contend with a straight face that the island’s problems have been imposed on them by the United States. Yes, Trump’s sanctions and blockade tactics have throttled the island’s economy, Cuban economist Mauricio de Miranda Parrondo conceded in a New York Times op-ed. “But Cuba’s economy was already on the brink of collapse,” he added. “What is happening in Cuba today is essentially the result of decades of structural economic failure under a rigid political system that has consistently resisted any reform.” And that resistance is buckling.

 

Ossified revolutionary slogans might sustain the Cuban regime’s comfortable apologists in the West, but they are packaged and retailed to a foreign audience. The Marxian left remains invested in the mythology of the Cuban regime, but they’re the last holdouts. Havana lost the fight it waged for 50 years on battlefields that ranged from Latin America to sub-Saharan Africa, and Trump is finally forcing the regime to contend with the consequences of its defeat. Communist Cuba’s supporters hope to avoid a confrontation with that reality. Who can blame them? Self-delusion is all they have left.