by Laila P

The first of two articles on Cuba’s revolutionary process

In a 1960 memorandum entitled ‘The Decline and Fall of Castro’, the US state department declared that it would starve Cuba’s population into desperation in order to alienate internal support for their new revolutionary leader Fidel Castro.¹ Over six decades later, the United States has moved into the genocidal phase of its plan for regime change in Cuba. Nobody can deny the suffering that US imperialism has inflicted on the island nation. Why is it then, that liberal and left-leaning types sitting comfortably in the imperial core still claim that Cubans suffer under a totalitarian dictatorship? That they need freeing— just not this way? Trump is a bastard, but so were the Castros, so is Miguel Díaz-Canel! Never mind that the US rarely seems to attack innocent nations; no, it’s the narco-terrorist dictatorship in Venezuela, the murderous tyranny in Iran, and the Stalinist autocracy in Cuba. A convenient array of opponents for an empire with clear imperial motives.

There is a moral high ground to be claimed by condemning at once the US and its victims. But where did these ideas come from? Who decided Cuba was a dictatorship? Is it true? And why does it matter what we say about the government when the people are the primary victims of imperial violence?

So-called ‘authoritarianism’, however it is defined, does not materialise from nothing. No revolutionary process develops in a vacuum, separated from its material conditions and the forces acting against it. Likewise, our understanding of the West’s geopolitical opponents is neither neutral nor unaffected by external forces. Here in Australia and the Western world generally, representations of Cuba’s politics have been filtered through a pervasive neoliberalism and constructed by institutions both actively malicious and unintentionally complicit in imperialist aggression. Cuba’s political leaders are demonised and represented as the enemies of the Cuban people. The US may be understood as an aggressor, but the effects of its aggression are limited to superficial analysis. But taking away this liberal lens and applying a materialist analysis reveals a far different reality to the narrative we are taught.

Disillusionment and dissidents in Cuba

The US wants you to believe that political opposition to Cuba’s communist ‘regime’ is natural, and that the opposition includes most Cubans. Yet initial protests came from the Cuban bourgeoisie and petite bourgeoisie, a minority who feared the power the Cuban Revolution was giving to working-class Cubans. As the US observed in 1960, Castro enjoyed support from a majority of the population. ² But the empire knew it could not overthrow the Cuban government in these conditions.

Before 1959, Cuba’s US-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista overlooked an underdeveloped plantation economy that prioritised the privileges of the rich over the needs of the poor. Essential services for the working majority were wilfully neglected, while the proliferation of casinos and brothels turned the major cities into playgrounds for US capitalists. When the revolutionary government came to power, capital flight, corruption, and theft had left them a public debt of $1.2 billion and only around $1 million in reserves with which to industrialise.³ In 1960, the US established an embargo against Cuba, the longest enduring trade embargo in modern history. 1962 saw the consolidation of a full blockade that continues to prevent Cuba from trading with US businesses or citizens, a brutal measure in a world where US multinationals have long monopolised vital industries. In the years since, the blockade has been strengthened and projected extraterritorially.

In 1996, the Helms–Burton Act was passed, a federal law so draconian it violates both US and international law. ⁴ Its measures include, but are not limited to:

• The codification of regime change efforts against Cuba into US law.
• Reinforced sanctions against the Cuban government and potential sanctions against non-US companies that trade with Cuba, thereby creating a coerced choice between the Cuban market and much larger US market.
• US opposition to Cuban membership in international financial institutions.
• Authorisation for US nationals to sue persons who “traffic” in property “confiscated” during the Revolution. In practice, this means corporations may face legal action for using, for example, a Cuban port that was foreign owned prior to the Revolution. ⁵
• The encouragement of other countries and multilateral organisations to cooperate with the US in regime change.
• Legal confirmation that US will only lift the embargo on the condition that the Cuban government is substantially transitioning the nation into a market-capitalist economy and has adhered to various US demands, including compensation for nationalised property.

The Helms-Burton Act was used to isolate Cuba economically, and to criminalise the existence of a sovereign Cuban government. Furthermore, Trump’s recent oil blockade has plunged Cuba into an acute humanitarian crisis that exacerbated the effects of the long-standing embargo.

The 1990s, when the Helms–Burton Act was passed, was also the time of the Special Period, in which the loss of the Eastern Bloc devastated Cuba’s economy. While revolutionary Cuba had made immense progress in many economic, political, and cultural spheres of life, the US blockade had pushed them into trade dependency on the USSR. 85% of Cuba’s trade had been with Comecon nations. The Special Period and the pervasive influence of capitalist propaganda fostered false disillusionment with the socialist system. Cuban youth in that period, with all the confidence of inexperience, described how in the US, “If you work hard, you can do well. It is the land of opportunity.” ⁶ US media has given many Cubans a false impression of life under capitalism, as simple reality is compared to an idealised pop-culture fantasy.

