Cuba: The Human Price of Political Cynicism

An island agonizing amid scarcity, fear, and class-based racism, while the people — Black and Mulato Cubans — carry the deepest wounds of misery, separation, and servitude.

Planned Asphyxiation

Cuba is not enduring an inevitable tragedy; it is enduring an administered one. The embargo presses from outside, the regime confines from within, and class-based racism determines who finds relief and who is abandoned. Between those forces, the poorest — especially Black and mulato Cubans without family abroad — pay the human price of political cynicism in hunger, exile, and servitude [1, 5, 7].

The economic embargo long ago ceased to resemble a temporary sanction; it hardened into a permanent machinery of pressure on daily life. Its historical effect has been to impoverish an entire country through scarcity, financial isolation, and material decay [1]. Its violence rarely arrives as a single blow. It works by attrition: hospitals without supplies, wages emptied of meaning, families split across borders, and generations taught to mistake survival for destiny.

Sanctions weakened the Cuban state, yet their heaviest burden fell on civilians. Eating, healing, traveling, repairing a home, or sustaining a family became daily negotiations with scarcity. Millions left not for adventure, but from historical exhaustion, searching for air, work, and dignity. The paradox is bitter: many fled a misery produced by the collision of blockade and authoritarianism, only to meet discrimination, deportation, closed borders, and the threat of return to the same hopelessness they had escaped [3].

In recent U.S. politics, Cuba has too often been reduced to an electoral slogan rather than confronted as a human catastrophe. Hard-line rhetoric promises freedom but frequently delivers abandonment. It speaks of pressure, firmness, and punishment; it rarely sees the elderly person without medicine, the mother without milk, the patient without treatment, or the young person who can imagine a future only in exile [4]. In that logic, the weakest become calculated damage — expendable lives inside a strategy that claims morality while rationing suffering [1].

The siege has left a generational wound: poorer nutrition, damaged health, blocked mobility, and emotional lives organized around waiting. Yet Cuba's tragedy is not authored by one hand alone. If the embargo presses from outside, the government converts that pressure into an internal alibi: it invokes the imperial threat to excuse failure, discipline dissent, demand sacrifice, and brand disagreement as treason. The island is trapped between a force that punishes and a power that manages confinement [5].

Race and Hunger

That double condemnation did not fall evenly; there the tragedy deepened. In Cuba, crisis also had color, surname, and postal address. External pressure converged with an intimate fracture: racial inequality intensified by emigration and remittances. Exile money did not arrive as a universal blessing, but as a privilege shaped by history, family networks, and migratory access. Many white or lighter-skinned families had relatives abroad able to send dollars, medicine, food, clothing, or start-up capital, while many Black and mulato families remained outside that network of rescue. For them, there was no monthly package, urgent medicine, hidden bill, or roof repaired before the rain. To lack family "outside" became a form of economic orphanhood [6, 7, 8].

Without family abroad

In households without remittances, poverty was not an abstraction; it was exposure. It was a mother dividing an insufficient meal, an elderly person splitting a pill to make it last, a young person staring at a hard-currency store as if at another country behind glass. While some could buy food, restore a room, pay for transportation, or open a business, others remained in the line, the blackout, the worthless salary, and the humility of asking for favors. Inequality clung to those who inherited deteriorated housing, little family capital, fewer migration networks, and fewer ways to turn crisis into opportunity [7, 8, 10].

Serving out of hunger

From that divided economy emerged a servitude without uniform or official name. Black and mulato women were pushed into cleaning homes, caring for the elderly, cooking, washing clothes, or preparing rooms for those who did receive dollars. Many did not serve by vocation; they served because hunger narrowed the possible. They exchanged hours, silence, and dignity for food, used clothing, or hard currency. The revolutionary promise of racial equality fractured in domestic scenes: a woman serving a table she could never afford, a mother enduring humiliation to obtain milk, a family dependent on the favor of another more connected to the diaspora [8, 9].

