Exile, empire, and the fantasy of regime change
To love Cuba is not to demand its submission to American models. To love it is to respect its sovereignty, to mourn its losses, to honor its resilience, and to support its people—not despite their defiance, but because of it.
Cuba has been in the backburner of the news for a while. Two wars have taken over the attention of the public. Still, this month the administration has taken additional measures restricting travel and immigration in the pursuit of regime change. It also pressured the Bahamian Health Minister to plan canceling contracts with Cuban healthcare professionals. For more than sixty years, U.S. policy toward Cuba has clung to a single premise: that the purpose of engagement—or its opposite—is to engineer such change. Whether through embargo or détente, pressure or persuasion, the only debate in Washington has been over how to change Cuba, not whether the United States has any right to attempt it.
This narrow debate masks a larger moral failure. Lost in the journalistic shuffle and political posturing is a third, neglected position: that the United States should not be in the business of regime change at all. It should not seek to reshape the internal affairs of sovereign nations, especially not through coercive instruments such as economic strangulation, covert operations, or ideological siege. From this position, the outcome of any engagement—liberalization or stasis, reform or retrenchment—is secondary. The principle is what matters: a sovereign people must chart their own course, however imperfect, without the suffocating tutelage of a foreign superpower.
But in the theater of U.S.-Cuba relations, principle has always taken a back seat to passion. And no constituency has driven that passion more fervently than the Cuban exile community, particularly in South Florida. Over decades, this community has built a formidable political machine—one that not only sustains the embargo but shapes the very terms in which Cuba can be discussed in American public life. What began as a historical grievance has metastasized into a kind of ideological priesthood, policing the boundaries of discourse and demanding fealty to a vision of Cuba that no longer exists, if it ever did.
In Miami, Cuba policy is not foreign policy. It is domestic ritual. Candidates genuflect before hardline orthodoxy, condemning any move toward normalization as appeasement, betrayal, or worse. Congressional races are won and lost not on Medicare or immigration, but on how loudly one denounces the Revolution. Presidential hopefuls speak not of diplomacy but of deliverance. The embargo, in this setting, becomes less a means to an end than an end in itself—a sacrament of exile identity, renewed through suffering.
And yet, what has this policy achieved? Since the triumph of the 26th of July Movement, U.S. hostility has done more to entrench authoritarianism in Cuba than to weaken it. Assassination plots, economic sabotage, radio propaganda, and support for armed incursions have only fortified a siege mentality among Cuban leaders and provided convenient scapegoats for internal failure. Far from accelerating democratization, the embargo has frozen both Cuba and its most fervent critics in a dialectic of mutual paranoia and performative grievance.
The irony is that both sides of the American policy debate now rely on selective evidence. Proponents of engagement point to the fall of the Soviet Bloc and claim that it was Western openness, not isolation, that brought down the Iron Curtain. Their opponents respond that Canada, the European Union, and most of the world have engaged Cuba for decades with no meaningful change in its political structure. Both may be partly right. But neither asks the prior question: Why is Cuba’s internal evolution any of our business?
Behind this entire debate lies an unexamined moral conceit: that U.S.-style democracy is the apex of political development and must be exported—by carrot or by stick—to the reluctant peripheries of the world. This belief is not only naïve; it is dangerous. It assumes that what works—or appears to work—in one culture, with one history, under one set of conditions, can be forcibly transplanted elsewhere. Worse still, it presumes that the U.S. version of democracy—often a thin veneer over oligarchy and corporate domination—is a flower that blossoms naturally on the tree of freedom, rather than a carefully pruned system of privilege and spectacle.
In Cuba’s case, that conceit is especially grotesque. The island has long occupied a peculiar place in the American imperial imagination. As early as 1823, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams wrote that Cuba would one day fall into U.S. hands “like a ripe apple.” That sense of inevitability never disappeared. It curdled into obsession, disappointment, and finally rage. Every moment of diplomatic failure, from the Bay of Pigs to Helms-Burton, has been animated by the same desire: to reclaim what was never ours but what we always presumed should be.
For many Cuban exiles, this presumption is even more personal. The trauma of 1959 was not just geopolitical—it was psychological, existential. Families were uprooted, assets seized, identities shattered. The Cuba they knew was abruptly replaced by one they could no longer recognize, much less accept. And so, the past became sacred. The Revolution became not a fact of history but a cosmic injustice, and exile became not just a condition but a calling.
From this posture, the exile community has demanded not just justice but restoration. The goal has never been merely reform on the island—it has been reversal. The past must be undone. Property returned. Systems dismantled. Memory redeemed. It is an impossible demand, but one whose impossibility sustains its emotional force.
And so, any movement toward normalization—any recognition of Cuba as it is rather than as it was—is met with fierce resistance. Artists, scholars, and politicians who question the logic of the embargo are accused of betrayal. Cuban Americans who advocate engagement are denounced as apologists. Dissent, so valorized in theory, is punished in practice. In this way, exile politics come to mirror the very authoritarianism they claim to oppose: rigid, censorious, and allergic to complexity.
This culture of unreality is compounded by the U.S. government’s own mythmaking, particularly the cynical branding of Cuba as a “state sponsor of terrorism.” The designation, reimposed by the Trump administration in its final days after Obama had removed it and reinstated by Trump again on his first day in office under Executive Order 14148, reversing President Biden’s brief removal, rests not on substantive evidence but on ideological expediency. The actual charges are tenuous: that Cuba provided safe haven to Colombian guerrillas during peace negotiations (under a multinational agreement designed to allow the negotiations to take place); that it shelters a handful of U.S. fugitives; that it supports revolutionary movements long since relegated to history. None of these amounts to a genuine threat to the United States. But they serve as convenient legal scaffolding for sanctions and as rhetorical bludgeons for domestic audiences, claims that amount to ideological pretext, not substance.
