Cuba Doesn't Need Pity - It Needs Pressure

Cuba's collapse no longer hides behind Castro-inspired speeches or leftist slogans. The lies rot in the open now, exposed by hungry citizens and a worthless currency.

Last month, Marta Elena Feitó Cabrera, then Cuba’s Minister of Labor, stood before the National Assembly and claimed, “There are no beggars in Cuba.” She accused those digging through trash of faking poverty to dodge taxes.

Her words triggered public fury. Cubans flooded social media with proof: elderly men clawing through dumpsters, mothers bartering soap for rice, families sleeping on sidewalks. Even President Díaz-Canel, usually a mouthpiece for the Castro family’s empire and regime, distanced himself, and Feitó resigned in a cloud of communist disgrace a few days later.

But the Cuban people's outrage didn’t stop with her resignation. It once again pulled back the curtain on the entire system. Cuba’s peso just hit an all-time low, 400 CUP to the U.S. dollar, driving basic goods further out of reach. Most Cubans earn in pesos, but government stores accept only foreign currency. Those without family abroad or access to black markets go without. In a system built on rationing and surveillance, survival depends on luck or connections.

The regime created this collapse. It controls every economic lever, salaries, imports, prices, and refuses to allow private enterprise. That control has left Cuba with no productive economy, no stable currency, and no path out. People wait in line for hours for food that might not arrive, as my mother once did. Doctors moonlight as cab drivers. Teachers sell eggs. Young men and women sell their bodies to sex tourists for a bar of soap or a scrap of food.

It's indefensible - but many still do.

To their great shame, Western defenders of the regime repeat bullshit talking points about the U.S. embargo. But Cuba trades with most of the world. It receives food and medicine from the U.S. under humanitarian exemptions. The embargo doesn’t cause ration books, surveillance, or prison sentences for dissent. The regime does. Cuba’s disaster isn’t external. It’s structural.

The global left still treats Cuba like a misunderstood experiment. They tour Havana, take photos of crumbling buildings, and call it resilience. They praise free healthcare while ignoring that patients bring their own bandages, gloves, and have to rely on American relatives to provide the medication. Furthermore, they romanticize the revolution because they don’t have to live under it.

Cuba doesn’t need pity. It needs pressure. The world should stop applauding slogans and start confronting results. A regime that can’t feed its people and jails those who speak up doesn’t deserve a platform; it deserves condemnation.

Socialism in Cuba hasn’t failed. It has succeeded in doing precisely what it was designed to do: centralize power, destroy individual freedom, and demand silence in exchange for scraps.

My parents sacrificed everything to get me out of that system, and I am eternally grateful. Over the years, I’ve watched communism and the Castros bleed my country. So many of us have buried what it stole from us, but we refuse to let it be sold to others as progress.

Cuba doesn't collapse because of chance. It collapses because the system was built to serve an imperial regime, not the people. If you praise that system, you're not an ally of the oppressed. You're a shield for the oppressor and an enabler of tyranny.