Over the years there have been waves of migration from Cuba to the US. But contrary to the belief that Cubans “flee” from political persecution, most often it is for perceived economic opportunities, this false promise of riches as the blockade suffocates the economy. For instance, Cuban hijackers in 2003 testified that although they always had sufficient food, they had attempted to leave exclusively for financial reasons. ⁷ Cuban migrants may hold many different political positions, but the effect of economic conditions is central even in the formation of one’s politics.

The US understood that weakening Cuba’s economy would foster political unrest. While the Communist Party still enjoys a wide base of support, it has been eroding due to hardship brought on by economic strangulation and political manipulation by the US. For decades the US has funded anti-Castro opposition groups, strengthened anti-communist forces with CIA labour, and created media outlets to spread propaganda. ⁸ They understand how to manipulate suffering.

The imperial strategy is clear:

1. Create conditions of economic hardship [through sanctions and sabotage].
2. Develop political unrest [through funding of opposition].
3. Utilise pro-capitalist propaganda based on the false American dream.
4. Present yourself as the saviour, offer ultimatums or economic assistance in exchange for obedience to the capitalist order.

Often the Cuban government accuses political dissidents of being paid by the US, and just as often they (and the US) reject this accusation. In 2003, a dissident argued in an interview that Castro’s claim of dissidents receiving salaries from the US was unfounded. When asked how he made a living, he replied that he had received $50,000 from a US organisation the previous year. ⁹ Cubans disillusioned with socialism are not mindless drones of the US government, but their work is US-funded, facilitated by imperialists, and in doing so, the US manipulates their suffering to create an allegiance to capital. They starve the Cuban people, then come in like superheroes and offer an escape, but that escape is a mirage.

During the 2003 government crackdown known as the Black Spring, Cuba arrested a number of anti-government journalists. Several liberal human rights NGOs, including Amnesty International, then rushed to declare them prisoners of conscience. ¹⁰ But thought crimes do not exist in Cuba. These journalists were arrested because they provided content to Radio Martí and other US-based media outlets in exchange for payment. ¹¹ Radio Martí, a US state-owned radio station, was specifically created to project pro-US propaganda to Cuba with overt ambitions for regime change. Had US journalists been paid to provide reports to, say, a hypothetical Russian state-owned media outlet with the open intention of destabilising the US government, it would be clearly understood as treasonous or seditious. But because the Cuban government protects the sovereignty of a socialist nation rather than a liberal one, they receive near total condemnation.

The repressive apparatus that the Western world accuses Cuba of maintaining exists only in the imagination of imperialists and pseudo-progressive liberals who view the right to exploit human beings as more important than the right to a home and healthcare. Indeed, while thousands starve in their own capitalist countries, they cry for the civil liberties of imperial collaborators in Cuba. But because Cuba has been deemed a dictatorship, millions of Cuban lives are considered disposable. None of the US interventions could be justified, regardless of Cuba’s government, but it is crucial to understand that we in the West call Cuba a dictatorship because the US wants us to.

Terror against the so-called “state sponsor of terrorism”

Where restrictions on political freedoms do exist in Cuba, they are presented as the inevitable developments of a communist government. On the contrary, such restrictions exist as a defence mechanism against decades of terrorism, foreign interventions, and counterrevolutionary efforts spearheaded by the US in an attempt to bring Cuba back under its dominion. The Bay of Pigs invasion, wherein the CIA recruited and trained Cuban exiles to invade Cuba, is well known but only one example.

In the early years following 1959, the CIA was already creating intelligence networks throughout Cuba and undertaking sabotage operations. In 1960, as a response to the increasing prevalence of terror attacks, Castro announced the creation of the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR). ¹² The CDRs would be a network of neighbourhood committees in which Cubans were mobilised on a mass scale against imperialist operations. And indeed, the CDRs were necessary, for 1961 saw the authorisation of Operation Mongoose, an organised terror campaign that sought to “bring the terrors of the earth” to Cuba and became the CIA’s largest covert operation globally. ¹³ The operation included the release of diseases into Cuba, firebombing of sugarcane fields and productive infrastructure, and the torture and murder of civilians, including student volunteers; other civilians were kidnapped or blown up in shopping centres. ¹⁴ Once Operation Mongoose ended, the terrorism was continued by Cuban-American exile groups. ¹⁵