Incongruously, it is Cuba—not the United States—that has borne the brunt of terrorism, much of it inspired, financed, or directly orchestrated by U.S.-based actors with the tacit or explicit support of Washington. While successive administrations have designated Cuba a “state sponsor of terrorism,” the historical record reveals a disturbing reversal of roles. From the early 1960s through the 1990s, Cuba was the target of a sustained campaign of violence rooted in Miami exile networks, often carried out with impunity and sometimes coordinated with U.S. intelligence services.
The most infamous example is the 1976 bombing of a Cubana de Aviación passenger plane off the coast of Barbados, killing all 73 people aboard, including teenage members of the Cuban national fencing team. The attack was orchestrated by anti-Castro militants Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch—both of whom had connections to the CIA and received safe haven in the United States. Posada Carriles, despite multiple public admissions of his involvement in terrorist activities, lived openly in Miami until his death in 2018, shielded by a political class unwilling to prosecute one of its own Cold War foot soldiers.
Here’s a specific, chilling quote from Luis Posada Carriles where he brazenly downplays civilian deaths and expresses indifference to publicity: “Nosotros pusimos la bomba, ¿y qué?”
(“We planted the bomb—so what?”)—Fredy Lugo, recounting Posada’s words, as told to Alicia Herrera in her book by that title.
But the airline bombing was only the most visible of hundreds of attacks. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Cuba endured a barrage of covert operations: bombings of embassies and trade offices, sabotage of agricultural and industrial infrastructure, assassination attempts on Fidel Castro (by the CIA’s own count, at least 638), and biological warfare, including the introduction of African swine fever and dengue fever to the island. In 1981, a dengue epidemic believed by Cuban authorities to be deliberately introduced claimed the lives of over 100 children. The perpetrators were never brought to justice.
Even in the 1990s, as the Cold War thawed, the violence persisted. In 1997, a series of hotel bombings in Havana aimed at destroying the island’s emerging tourist economy killed an Italian businessman and injured several others. Posada Carriles again admitted responsibility in interviews with The New York Times yet continued to receive protection under the U.S. legal system, shielded from extradition to Venezuela or Cuba.
These acts, if reversed—if Cuban agents had planted bombs in Miami hotels, downed a commercial airliner, or introduced lethal viruses into U.S. cities—would have constituted international scandals and likely acts of war. Yet when the victims were Cuban and the perpetrators part of the anti-Castro cause, Washington treated the latter as freedom fighters, not terrorists.
This inversion of truth—labeling the victim the aggressor—is not merely a matter of historical misrepresentation. It has legal consequences, reinforcing sanctions that cripple Cuba’s economy, cutting it off from international financial systems, and impeding humanitarian transactions. It also sustains the fiction that Cuba represents a threat to global peace, when in fact it has long been a target of low-intensity warfare waged from Florida’s shores.
To speak honestly about terrorism in the context of U.S.-Cuba relations is to confront a painful legacy of double standards, impunity, and moral blindness. It is to acknowledge that while the rhetoric of democracy and human rights has been used to justify economic war, the actual history is one of tolerated violence—violence whose victims rarely appear in American political memory.
Equally spurious are accusations that Cuba engages in “human trafficking” through its overseas medical missions—a grotesque inversion of reality. These brigades, which have brought healthcare to underserved regions in dozens of countries, are cast not as acts of solidarity but as instruments of exploitation. Have Cuban doctors been paid less than their market value? Undoubtedly, but still six to twelve times more, at the low end, and twenty to thirty times more, in a country like Brazil, than they would make in Cuba. Are they coerced? Hardly. They volunteer with full knowledge of the financial arrangements, often seeing them as opportunities for remittances and professional development. But in the Washington narrative, their labor must be reframed as servitude, so that Cuba’s most admirable global export can be twisted into a human rights violation.
Such distortions are not accidental. They are essential to maintaining the embargo’s moral cover. For an economic war that strangles access to food, fuel, medicine, and basic financial instruments cannot be defended in utilitarian terms. It can only be justified if Cuba is portrayed not merely as authoritarian but as evil—rogue, criminal, parasitic. Hence the inflated rhetoric, the unmoored designations, the weaponization of suffering. Policy is no longer anchored to evidence but to narrative. Cuba must remain the villain, no matter how many times the script collapses.
But perhaps the greatest tragedy is generational. For the children and grandchildren of exiles, Cuba is often a myth glimpsed through stories and slogans, filtered through nostalgia and rage. They are asked to hate a country they have never visited, to long for a Cuba that no longer exists. In most cases, they do. In some, they rebel. But in either case, they inherit a burden that distorts their political imagination and narrows their moral horizon.
There is another way. It begins with relinquishing the fantasy that history can be reversed. It requires acknowledging that Cuba’s path—like that of every nation—will be winding, contingent, and its own. It requires resisting the temptation to weaponize human rights and remembering that solidarity means accompaniment, not control.
To love Cuba is not to demand its submission to American models. To love it is to respect its sovereignty, to mourn its losses, to honor its resilience, and to support its people—not despite their defiance, but because of it. The embargo does not express that love. It is a wound disguised as strategy, a punishment disguised as policy. It is time to let it go.
Without justifying the many failings of a habitually authoritarian and sometimes inept Cuban government, let Cuba be Cuba. Let the exiles grieve but not govern. Let the U.S. finally admit that the goal of foreign policy is not to recreate the world in its image, but to live in the world as it is—with humility, with patience, and with the courage to stop mistaking power for virtue. And most importantly, let’s help the Cuban people instead of crushing them with a brutal sanctions regime.
