When the lights went out in Cuba last month leaving in the dark 10 million people, American media coverage reflexively reached for its tired old frame: a failed communist state, a dying regime, an opportunity. What that coverage cannot see, because it has not been looking at Cuba the way Cuba has been looking at itself, is what we stand to lose when the logic of possession replaces the logic of solidarity.
Last week, the Russian oil tanker Anatoly Kolodkin, a sanctioned Russian vessel, arrived at the Cuban port of Matanzas. It made the first delivery of oil to the country in three months, unloading 730,000 barrels of crude – enough to satisfy Cuban energy needs for just 10 days. Another Russian tanker headed to Cuba, the Sea Horse, diverted to Venezuela.
The US blockade on Cuba continues, with a US destroyer and other military vessels enforcing it in the Caribbean.
Donald Trump, the president of the United States — who a federal jury found liable for sexual abuse — has announced that he expects to have “the honour” of “taking” Cuba. “Whether I free it, take it — I think I can do anything I want with it,” he said. Characteristically crass and perhaps politically unhinged as this language may seem, Trump merely said the quiet part out loud.
This is the logic of the plantation — and not incidentally, the logic of the rapist. Specifically and historically, this is the logic that the US has applied to Cuba for more than a century: an island 90 miles from Florida that kept finding ways to refuse. Trump now has “the honour” it seems — with the help of his Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has made this the centre of his own desire — to finally make Cuba submit.
This is the most important thing to understand about how American analysis — official and journalistic — is failing the current crisis: the problem is not information. It is the imperial standpoint that finds Cuba as a bit player to be acted upon, rather than as the protagonist in their own story.
I first arrived in Cuba in the late 1990s, a young anthropologist-in-training steeped in the Latin American studies tradition that what matters in this region is class, not colour. Cuba disabused me of this within days.
Walking the streets of Havana, I was stopped repeatedly by Cuban police who demanded “dame carnet” (give me your ID). My body had placed me, unmistakably, in the category of young Black Cuban male — subject to surveillance. The logic was familiar.
I knew the routine already, from driving in the Deep South and the geography of what I had come to call walking while Black anywhere at home in the US.
In Cuba, the stakes were lower. No deadly chokeholds or point-blank executions by police, like in my own homeland. But the hail was the same: an authority interpellating a Black body, deciding what it was before it could speak. I had arrived in Cuba to look. Cuba was already looking back.
This dialogic looking — conversations between the authority of the state that hailed me, the appraising surveillance of hotel security and university officials, and most importantly, the Black Cubans and Black exiles who held me close — produced another way of seeing Cuba.
US policymakers and casual observers too often see only an uncomplicated postcard when they look at Cuba. The Cuba in the postcard is not the Cuba I documented. The Cuba I came to know was populated by people like a man I’ll call “Domingo”, who navigated Havana’s informal economies — hustling counterfeit cigars and whatever other activities would bring him divisa, or hard currency in euros or dollars — while his wife maintained their apartment with the ingenuity of someone making things work that should not.
They knew both blockades: the one the United States had imposed since 1962, and the one many like them feel the Cuban government imposed on its own people — the racial and economic silences that the Revolution had papered over with a discourse of equality it had never fully honoured.
On innumerable occasions, I put the question to Cubans — academics and ordinary people alike: If the Revolution liberated everyone, why are Blacks still overrepresented in the margins and underrepresented in the professions and the state? The answers came from dyed-in-the-wool materialists. The language was Marxist. The analysis was Moynihan. The conditions derived from capitalism; the failure, they held, was Black. A washing of hands. An indictment. “Not determined,” one woman said. “Predisposed.”
That analysis was not simply an attitude I encountered in fieldwork. It was structural. While the Cuban government’s own statistics office produces no official racial data, a 2020 nationwide survey (PDF) of more than a thousand Cubans by sociologists Katrin Hansing and Bert Hoffmann confirmed what my ethnographic fieldwork documented, and everyone living in Cuba could already see: Structural inequalities were returning precisely along the prerevolutionary racial lines.
Racialised out-migration meant that remittances flowed overwhelmingly to white Cuban households whose relatives had left after the Cuban Revolution of 1959. The gradual opening of private enterprise favoured those with access to start-up capital, which tracked directly with race.
In July 2021, I was shocked, when Cubans — many of them Black people of the island’s poorest neighbourhoods — took to the streets of Santiago de Cuba and Havana, in what would become the largest protests since the Revolution.
Riffing on the standard revolutionary slogan meant to express resolve for national sovereignty, “patria o muerte” (homeland or death), they chanted “patria y vida” (homeland and life) and “abajo la dictadura” (down with the dictatorship). The Cuban government’s response was mass arrests and decades-long sentences. Repression, as the human rights record shows, fell disproportionately on Black Cubans, too.