Had it not been for the ongoing terrorism of the CIA and counterrevolutionary groups against Cuba, there would have been no impetus to create the CDRs and no need to monitor dissent. Likewise, US propaganda operations reinforced popular support for press censorship. Although private beliefs are not policed, pro-capitalist or counterrevolutionary sentiment is forbidden from being propagated in Cuban media. Just as the CDRs protected against terrorism, so too do Cuba’s press policies protect against imperialist propaganda. In order to undertake a “powerful propaganda offensive”, the US placed a broadcasting facility on Swan Island. ¹⁶ For Operation Peter Pan (1960–1962), the CIA propagated false allegations that the revolutionary government planned to abolish parental custody of children and send them to indoctrination camps or to the USSR to be turned into tinned meat. ¹⁷False documents that “proved” the rumours were spread clandestinely through Cuba’s petite bourgeois and religious communities. ¹⁸ Over 14,000 unaccompanied minors were thus sent by their parents to the US from 1960—1962, and many thousands more were sent to other countries, ultimately affecting 25,000+ children in what amounted to a mass kidnapping. ¹⁹

The world’s largest imperial power has fought relentlessly to destabilise Cuba, and Cuba responded to protect its sovereignty and its people. Constant US interference in Cuba’s internal affairs, including their funding of opposition, has created an association between imperialism and dissidence in Cuban political culture. Yet we are expected to blame the Cuban government for the crimes of the US and continue the propaganda offensive for them. Empty words proclaiming support for Cuba’s sovereignty mean nothing if there is no support for what it takes to maintain sovereignty.

Homonationalism and the diaspora

If you’re queer and pro-Palestine, you may have been told that you would be hated or even murdered in Palestine. If you’re a woman who has supported Iran, maybe you’ve been told how misogynistic the Islamic Republic allegedly is. No doubt you’ve heard that the US sought to liberate the poor oppressed Iranian women. Identity is weaponised to excuse imperial violence. If a people or a state are not perfect, morally pure victims, that is said to justify genocide and mass slaughter. It’s a tactic the US employs regularly, and so too did it use homonationalism against Cuba.

By the 1970s and 1980s, the US propaganda machine had identified a new way to attack Cuba: gay rights. While the US had been raping and murdering its queer working-class population at home for decades, it claimed that Cuba was a police state for gays. Socialists who supported Cuba were questioned by progressive youth, and anti-communist elements in the gay movement gained ever more credibility. ²⁰ The consequence was a massive loss of solidarity and a weakened communist movement in a time where gay liberation was becoming central to many popular social movements. The anti-Cuba campaign goes on today, albeit with less of an ability to attack Cuba’s record on queer rights.

The accusations, of course, were false. What homophobia existed in socialist Cuba was an inherited colonial legacy that took immense efforts to overcome, yet the US represented the Cuban Revolution as fundamentally repressive—and all communism by extension. How, you might ask, did the US succeed so dramatically? The tactic is still central in their propaganda arsenal today: weaponise the diaspora.

In the 1950s, anti-gay persecution and an increasingly repressive culture in the US created demand for an offshore prostitution industry, and a massive one was developed in Cuba. ²¹ Cuban brothels were frequented by US elites, including bourgeois homosexual men who exploited working-class Cuban gay men. For many working-class gay men and lesbians in Cuba, working in prostitution was the only way to survive amongst any queer community. And although pre-revolutionary Cuba was violently homophobic, class power and the profitability of the prostitution industry allowed gay men among the US and Cuban bourgeoisie to avoid state persecution.

Prostitution, however, was one of the first industries shut down by the revolutionary government after it seized power in 1959. Naturally, the national bourgeoisie that profited from the prostitution industry fled to the US, sometimes taking large amounts of their displaced workers with them. ²² In order to gain the legal advantages of refugee status, wealthy Cuban migrants faced pressure to give exaggerated testimonies of political persecution. ²³Yet it was precisely these testimonies that were used to judge the experiences of Cuba’s gay populations. ²⁴Such a misguided use of testimonies obscured the colonial context to Cuba’s homophobic policies and made the Revolution’s changing social and legal treatment of queer people invisible.

Much of diaspora politics operates in a similar manner, whether specific social issues are weaponised or not. In the case of Cuba, affluent Cubans of all identities continued to migrate to the US in order to protect their wealth built on exploitative labour relations. The incentive to exaggerate testimonies of persecution to gain legal and economic advantages was still present, and diaspora testimonies have been thoroughly exploited to aid in regime change propaganda. Additionally, the abolition of exploitative practices and redistribution of land and wealth was understood as a genuine encroachment on rights. Up to 20,000 Cubans had been killed by Batista’s forces, and many CIA agents worked in his government as torturers. ²⁵ Yet for many wealthy Cubans, the Revolution was the first time they had ever felt their privileges attacked.

