For almost as long as the Cuban revolutionary government has been in power, the U.S. has been devoted to its demise. The longest-standing strategy has been starvation by way of economic embargo, first enacted by President Kennedy in 1962. Over a half-century later, its architects’ desired outcome finally appears to be within reach. Since the U.S. military strikes on Venezuela cut the island off from most of its fuel supply, the situation has grown dire. Its electrical grid is failing, and that means the pumps can’t bring running water to people’s homes, garbage is piling up in the streets, and industrial production has ground to a halt. Cuba is running out of options—and don’t the White House know it. “They’re a very weakened nation right now,” the President recently said, licking his chops. “I think I can do anything I want with it.”
This statement is shocking, because throughout the history of our country’s relations with the Cuban revolutionary government, sitting presidents have invariably saved that kind of language for the war room. In public, they’ve stuck to a high-minded condemnation of Communist tyranny meant to justify everything from outright military invasion to more covert actions, such as deadly attacks on Cuban infrastructure, sending thousands of Cuban children away from their families under false pretenses, and a staggering 638 plots to assassinate Fidel Castro, with methods including poisoned cigars, exploding seashells, and a scuba suit infected with a skin-ravaging fungus. As John F. Kennedy phrased it during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, “The cost of freedom is always high—but Americans have always paid it.”
But American politicians weren’t always so reticent regarding their desire to possess the island. In 1823, Thomas Jefferson wrote to James Monroe, “I candidly confess that I have ever looked on Cuba as the most interesting addition which could ever be made to our system of states.” After the Haitian Revolution, Cuba took over from the newly-liberated former sugar capital as the world’s largest sugar producer, and Southern politicians hoped to annex Cuba and bring it into the Union as a slave state to balance the new free states out West. In 1868, Cuba’s war for independence from Spain began, but it wasn’t until three decades later, when the Cubans were on the cusp of victory, that the U.S. offered its military support—with plenty of strings attached. In 1898, the defeated Spain ceded control of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Guam to the United States. While the U.S. nominally returned sovereignty to the island, none who read the fine print doubted Cuba’s colonial status.
In mainstream news coverage of Cuba, the 1957 revolution is commonly referred to as a Communist uprising; a March 21st New York Times article refers to Fidel Castro as “the leader of Cuba’s Communist revolution.” That is factually incorrect. Fidel Castro’s political inspiration didn’t come from Lenin or Trotsky, but the Cuban poet and revolutionary José Martí, who died fighting to liberate Cuba from Spain. The Cuban revolution of 1959 was considered a continuation of the struggle against imperialism that began in 1868. The irony of winning their freedom from Spain only to have it snatched away again by the U.S. was not lost on Cubans. It was well-known that Fulgencio Batista, the sadistic gangster who ruled Cuba at the time of the revolution, owed his power to U.S. protection. When the revolutionary network linking urban centers and the countryside sprang into action in the late ‘50s, they were fighting, once again, against imperial rule.
Accordingly, the Eisenhower Administration was wary of Fidel Castro and his barbudos, and offered a chilly reception during Castro’s first visit to the U.S. These suspicions were confirmed when, shortly thereafter, the revolutionary government began enacting sweeping land reforms. The first agrarian reform put a cap on large estates at 1,000 acres, and holdings any larger than that were redistributed to the peasantry at 67 acres per farm. Next, the revolutionary government prohibited foreigners from owning land, which in effect made U.S. economic imperialism illegal. The CIA promptly began drawing up plans for an invasion of Cuba.
Naturally, the U.S. attributed the radical measures taken by the Cuban government to Soviet infiltration. But the Caribbean has its own radical tradition. The first Haitian Constitution outlawed foreign land ownership in 1805. This stipulation remained sacrosanct in all subsequent Haitian constitutions, until the U.S. Marines invaded in 1915 and insisted at gunpoint that it be changed. In Cuba, in keeping with the new style of economic imperialism, over 40% of arable land was owned by foreigners, to say nothing of the mafia-owned nightclubs and casinos of Havana. So revolutionary expropriations targeted American-owned sugar plantations and the banana barons of the United Fruit Company. To identify the source of Cuba’s oppression, it was not necessary to read Marx.
But the Cold War had a way of obliterating such nuances. While Cuba charted its own course into a post-revolutionary future without help from the Kremlin, escalating U.S. aggression eventually made it impossible to go it alone. It was only during the full-scale—and pitifully botched—U.S. invasion at the Bay of Pigs that Castro announced Cuba’s status as a socialist state. By ideologically aligning with the Soviet Union, Cuba was guaranteed the military protection of a world power. Considering how relentlessly the U.S. subsequently worked to overthrow the revolutionary government, who could say they didn’t need it?
By now, there doesn’t appear to be much left of the original revolutionary spirit in the Cuban government, which refuses to loosen its stranglehold on the people as they strive to adapt to impossible conditions. One way or another, change is coming to Cuba. But to mark this historic moment, let’s celebrate their daring to dream of a life outside the lines drawn by the plantation, and their chutzpah in pulling it off. At the start of the revolution, their army numbered less than 100, and their navy was a dilapidated tugboat named the Granma, which barely managed to transport the revolutionaries from exile in Mexico to Cuba. Wildly outnumbered and outgunned, it was the vision that made the difference, and the care for the people they showed along the way. We might consider letting some of that audacity rub off on us. Louisiana, another post-Haitian Revolution sugar producer whose concentration of wealth remains undisturbed by expropriations, could use audacious thinking right now. Like Cuba’s, our economy is running out of road. Maybe there’s a new one we can walk together.—Holly Devon
illustration by Sadie Wiese
April 2026 cover by Anneliese Depano