Bodies for sale

Tourism widened the wound. Where dollars circulated, poverty found a narrow, humiliating door. For many young women without remittances, capital, or protection, tourist zones offered a bitter bargain: survival in exchange for exposure, companionship, affection, or intimacy governed by need. Prostitution and relationships of convenience cannot be reduced to individual choice when hunger, racism, migratory inequality, and the absence of alternatives stand behind them. Misery compelled too many people to sell not only objects, but fragments of private life, while others converted vulnerability into consumption, power, or business [8, 9, 10].

The connected elite

Above that older inequality rose another privilege: proximity to power. When private spaces opened, not everyone began from the same ground. Some had dollars, property, contacts, and information; others had hunger, color, cheap labor, and silence. Remittances, private capital, and state networks reinforced a cruel pyramid: those with money or connections at the top, those with scarcity and dependence at the bottom. The phrase "down with anyone who rises" captures that pedagogy of confinement: the poor are not only kept from rising; they are taught that trying may cost them the little ground beneath their feet [7, 10, 19].

Asphyxiation, power, and blocked transition

That internal pyramid cannot be separated from external pressure; both descend upon the same bodies. Washington promises change through punishment, while Havana promises sovereignty through obedience. Between those rhetorics families remain without steady food, the sick without medicine, neighborhoods without electricity, and young people who learn to emigrate before they learn to imagine a future [3, 14, 17, 18]. Politics ceases to be strategy when its success is measured by how much suffering it can administer [1, 16].

Coercion without an exit

An economic siege does not liberate when it offers no political exit. Without credible negotiation, humanitarian relief, or guarantees for transition, sanctions punish society more than power [11, 12, 15]. The regime then converts pressure into narrative: it blames the external enemy, demands internal discipline, and treats criticism as betrayal [5, 18]. The circle closes: the embargo impoverishes, the State controls, and the people are left to endure [1, 5, 14].

The mirage of a quick fall

From this comes the mirage of a quick fall: the belief that hunger topples governments by itself. Scarcity may produce anger, but it can also produce exhaustion, caution, and silence [17, 18]. The Cuban leadership retains institutional control, negotiations remain frozen, and repression continues to function. Meanwhile, the promised transition is postponed for those who cannot wait for mothers searching for milk, elderly people dividing medicine, workers walking kilometers, and families counting the hours of the blackout [14, 18].

Slow war, transferred pain

While transition remains postponed, the slow war unfolds in daily life: refrigerators go dark, ambulances stall, hospitals strain, and children study in the heat [14, 17]. Cutting fuel or sanctioning key sectors may sound abstract in an official communiqué, but on the street, it means longer lines, worthless wages, and dependence on those with dollars, contacts, or relatives abroad [7, 12, 13].

Strangulation can wound without collapsing. The Cuban State transfers pain downward, dresses it as discipline, and wraps it in the language of a besieged plaza [5, 18]. External pressure feeds internal closure; fear turns necessity into obedience. The result is not liberation, but a poorer, more dependent, and more exhausted society [14, 16, 17].

Electoral calculation

Domestic political calculation in the United States deepens the stalemate. Cuba often works as an electoral symbol more than as a sustained diplomatic priority: invoked to mobilize ideological sectors, punish opponents, or perform firmness, but rarely placed at the center of a real transition strategy [11, 15]. Recent sanctions policy tends to harden confrontation without building the diplomatic architecture needed to turn pressure into verifiable agreements, humanitarian relief, or political reform [12, 13, 15]. With attention displaced toward other legislative, electoral, and geopolitical battles, Cuba policy remains trapped in the punitive gesture: strong enough to display toughness, too weak to produce transformation [11, 15].

Digital dictatorship and algorithmic obedience

When fear is no longer enough in the street, control moves to the network. Surveillance, internet interruptions, smear campaigns, and censorship by visibility decide who may speak and who may be heard [20, 21, 22]. Digital repression does not always erase; it reduces reach, sows suspicion and turns every critical gesture into personal risk. The plaza is no longer only in the street. It is also on the screen, and the State knows it.

