Progressives must learn: You can’t believe everything Cuba says

When Democratic Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and Jonathan Jackson (D-Ill.) returned from Cuba earlier this month urging less U.S. “rhetoric” and a reconsideration of sanctions, they framed their trip as a humanitarian fact-finding mission. Unfortunately, too much of what they brought back was the Cuban regime’s preferred propaganda about itself. There is no question that recent U.S. policy has worsened an already dire situation. Tighter sanctions, particularly restrictions on oil shipments, have aggravated Cuba’s fragile energy sector, contributing to blackouts and shortages that ripple across daily life. Any honest account must acknowledge that. But to stop there is to adopt Havana’s preferred narrative: that Cuba’s suffering is primarily the result of external pressure rather than a political system that has spent decades prioritizing control over competence, repression over reform. That narrative was on full display during the lawmakers’ visit. Jayapal and Jackson spoke movingly about Cuba’s material hardships and urged a less punitive U.S. approach. Their concern for ordinary Cubans is understandable. But concern is not the same as clarity. A visit that focuses on scarcity without fully confronting the political system that manages, distributes and often weaponizes scarcity risks reinforcing the very story the Cuban government most wants foreign visitors to take home. Faced with a government that imprisons dissenters, restricts expression and maintains a system of centralized control that stifles production and distribution, these lawmakers chose not to interrogate power but to echo it. In doing so, they functioned less as observers than as amplifiers — or, to use an older and harsher term, as “useful idiots,” participants in puppet theater that serves the interests of the very regime they claim to approach with humanitarian concern. The Cuban regime has long understood the value of curated encounters with foreign sympathizers. It offers access, proximity and the quiet prestige of being received, a carefully managed glimpse that reinforces its preferred talking points while muting dissenting voices. What it does not offer is unmediated reality. And too often, those who accept the invitation fail to look beyond what is shown. During my early visits to Cuba, I moved in circles close to the island’s political elite. I spent time around Mariela Castro and Gerardo Hernández, one of the Cuban Five, as well as cultural figures whose prominence depends on not straying too far from the official script. I was given not merely a Potemkin glimpse, but a front-row seat to a carefully staged production of revolutionary Cuba. I know how persuasive that script can be, because I once believed parts of it myself. Then I stepped outside of it. What I found was not merely poverty — which can have many causes — but a system in which deprivation and dependency were inseparable from political control. Access, privilege and relief were tied to proximity to power. Ordinary people were left to improvise survival amid shortages that had long since become structural. During later visits, I began to walk the streets of Habana Vieja and Centro Habana. I spoke with ordinary Cubans. I went into tenements and saw firsthand the decay, deprivation and quiet despair that official narratives work so hard to obscure. The romantic lens through which many foreign sympathizers still prefer to view the Cuban state did not survive contact with reality. That reality remains grim. Independent journalists, artists and activists continue to describe surveillance, arbitrary detention and severe limits on expression. Recent imprisonments for minor acts of dissent underscore how determined the government remains to police speech and public life. None of this requires minimizing the damage U.S. sanctions can inflict. One can oppose policies that deepen human suffering while also holding the Cuban government accountable for the conditions its citizens endure. Intellectual honesty demands both. What is harder to defend is the posture of those who, in the name of solidarity, collapse that distinction entirely. When U.S. lawmakers or activists attribute Cuba’s crisis primarily to Washington, they risk absolving the very system that has produced and prolonged that crisis. Democratic members of Congress — no matter how progressive — should resist the temptation to mistake curated access for truth. A humane Cuba policy must reckon with both the harm sanctions can cause and the central role the current regime plays in producing the suffering it so skillfully markets abroad. George Henson, Ph.D., is visiting assistant professor of Spanish translation at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.