The Cuban regime has created a narrative of victimhood as a smoke screen for its gross incompetence and corruption. I should know. I once believed it, too.
October 2025
For more than six decades, the Cuban regime has anchored its political survival in a single explanation for every failure it produces: the U.S. “blockade.” It is invoked to justify the collapse of institutions, empty shelves and blackouts, and the exhaustion of daily life. Repeated with ritual insistence, it has become accepted as truth across wide circles of international opinion. The documented reality tells another story. When one looks at actual trade flows, verifiable financial transactions, and the effective distribution of resources on the island, the argument crumbles. The economic consequences Havana attributes to the embargo cannot withstand empirical scrutiny. The gap between discourse and fact obeys a calculated strategy. For years, the governing elite has turned administrative incompetence into geopolitical victimhood, institutionalized corruption into heroic resistance, and an exploitative economic order into the supposed collateral damage of external hostility. This operation has worked with remarkable success, while much of the world searches for culprits in Washington, the true authors of Cuba’s tragedy rule from Havana with near total impunity.
Tomorrow, the UN General Assembly will once again vote on a Cuban resolution condemning the embargo, and the old ritual will repeat itself as it has since 1992. Cuba will present astronomical damage estimates, dozens of governments will deliver speeches of solidarity, and the resolution will pass by a wide margin. What will not be debated in that chamber are the data that contradict the myth, the records of multimillion-dollar transactions, the evidence of liquid reserves larger than those of entire nations, and the real architecture of a system that has perfected the art of converting its own failures into diplomatic capital. The vote will not decide the fate of the embargo, which will remain in force regardless of the outcome. But it will decide whether the international community continues to legitimize a story that absolves the regime of responsibility for the suffering of its people, while that same regime conceals US$18.5 billion that could resolve the crises it blames on outsiders.
I write this because I too once believed the narrative of victimization. No one who loves their country wishes it harm, and the regime knows how to exploit that reflex. With fuller access to information, I can now dismantle a rhetoric that once appealed to my patriotism.
The Real Numbers
Start with the trade that supposedly cannot exist. Official records from the U.S. Department of Agriculture contradict any idea of a total siege. In 2024, U.S. exports to Cuba exceeded $370 million in agricultural goods and food, frozen chicken, soybeans, corn, and wheat, the very staples that a genuinely blockaded country should be unable to buy from its principal geopolitical adversary. The trend has been persistent and steep. In February 2025 alone, sales reached $47 million, the highest monthly figure since 2014 — a jump of roughly 75 percent over the year before. Between January and June 2025, the tally came to $243 million, up 16 percent from the same period in 2024, and projections for the year total more than $585 million. The paradox is plain: The country that supposedly starves Cuba sells it chicken, rice, milk, and medicines on a regular and growing basis.
Nor does the commerce stop at food. In the first months of 2025, Cuba bought used vehicles from U.S. territory worth $15.3 million dollars, along with solar panels, agricultural machinery, medical equipment, industrial chemicals, and refrigeration systems. The catalog runs from John Deere tractors to fortified milk powder and communion wafers. The legal ground for these transactions has existed for decades, which already undermines the image of a hermetic cordon. The Cuban Democracy Act of 1992 and the Trade Sanctions Reform and Export Enhancement Act of 2000 explicitly authorize sales of food, medicine, and humanitarian supplies to Cuba, on one condition: payment in cash. No credit and no deferred financing, but no prohibition of trade in goods.
The U.S. State Department has been categorical for years, the embargo does not prohibit the sale of food, medicine, or humanitarian goods. In 2023, Washington authorized medical exports to Cuba in excess of $800 million, double the 2021 figure. The restrictions bite mainly in finance. Cuba cannot borrow from U.S. banks or tap New York capital markets, but it can purchase almost anything for cash. The decisive limitation, therefore, is not an absolute commercial barrier but access to credit, which depends on trust and repayment.
Here, the record is devastating. For decades, the Cuban state has built a reputation of serial default. Owing $4.6 billion, Cuba is the Paris Club’s second-largest Latin American debtor after Venezuela. In 2015, the “informal group of official creditors” forgave $8.5 billion, more than three-quarters of Cuba’s total debt, and restructured the remainder on extraordinarily favorable terms, with minimal annual payments until 2033 and a five-year grace period without interest. The response was systematic nonpayment. Since 2019, Havana has failed to meet more than $200 million in scheduled installments, repeatedly asking for delays that creditors have granted under the familiar language of “understanding the country’s difficulties.”
The pattern extends beyond the Paris Club. China forgave $6 billion in 2011; Mexico, $487 million in 2013; and Russia, $35 billion in 2014, erasing 90 percent of Cuba’s Soviet-era debt. Yet Cuba continues to default, now owing over $40 billion globally, and facing lawsuits such as the CRF1 case in London over unpaid loans from the 1980s. Even Cuba’s own officials have admitted the collapse. In July 2024, Minister of Economy Joaquín Alonso acknowledged before the National Assembly that foreign-currency revenues were “insufficient,” and that access to credit was “almost null.” The admission confirmed what financial markets already knew, lending to Cuba is equivalent to giving money away.
