For well over six decades, right-wing Cuban émigrés have fed Washington’s narrative that any hardship experienced by the people on the island — including shortages of food, fuel, and medicines alongside periodic electrical blackouts — is the result of the policies of the Cuban state.

To peddle this myth, successive U.S. administrations, beginning with that of Democrat and liberal icon John F. Kennedy, have relied on their control of the media and the fact that a layer of Cuban Americans were prepared to use violence to silence anyone who countered this narrative. They have used their propaganda machine to try to bury the truth about both the accomplishments of the Cuban revolution and the human consequences of the U.S. economic war.

Despite the picture Washington has tried to paint, the Cuban diaspora in the United States cannot be defined only by its reactionary core — made up of the elites under the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista — that emigrated following the dictator’s overthrow in 1959. Before those Cubans arrived on U.S. shores, there was already a Cuban American community, especially in Florida, many of whom had been exiled by the Batista regime.^[1]

Among more recent waves of immigrants there are tens of thousands who came for economic, not political, reasons. They did not necessarily bring with them the same hostility to the Cuban revolution.

Nevertheless, the likes of U.S. secretary of state Marco Rubio, a Cuban American and now a leading figure in crafting Washington’s anti-Cuba and other imperialist policies in the Caribbean, are held up by the big-business media as representative of the vast majority of Cuban Americans.

Danny Valdes, another Cuban American, begs to differ. He explains in the article below that Washington’s myth about the source of the island’s economic challenges has been exposed, most recently and most clearly, by U.S. president Donald Trump. “There’s an embargo. There’s no oil, there’s no money, there’s no anything,” Trump said last month.

Valdes also notes that the hold of right-wing opposition to the Cuban revolution in the Cuban American diaspora is weakening, especially as younger people find their voice.

“There is … a growing shift,” Valdes writes. “Cuban Americans, especially younger generations, are beginning to speak out against the criminality and cruelty of a Cuba policy that claims to represent our community’s interests. Whether in Miami or in New Jersey, we are today seeing a wave of Cuban Americans who are mobilizing to demand engagement, rather than escalation.”

The opinion column below first appeared on the online edition of the British daily The Guardian on March 6, 2026. We are publishing it for the information of our readers. The headline, subhead, text, and photos that follow are from the original. Notes are by World-Outlook.

— World-Outlook editors

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I’m Cuban American. For the sake of both countries, Trump’s siege must end

Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, crushes our people and calls it freedom. We want engagement, not escalation.

Fri 6 Mar 2026 08.00 EST

By Danny Valdes

The day that will be remembered as one of the darkest days of the long and troubled US-Cuban relationship is 29 January. That was the day that Donald Trump declared Cuba an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to US national security, introduced a full-scale fuel blockade around the island, and turned off the lights for their home, schools and hospitals.

For Cubans Americans like me, the consequences of Trump’s declaration are not abstract. They are immediate, and devastating. Our families are running out of food. Our friends are unable to access medicine. While Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, speaks in the name of our “freedom”, he actively starves our communities of their most basic needs.

In our community, this kind of doublespeak is nothing new. For decades, the United States has enforced a brutal embargo against the island, forcing its exclusion from the international systems of trade, finance, and tourism under the banner of “democracy promotion”. Washington insists that its approach pressures the government. In reality, everyday people have always borne the weight.

The logic of that collective punishment is written in black and white. In an infamous 1960 cable, the US secretary of state made the case for policy to “economic dissatisfaction and hardship” on the island. The plan was explicit: inflict deprivation on ordinary Cubans so they turn against their government. In other words, the goal of the US embargo has always been regime change, pursued with full knowledge that the suffering would fall hardest on everyday people.^[2]

And yet — throughout my childhood — the dominant narrative in places like Miami insisted that the embargo either did not exist or had no real effect. Every shortage, every blackout, every empty shelf was blamed exclusively on the Cuban state. Politicians like Rubio carried this myth into Congress and sold it to the broader American public.

