I Am Cuban-American. Stop Using My People’s Suffering To Win An Argument

A quick Google search of “Cuba” yields three dominant themes: the U.S. embargo on the Caribbean island, President Donald Trump, and oil, with the Cuban baseball league making the occasional cameo.

None of this is surprising. Most mainstream coverage of Cuba is published in relation to the United States, when the U.S. is a cause and Cuba is the effect. The more than six-decade long U.S. embargo is the focal point because it’s a clean narrative: here’s what it’s doing to the island, here’s what lifting it might fix, and here’s who’s to blame for Cuba’s suffering. The same question is recycled endlessly. 

That scrutiny is warranted. U.S. foreign policy toward Cuba deserves examination. The U.S. embargo against Cuba impacts everyday life on the island, with trade restrictions worsening shortages of food, medicine, and basic goods and, according to the United Nations, sanctions leading to an estimation of billions of dollars in economic damage each year. Most recently, U.S. sanctions targeting oil shipments have exacerbated Cuba’s fuel shortage, engendering mass blackouts and fuel shortages. 

But this isn’t the full story. It erases how the Cuban government’s centralized economic policies have stifled growth, how aging infrastructure has strained basic services, and how the collapse of Soviet support in the 1990s triggered an economic shock the country has never fully recovered from.

The Cuban government has spent decades pushing the story that Washington, and Washington alone, is responsible for the island’s suffering. And every time that framing goes unchallenged in national and international press, the Cuban government benefits from it.

This framing also crowds out another story, the one about what the Cuban government does to its own people. It erases how repression and the systematic silencing of dissent have broken something harder to measure than GDP: the freedom to speak and to imagine a different reality.

When you go looking for that story, what you find are mostly NGO reports, not news articles. For example, a Human Rights Watch account found the government has systematically repressed dissent. Cubalex documented 56 deaths of people in detention or under Cuban state custody over two years, with “excessive force” cited as a leading cause. By September 2024, the Cuban Institute for Freedom of Expression and Press had tallied 99 arbitrary detentions, 179 threats and acts of aggression, and 126 physical assaults against journalists and activists.

These findings don’t circulate widely and that’s not an accident. Reporting on Cuba’s internal repression requires access that the Cuban government routinely denies. Foreign journalists operate under strict limitations on the island, and those who push too hard risk expulsion. Independent Cuban journalists face something worse: prosecution. Ultimately, the story gets filed under “difficult to cover,” something new happens elsewhere, and editors move on. 

Dr. Lisandro Pérez, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and Cuban studies scholar, told Refinery29 Somos: “With the exception of coverage in Miami, Cuba only really gets coverage on a national basis when something happens.” He described it like this: “Imagine that it’s like a theater, right? And those of us who are always following Cuba and interested in Cuba are sitting in the theater, which is largely empty. And then something happens — the Pope visits Cuba, there’s a boat lift, there’s a change in U.S. policy — and then the theater fills up again. The press comes in, everybody else comes in. And then when that’s finished, when it sort of wears out, the theater empties again. And there we are, just by ourselves.”

It’s the nature of the news cycle. But it’s also a cycle that places much of its weight on the U.S. and consistently misses the elephant in the room: Cuba’s own government, and the Cubans living under it. 

Cuban voices on the island have tried to speak up about their reality, but they’ve been silenced. A trio of laws, including Decree-Law 35, Decree-Law 370, and the 2024 Social Communication Law, criminalize vaguely defined offenses like spreading “fake news” or criticizing the “social interest, morals, good manners and integrity of people,” giving the state wide latitude to monitor, restrict, and punish Internet users. In practice, that can mean a knock on the door at dawn. It can mean an account flagged or a family member called in for questioning. It can mean losing a government job (which, in Cuba, is most jobs) for something posted and shared online. The law doesn’t need to be applied consistently to be effective. It just needs to make people afraid.

These laws don't stop at traditional journalism; they also extend to content creators. When encountering Cuba online through Instagram Reels and TikTok videos, it’s worth remembering that the Cuban voices you’re not hearing outnumber the ones you are. On the island, it’s usually state-approved opinions that make their way to the World Wide Web. 

It’s why some creators who have disagreed with the regime have been arrested. Among them: the creators behind El4tico — known as El Cuartico, or “The Little Room” — an independent digital project founded inside Cuba by Ernesto Ricardo Medina and Kamil Zayas Pérez. The meaning behind the name is as powerful as the mission itself. For decades, Cubans have had a phrase, which is part-joke, part-resignation: el cuartico sigue igual (the little room is just the same). It’s what you said when you came back home and found everything exactly as you'd left it. Over time, the cuartico became another name for the country itself, a closed room where the years pass but nothing changes.

Medina and Zayas Pérez built something to challenge that. Their videos addressed the realities of life in Cuba and some of its government’s illegal activity on the island. On February 6, 2026, they were arrested. Authorities seized their computers, phones, cameras, and equipment, and are pursuing charges of “propaganda against the constitutional order” and “incitement to commit crimes.” 

In a statement, Pérez said he was arrested due to “the only crime that a dictatorship cannot tolerate: daring to look them in the eye and speak aloud what everyone notices. Their glaring shortcomings, their chronic inefficiencies, their systematic injustices, and the oppression that crushes the dignity of an entire people.”

There are hundreds of cases like this. In fact, Cuba currently holds more than 1,000 political prisoners. It’s the reason why Cubans fear speaking up, because speaking means arrest, or losing a job, or becoming unhireable overnight. 

Dr. Pérez puts it this way: “I think there might not be enough coverage on how people generally have to subsist in Cuba and the problems of subsisting there. And how, in many ways, Cubans have been so resilient over the past 50 years in terms of their living conditions.” 

People often ask how to help Cuba, especially with the U.S. block of oil supply. They want to send items, money, anything they can to the island. But the most important thing we can do for the Cuban people right now is to refuse to let U.S. foreign policy be the only lens through which we view Cuba. 

This means covering the stories of its thousands of political prisoners, not as a footnote to a sanctions debate, but as a story in its own right. It means platforming Cuban journalists and activists in exile who are reporting on the island at significant personal cost. It means asking, when Cuba does make the news, whether the Cuban government’s role in its people’s suffering is being named as clearly as Washington’s. 

Cuba deserves a fuller conversation than the one we’ve been having. So do the people on the island who don’t get to have it at all.