Sixty-seven years of revolutionary promise, steadily hollowed out by mismanagement, repression, and a surveillance apparatus that punishes dissent, leaves a particular kind of exhaustion.
This is why many Cubans — including people I know and respect — now expect so little of the Cuban state. To acknowledge this is not to endorse a US Navy destroyer driving away the ships carrying fuel for Cuban hospitals. To mourn the potential of the Cuban Revolution — the genuine and very significant advances it made towards an equitable society — is not the same as welcoming what appears to be coming to replace it.
Still, to understand what is being destroyed in this crisis — beyond the immediate humanitarian catastrophe — you have to look at what Cuba did for the world beyond its shores. You have to look at Jamaica, which, over 30 years, received more than 4,700 Cuban medical workers who treated more than 8 million patients and performed more than 74,000 surgeries. That arrangement is now over — ended under US pressure, 277 Cuban health workers withdrawn, the people who depended on those clinics left to absorb the consequences in silence.
You have to look at West Africa in 2014, when Cuba sent more than 300 doctors and nurses to fight Ebola — the largest single-country contribution in the world, from an island already under crushing embargo, to countries that had nothing to offer in return except solidarity.
You have to look at Angola in the 1970s, when Cuban forces fought alongside liberation movements against apartheid South Africa, in a chapter of internationalism that shaped the entire trajectory of independence struggles in Southern African.
Nelson Mandela knew this. One of his first trips after he was released from prison in 1991 was to Havana to meet Fidel Castro, whom he called a friend of the African people when it was neither safe nor profitable to do so.
This is what is at stake in the blockade. Not only the immediate suffering of 10 million people — real, urgent, demanding response — but the severing of a 60-year record of solidarity that ran counter to the logic of empire.
Cuba’s government was and is repressive, racially contradictory, economically sclerotic. All of that is true.
But it also kept American revolutionary Assata Shakur alive and free for decades against a $2 million federal bounty. It offered Cuban doctors to the US after Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent breaching of levees in Black neighbourhoods. When Washington refused, it sent them to Pakistan in the aftermath of a deadly earthquake, where they set up 30 field hospitals in remote and highly impoverished areas. During the COVID-19 pandemic, when Western pharmaceuticals were making windfall profits, Cuba developed its own vaccines and shared them with the Global South through fair technology transfer agreements.
Both of these sides of the story are true at once. The left has sometimes been too romantic about the first truth. The centre and right have shown willful ignorance of the significance of the second. What this moment requires is a standpoint that has never had the luxury of choosing between the two. The current crisis can be read from neither imperial certainty nor romantic solidarity. Black Cubans navigate both truths as people for whom irresolution is not merely a philosophical position, but the condition of their lives.
The current US administration frames Cuba as a failed state ripe for liberation. What this framing cannot accommodate is the question of liberation for whom, and from what. Cuba’s refusal to extradite Black American revolutionaries like Assata Shakur and Nehanda Abiodun— across every administration from President Ronald Reagan through Joe Biden, through normalisation and its reversal, through Barack Obama’s thaw and Trump’s freeze — was a refusal on behalf of Black people everywhere who understand what it is to be at war at home and who revere those who stand up to fight.
It recognised those for whom the US criminal justice system has never represented justice. That refusal cost Cuba. It is part of what the blockade is now, in part, settling.
The same administration that abducted Venezuela’s President Nicholas Maduro in January — cutting off Cuba’s primary oil supply in the process — is simultaneously at war in Iran, where conflict and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz have reshaped global energy markets and created the precise conditions under which Russian tankers are now crossing the Atlantic with oil bound for Cuba, while a US naval destroyer tracks them.
Cuba is and has always been a contemporary and vital global actor. It is perception of Cuba that is warped — by 60 years of embargo logic that made the island’s failures America’s talking point and its solidarities America’s grievance.
What the current crisis requires is not a new deal brokered from above, and certainly not a “taking” narrated as liberation. It requires a reckoning with what Cuba kept, for its Caribbean neighbours, for Africa and the Global South, for Black people across the diaspora — and an honest accounting of what its exhausted, compromised, contradictory revolution could not.
The Anatoly Kolodkin docked at Matanzas. A second Russian tanker is already being loaded. Six hundred fifty people arrived in Cuba as part of the convoy Nuestra América, named after an 1891 essay by Cuban poet Jose Martí, imagining an imperialism-free Latin America.
Pan-African movements across three continents said of Cuba’s 60-year record: you have not lectured us; you have shown us. The fist unclenches on its own terms — and the world that Cuba built through solidarity keeps showing up anyway – slower than a destroyer, less armed, yet still moving towards the island.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
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