Anti-Castro perspectives which aligned with US corporate interests were platformed, while pro-Revolution and working-class Cubans were silenced. This has never changed. The Cuban diaspora consequently appears like an anti-communist monolith with figures like Marco Rubio at its helm. Though not all of the Cuban diaspora are wealthy anti-communists, the US media industry is not in the business of representing reality. Even when individual testimonies regarding oppression are true, they are expanded to represent the entirety of the nation and usurp any genuine analysis of the Revolution’s development. The Revolution is presented as a static thing, incapable of internal progress, with Cubans in need of Western saviours.

Diaspora politics and the weaponisation of identity in the context of all imperial attacks, including those against Venezuela and Iran, are little more than the reinvention of the colonial ‘standard of civilisation’. The West, we are told, needs to save the women, queers, and workers of the backward Global South nations. It begs the question of why wealthy diaspora voices are considered more valid than the voices of the people living inside Cuba and all anti-imperialist countries.

Western chauvinism and liberal naivety

The humanitarian achievements of the Cuban Revolution are occasionally, reluctantly, acknowledged by the West. But in the Western consciousness they are divorced from Cuba’s political and economic structure as a Marxist-Leninist country. We are expected to acknowledge the former only alongside complete condemnation of the latter. Following Castro’s death, Amnesty International declared that his government’s improvements in healthcare and education should be applauded, yet they simultaneously condemned what they called his “systemic repression of basic freedoms”. ²⁶What Amnesty International does not offer is any feasible alternative for the Cuban Revolution’s suppression of counterrevolution.

It’s comforting to assume that a nation like the one Amnesty International envisions is possible. Yet at the core of this assumption is the belief that the freedom to advocate for exploitation is equally important to a person’s right to live free from exploitation. And it assumes that such a thing has not been tried before. It imagines a world entirely unlike our own, where the Cold War annihilation of peaceful democratic socialists never occurred. For the sufficiently ‘democratic’ Fidel Castro did exist, and his name was Salvador Allende.

Salvador Allende was the democratically elected socialist leader of Chile before 1973, when the CIA provoked and supported a coup by Chilean fascists and General Augusto Pinochet. In the months leading up to the coup, Castro warned Allende. He told the Chilean president that he gave too much freedom to the opposition and would lose the imminent confrontation between fascism and socialism if he did not take a harder line. ²⁷Allende, however, remained committed to liberal leniency, permitting all the freedoms that Cuba has denied. He lost his life for it, as did tens of thousands of innocent people who were slaughtered under the hand of military dictator Pinochet and Operation Condor. Should we now condemn Castro for being right?

What the brutal end to Salvador Allende’s democratic socialism demonstrates is that sovereignty is not a right freely extended to imperialised nations. To condemn Castro and the repressive aspects of the Cuban Revolution with no consideration given to the environment in which revolutionary development took place is to be small-minded and act in service of imperialism. The necessity of balanced criticism notwithstanding, many do not understand where their criticisms come from, let alone the role such criticism plays in the political sphere.

Anti-imperialist solidarity

The history of the Cuban Revolution shows us that no liberation movement can develop divorced from its context. For Cuba, this means a constant need to contend with a world superpower launching economic, psychological, and political attacks on your people for daring to be sovereign. Repression in Cuba, both real and imagined, was the product of an imperial onslaught that continues today. Cuban leaders were forced to operate within an imperialist global economy and the hegemony of their neighbour to the north. To submit to US regime change efforts would be a betrayal of the Cuban people and all those benefiting from Cuban internationalism. From treating more children affected by the Chernobyl disaster than all other countries combined, to joining Nelson Mandela in the struggle against apartheid, communist Cuba has always been a world leader in humanitarianism and anti-imperialism. ²⁸

None of this is to say that anti-imperialist nations are incapable of making mistakes, committing abuses, or that it is impossible for them to be dictatorships. But a dictatorship does not justify collective punishment or imperialism. Along with opposing the imperialism of wars and sanctions, we must also oppose the imperialism of liberal institutions and propaganda. The image of a totalitarian Cuba was produced by the US and liberal-imperialist political institutions, and there can be no serious anti-imperialism without serious understanding of the US propaganda machine and its consequences. Holding socialist and anti-imperialist countries to utopian standards benefits only the US ruling class. They manipulate even well-intentioned condemnations of anti-imperialist forces in order to cultivate regime change propaganda. To be strategic with our criticisms should be the goal. For a better world, anti-imperialist forces warrant our solidarity and critical support. Moral purity politics wherein we abandon anti-imperialist countries for imperfection is chauvinism and complicity in imperial warmongering.

