Nobody's Saying Much About Cuba

The controversy over Elian Gonzalez, the Cuban boy who survived the sinking of a small boat carrying Cuban refugees to Florida in 1999, reminded me of the US Left's attachment to the Castro regime, which had apparently gone undiminished over four decades. At the time, it struck me as an incongruous artifact from the late 1950s. I asked Chrome AI Mode, "Why did US intellectuals like C Wright Mills support Castro?" It answered,

C. Wright Mills and other US intellectuals supported the 1959 Cuban Revolution, viewing it as a, non-Stalinist, anti-imperialist, and "New Left" alternative to both US corporate capitalism and Soviet bureaucratic communism. Mills believed the revolution represented a "human socialism" emerging from the Third World, not from existing Communist parties.

It appears that this fantasy of the Castro regime persisted within the US Left despite the clear movement of the revolution toward Marxism-Leninism from the start:

The political consolidation of Fidel Castro in the new Cuban government began in early 1959. It began with the appointment of communist officials to office and a wave of removals of other revolutionaries that criticized the appointment of communists. This trend came to a head with the Huber Matos affair and would continue so that by mid-1960 little opposition to Castro remained within the government and few independent institutions existed inside Cuba.

The subtext of the Elian Gonzalez affair, which was prominently expressed by Clinton's Attorney General, Janet Reno, was that the boy deserved to grow up in the simple, uncorrupted Cuban environment, not the commercialized, dollar-worshipping US, which would turn him into a capitalist automaton. Elian himself has had a good career as an engineer and politician following his forced return, we may assume due to his propaganda value.

But with what appears to be the inevitable end of the Castro regime following Trump's cutoff of Venezuelan and Mexican oil, I've been puzzled thwt there's been so little reaction from those same quarters of the US Left. In part, this may be due to the distraction of the continuing Mom Guthrie story, but I'm still expecting more on Cuba than I've seen. About the only coverage has been from The Guardian in the UK:

Cuba is in crisis. Already reeling from a four-year economic slump, worsened by hyper-inflation and the migration of nearly 20% of the population, the 67-year-old communist government is at its weakest. After Washington’s successful military operation against Cuba’s ally Venezuela at the beginning of January, the US administration is actively seeking regime change.

Think about this. The Left is able to mobilize crowds in cities across the US to protest ICE, but there's simply no protest about regime change in Cuba, even though we can see in The Guardian that the Left is fully aware of this.

The consequences of the US oil blockade have arrived faster than anyone expected, adding to diplomats’ concerns. All three airlines flying tourists into Cuba from Canada suspended their services this week due to a lack of aviation fuel on the island. Two Russian airlines followed. All five carriers have begun the process of repatriating travellers.

Three-quarters of a million Canadians visited Cuba in 2025, by far the largest group. Russians are the third most numerous category of visitors, after Cuban expatriates. On Wednesday, the UK Foreign Office adjusted its travel advice to recommend only essential travel to the island.

I asked Chrome AI Mode, "How much does foreign tourism contribute to the Cuban economy?" It answered,

Foreign tourism is currently a struggling but vital "engine" for Cuba's economy, as it is one of the primary sources of hard currency needed to import essential food and fuel. However, the sector has faced a severe decline, contributing significantly to a 5% contraction of the Cuban GDP in 2025.

. . . At its peak, tourism directly and indirectly accounted for roughly 10% of Cuba's total GDP. More recently, the broader services sector—heavily driven by tourism—represents nearly 75–80% of the country's GDP.

The Guardian link concludes,

In the centre of Havana, hotspots that have made the city one of the world’s most loved tourist destinations are falling quiet. Yarini is one of the hippest rooftop bars, named after a famously anti-American pimp of the early 1900s.

Usually it seethes, but on a warm weekday night, only two tables were occupied. Neither of the groups turned out to be local people or regular tourists. Instead they were war correspondents taking a break from winter in Ukraine, in the hope of covering the fall of one of the world’s last communist states.

Another Guardian piece echoes the leftist Cuba fantasy:

Across the Florida Straits, Cuba’s exile community watches events on the island carefully, sensing the end even as they struggle with this latest, unprecedentedly large, influx of refugees. In an office on the 11th floor of a glittering building in Miami’s Brickell mall, Pedro Freyre is one of the city’s leading attorneys. The 76-year-old is exile aristocracy, his family having fled a beautiful house on Havana’s Fifth Avenue ahead of the revolution. His brother fought against the Castros in the Bay of Pigs and his brother-in-law died there.

Cuban Americans are proud of their relationship with their adopted country, he says. “We were well received, well treated. And, as the song says, we built this city.”

. . . Then I look around, at Miami’s flatlands full of strip malls and faux-this-and-that houses. Cubans may have built this city, but they didn’t do it with any poetry.

Cuba is collapsing, but it's collapsing with poetry! This may be the key: the Left is resigned to the inevitable, but it will probably never drop the fantasy. But so far, it's not worth mobilizing the protesters.