In this column, Cuban-American Danny Valdes explains that Washington’s myth about the source of the Cuba’s economic challenges has been exposed, most recently and most clearly, by U.S. president Donald Trump. “There’s an embargo. There’s no oil, there’s no money, there’s no anything,” Trump said last month. “There is … a growing shift,” Valdes adds. “Whether in Miami or in New Jersey, we are today seeing a wave of Cuban Americans who are mobilizing to demand engagement, rather than escalation.”

March 10, 2026 [features article from #TheGuardian]

For well over six decades, right-wing Cuban émigrés have fed Washington’s narrative that any hardship experienced by the people on the island — including shortages of food, fuel, and medicines alongside periodic electrical blackouts — is the result of the policies of the Cuban state.

To peddle this myth, successive U.S. administrations, beginning with that of Democrat and liberal icon John F. Kennedy, have relied on their control of the media and the fact that a layer of Cuban Americans were prepared to use violence to silence anyone who countered this narrative. They have used their propaganda machine to try to bury the truth about both the accomplishments of the Cuban revolution and the human consequences of the U.S. economic war.