Social control and impossible transition

Material fatigue, institutional fear, and digital surveillance help explain why misery does not automatically become rebellion [5, 18, 20]. A family searching for food, medicine, transportation, connection, and electricity can scarcely sustain prolonged protest against prisons, internet blackouts, and campaigns of punishment [14, 18, 21]. Suffering can awaken consciousness, but it can also paralyze the very people expected to lead change [17, 18].

Even so, fear does not erase dignity. July 11, 2021, showed that Cuban society is not passive. Protest arose from neighborhoods, peripheries, and historically abandoned sectors, including young people and Afro-Cuban citizens marked by remittance inequality, economic orphanhood, and institutional repression [4, 7, 10, 19]. It also revealed the limits of spontaneity before a State that combines judicial punishment, physical repression, narrative control, and informational closure: dignity collided with a machine designed to convert protest into crime and hope into punishment [20, 21].

Nor is it enough to imagine transition as a decision delivered from above. Cuban power is not a single key that Washington can turn; it is a web of political, military, family, and economic networks that protect one another [18]. While intermediaries and possible heirs are discussed, ordinary life keeps sinking into blackouts, lines, exile, economic racism, and dependence [7, 14, 18].

Cultural resilience: choteo, nickname, and ajiaco

After repression, one must also look at agency. To reduce Cubans to victims would be another erasure. They resist language, mockery, memory, and culture. Choteo punctures official solemnity; the nickname pulls the power down from the pedestal; transculturation absorbs crisis, exile, and mixture without surrendering symbolic agency. Cuba remains an ajiaco: African and Spanish memory, popular religiosity, defensive humor, migratory pain, and social invention. There survive forms of freedom that neither embargo nor State has been able to administer completely [20, 24].

The human bill

That agency, however, must not conceal the human bill. The cost is not measured in communiqués, but in skipped meals, interrupted treatments, children growing up amid blackouts, elderly people dependent on remittances, and young people learning to say goodbye before learning to stay [3, 7, 14]. If a policy does not reduce suffering or open space for rights, relief, and dignified life, it does not liberate; it uses pain as leverage [1, 14, 17].

In the end, the Cuban people appear less as the addressee of policy than as its hostage [1, 14, 16]. From outside, hunger is tightened in the name of freedom; from within, fear is administered in the name of sovereignty [5, 17, 18]. The poorest, especially Black and mulato people without remittances, networks, or protection — carry the most brutal weight: they survive scarcity, serve in other people's economies, emigrate when possible, and resist when there is no other exit [3, 7, 8, 10]. No strategy deserves to be called moral if it must first break the lives of those it claims to save [1, 14, 17].

Conclusion: The People as Hostage

The conclusion, then, cannot be neutral. Cuba does not need more slogans, threats, or empty promises; it needs its people to stop being used as hostages. To denounce the embargo is not to absolve the regime; to denounce the regime is not to justify punishing a nation. The ordinary Cuban neither decides in Washington nor commands in Havana, yet loses food, medicine, electricity, freedom, and the elementary right to remain without feeling that the ground is giving way. That is the cruelty of political cynicism: it turns another people's suffering into bargaining currency, electoral argument, internal discipline, and calculation of power.

There will be no dignified exit while hunger is tightened from outside, fear is justified from within, and speech is monitored from the screen. Yet there will not be definitive defeat while the people preserve memory, humor, faith, language, protest, and family. Cuba has survived not because the system works, but because its people invent life amid collapse: they break bread, share medicine, send remittances, light candles, mock the powerful, name abuse, care for neighbors, and begin again. That capacity to resist should not be romanticized; no one should have to be heroic in order to eat, speak, heal, or live in their country. Cuba deserves a life where survival is not a feat, speech is not a crime, rising does not require sinking another, and no people pays, generation after generation, the human price of political cynicism [1, 4, 5, 7, 14, 16, 19, 20, 24].

References

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