The narrative of poverty, supposedly caused by the blockade, collapses entirely when one examines the revelations about the Armed Forces Business Administration Group (GAESA), which controls the most profitable sectors of the economy. Leaked internal financial documents, analyzed by journalist Nora Gámez Torres for the Miami Herald, reveal that GAESA has $18.5 billion in liquid assets, $14.5 billion of which are held in its own banks and thus immediately available. The scale is staggering, surpassing the foreign reserves of Costa Rica, Uruguay, and Panama combined.
In just the first quarter of 2024, GAESA generated $2.1 billion in net profit. Its subsidiaries, CIMEX and Gaviota, reported billions more. Economist Pavel Vidal estimated GAESA’s gross earnings at 37 percent of Cuba’s GDP, accounting for a third of all exports and 41 percent of service exports, with total income triple that of the entire state budget. GAESA functions as a parallel central bank, hoarding dollars while the rest of the economy collapses under inflation. It operates as a nested structure of opaque companies spanning tourism, retail, telecommunications, ports, customs, and finance, accountable to no civilian authority. Even Cuba’s former comptroller admitted she could not audit it, and was later dismissed without explanation.
Despite massive profits, GAESA spent $5 billion between March and August 2024, mostly on luxury hotel construction. From 2021 to 2023, 36 percent of government investment went to hotels, only 2.9 percent to agriculture, and 1.9 percent to health. While hospitals lack 70 percent of essential medicines and seven in ten hotel rooms remain empty, the regime continues to pour money into an idle tourism sector. GAESA even receives direct subsidies from the state, hundreds of millions of pesos annually, while contributing almost nothing in taxes. When the leaks became public, official media attacked the reporter personally rather than disputing a single figure, confirming the accuracy of the documents through their silence.
What could Cuba do with $18.5 billion in cash? It could supply all pharmacies for 54 years, maintain a stable electric grid for 74 years, pay off its Paris Club debt entirely, finance food imports for nearly a decade, rebuild its infrastructure, or secure oil imports for six years. The poverty of 89 percent of Cuban families is therefore not inevitable but engineered. The system is designed to produce this result, concentration at the top, scarcity at the bottom, and a convenient foreign enemy to divert blame.
Havana’s False Victimhood
The narrative of the “genocidal blockade” serves not only as domestic propaganda, but as a tool of diplomatic engineering. At the United Nations, Cuba annually secures overwhelming condemnation of the U.S. embargo, 187 votes to 2 in 2024. These victories perform three functions: They validate the regime’s self-image as victim, reinforce its David-versus-Goliath myth across the Global South, and yield diplomatic concessions. The astronomical damage figures that Havana presents — $7.5 billion in a single year and a cumulative $170 billion — have no transparent methodology and rest on speculative losses that no one verifies. Few governments demand evidence, and fewer still examine the contradiction between rhetoric and fact, how a country supposedly blockaded can import hundreds of millions annually from its supposed oppressor, or why a state that claims starvation holds billions in military reserves instead of using them to alleviate hunger.
Each uncritical vote in favor of the Cuban resolution reinforces this deception. It allows Havana to present itself as victim, to point to the UN scoreboard as proof that the world blames Washington, not itself, for the country’s suffering. The moral inversion reaches its extreme in the regime’s complicity in recruiting thousands of Cubans as mercenaries for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Ukrainian and Western intelligence estimate between 20,000 and 25,000 Cubans have been enlisted, making Cuba Moscow’s largest foreign-manpower supplier. Many recruits thought they were signing construction contracts, only to find themselves in the trenches, their passports confiscated, their pay dependent on surviving the next battle. For them, the decision was born of despair: $2,000 a month in Russia versus $20 at home — hunger at home or death abroad.
At least forty Cubans are confirmed dead, though the real number is likely far higher. When a senior Russian official publicly praised Cuban participation, Havana uttered not a word of protest, revealing its complicity through silence. The regime that claims moral outrage at the embargo now exports its citizens to die in a foreign war, while building empty hotels and hoarding billions.
Eighty nine percent of Cuban households live in extreme poverty, seven in ten citizens skip meals, hospitals lack antibiotics, and the country endures daily blackouts that can last up to twenty hours. Yet GAESA holds more reserves than several Latin American nations combined. Cuba trades freely with the world, including the United States. Its problem is not access to goods, but how it uses its wealth. Decades of corruption, mismanagement, and deliberate nonpayment have isolated it from credit markets that Cuba itself destroyed. The embargo is not the cause of the country’s misery; the true blockade is internal, a military-economic complex that concentrates billions of dollars while its people starve.
Every time the international community votes mechanically to condemn the embargo without examining these facts, it becomes complicit in perpetuating the system that impoverishes Cubans. Each gesture of “solidarity” shields the very elite that keeps them hungry. This is not an academic exercise. It matters because the lie kills; because some 20,000 young Cubans are risking their lives fighting a foreign war to avoid starving at home; because $18.5 billion could feed, light, and heal the island for decades.
The embargo that truly exists is domestic, not external, and until the world recognizes that fact, Cuba’s suffering will continue, sustained by a lie convenient to everyone except those who endure it.
Carolina Barrero is a Cuban historian, writer, and human-rights advocate who emerged as a leading voice during the 2021 civic uprising in Cuba. She is the founder of Ciudadanía y Libertad, an independent organization dedicated to the promotion of civil and political rights.
Copyright © 2025 National Endowment for Democracy
Image credit: STRINGER/AFP via Getty Images
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