Now, Rubio’s myth has been exposed by Trump himself in his escalating campaign for a “takeover” of the island. “There’s an embargo. There’s no oil, there’s no money, there’s no anything,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One last month.

Some Cuban Americans still cling to the belief that stronger forms of collective punishment will somehow unlock positive change on the island. Many of them argue that suffering is necessary. Others go further, using the opportunity created by Trump’s executive order to purchase weapons and advance their own plots for violent counter-revolution.

Just last week, Cuban authorities reported intercepting a Florida-registered speedboat off the northern coast of Cuba loaded with assault rifles, handguns, Molotov cocktails, night-vision gear and camouflage. The incident is a stark reminder that when pressure intensifies, some in the exile community feel emboldened to pursue violence against their own people rather than dialogue across our community.

Yet there is also a growing shift within that community. Cuban Americans, especially younger generations, are beginning to speak out against the criminality and cruelty of a Cuba policy that claims to represent our community’s interests. Whether in Miami or in New Jersey, we are today seeing a wave of Cuban Americans who are mobilizing to demand engagement, rather than escalation.

We have already seen how powerful a movement like this can be. Over the few years, young American Jews have radically reshaped the dominant narrative about US-Israel policy. They, too, took to the streets and to the Capitol to make their voices heard, refusing to let their identity become a weapon in the hands of the US government against their community.

Cuban Americans are today organizing to do the same. Just as Jewish Americans clashed with institutions like Aipac [American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a pro-Israel lobbying group], Cuban Americans are challenging the organized Cuban American lobby that has long pushed a policy of aggression in the name of our community.

This growing movement spans across ideological divides. For so many Cuban Americans, the devastation wrought by the fuel blockade requires us to put aside differences of opinion to stand up for our community’s most fundamental rights — to food, to school, to medicine. This humanitarian crisis does not discriminate between old and young, left or right. It devours everyone.

The crisis that we are inflicting in Cuba should thus be a call to conscience for the entire United States — not just our small diasporic community. No country that claims to stand for human rights can allow policies that deepen hunger and desperation. No citizen who believes in basic dignity can accept this suffering as collateral damage.

Cuba is our next-door neighbor: just 90 miles away from the Florida coast. Its people are our relatives, our friends, our coworkers and our fellow students. And right now, they need us to act with compassion.

The 29 January will be remembered for its darkness. But we have a real opportunity today to turn back on the light. It was just a decade ago that Barack Obama took the brave decision to reestablish diplomatic relations with our neighbor — and opened the door for a new chapter of friendship and shared prosperity. Recovering that memory may be the first step on the path to enduring peace between our nations.

Danny Valdes is an activist from Miami and co-founder of Cuban Americans for Cuba.

NOTES

[1] In December 1959, with rebel forces led by Fidel Castro advancing on Havana, the hated, U.S.-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista collapsed; Batista and many of his cronies fled the island. Cuba’s revolutionary government moved rapidly to nationalize the main means of production.

In response to threats from Washington, Cuba nationalized the Shell refinery and other oil installations and then the country’s massive sugar industry. It also carried out a thorough agrarian reform. And it dismantled the capitalist state, from its army to all its bourgeois institutions. Cuban revolutionaries took key positions in government, banking, and industry, forcing out those capitalists who did not leave voluntarily, all the while mobilizing the population to defend the gains of their revolution. Many of those who left ended up in the United States.

[2] In April 1960, U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state Lester Mallory wrote an internal memo under the heading “The Decline and Fall of Castro,” giving a brief analysis of “considerations in respect to the life of the present Government of Cuba” and proposing the initial steps that led to a ban on all U.S. trade with Cuba later that year. Mallory proposed “a line of action which, while as adroit and inconspicuous as possible, makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.” In 1962, then-president John F. Kennedy instituted a full, official embargo and travel restrictions. The full text of the Mallory memorandum can be accessed in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958–1960, Cuba, Volume VI – Office of the Historian.

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