¡Viva la revolución!

Long live the Cuban Revolution!

References

1. The Decline and Fall of Castro, Central Intelligence Agency, 1960. https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/sites/default/files/2022-02/Embargo1-Mallorymemo.pdf. ↩︎
2. The Decline and Fall of Castro, 1960. ↩︎
3. Jon Lee Anderson, Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life (Bantam Books, 1997), 409 ↩︎
4. Salim Lamrani, The Economic War against Cuba: A Historical and Legal Perspective on the U.S. Blockade (Monthly Review Press, 2013), 34; Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity (LIBERTAD) Act of 1996, United States Government Publishing Office, 1996, https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/PLAW-104publ114/pdf/PLAW-104publ114.pdf. ↩︎
5. Jan Wolfe, “US Supreme Court deals setback to cruise operators over Cuba confiscations,” Reuters, May 21, 2026, https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-supreme-court-deals-setback-cruise-operators-over-cuba-confiscations-2026-05-21/. ↩︎
6. Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism (City Lights Books, 1997), 67 ↩︎
7. Looking for Fidel, directed by Oliver Stone (Cinema Libre Studio; 2004), 11:35–13:20, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlXELrvWk3o. ↩︎
8. Briefing of Secretary of State Designate Rusk, Department of State, 1961, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1961-63v10-12mSupp/d236. ↩︎
9. Looking for Fidel, 35:25–35:55. ↩︎
10. “Cuba: One Year Too Many: Prisoners of Conscience from the March 2003 Crackdown,” Amnesty International, March 16, 2004, https://web.archive.org/web/20120926031905/http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/info/AMR25/005/2004. ↩︎
11. Looking for Fidel, 32:00–35:25; “Cuba’s Long Black Spring,” Committee to Defend Journalists, March 18, 2008, https://cpj.org/reports/2008/03/cuba-press-crackdown/. ↩︎
12. Richard R. Fagen, The Transformation of Political Culture in Cuba (Stanford University Press, 1969), 69–70. ↩︎
13. Keith Bolender, Voices From the Other Side: An Oral History of Terrorism Against Cuba (Pluto Press, 2010), 15; Anderson, Che Guevara, 522. ↩︎
14. Bolender, Voices From the Other Side, 14–20. ↩︎
15. Bolender, Voices From the Other Side, 15. ↩︎
16. A Program of Covert Action Against the Castro Regime, Department of State, 1960, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1958-60v06/d481; Briefing of Secretary of State Designate Rusk, 1961. ↩︎
17. Fidel Castro and Ignacio Ramonet, Fidel Castro: My Life (Scribner, 2009), 236–237; Bolender, Voices From the Other Side, 70–75. ↩︎
18. Bolender, Voices From the Other Side, 70–72. ↩︎
19. Bolender, Voices From the Other Side, 71. ↩︎
20. Leslie Feinberg, Rainbow Solidarity in Defense of Cuba (World View Forum, 2009), 2. ↩︎
21. Feinberg, Rainbow Solidarity in Defense of Cuba, 11–12. ↩︎
22. Feinberg, Rainbow Solidarity in Defense of Cuba, 12. ↩︎
23. Lourdes Arguelles and B. Ruby Rich, “Homosexuality, Homophobia, and Revolution: Notes toward an Understanding of the Cuban Lesbian and Gay Male Experience, Part I,” Signs 9, no. 4 (1984): 684, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3173617. ↩︎
24. Arguelles and Rich, “Homosexuality, Homophobia, and Revolution: Notes toward an Understanding of the Cuban Lesbian and Gay Male Experience, Part I,” 684. ↩︎
25. Political Murders in Cuba—Batista Era Compared with Castro Regime, Central Intelligence Agency, 1963, https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP79T00429A000300030015-8.pdf; Fidel: The Untold Story, directed by Estela Bravo (Bravo Films, 2001) 21:30–21:45, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GP9IFC8xPNk. ↩︎
26. “Fidel Castro: A progressive but deeply flawed leader,” Amnesty International UK, November 26, 2016, https://www.amnesty.org.uk/knowledge-hub/all-resources/fidel-castro-progressive-deeply-flawed-leader/. ↩︎
27. Vincent Bevins, The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anti-Communist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World (PublicAffairs, 2020), 201. ↩︎
28. Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds, 39; Salim Lamrani, “Fidel Castro, Hero of the Disinherited,” International Journal of Cuban Studies 8, no. 2 (2016): 159—160. https://doi.org/10.13169/intejcubastud.8.2.0151. ↩︎