Thank you, Cuba, for the 60 years they’ve been trying to make us forget

When the plane landed at José Martí International Airport in November 2022, I felt something I had not expected: a kind of time warp. Seeing the word Cuba – not in a book, not in a speech, not in the reverent tones of the elders who had shaped my political formation – but on a sign, a real sign, in a real airport, on an island I was actually standing on.

I grew up knowing that somewhere beyond the walls of apartheid South Africa, there was a place that held our dreams. That sent its young men to die in Angolan soil so that we might one day be free. That place was Cuba. And now here we were: twenty social justice leaders from across our country, a cross-disciplinary group working in health, land, food politics, education, queer liberation, feminist organising, all of us in various ways children of a struggle that Cuba had helped make possible.

We had come to learn. And what we found was more complicated, and more human, than any of our frameworks had prepared us for.

We arrived during what Cubans were experiencing not merely as an electricity crisis, but as something deeper and more entangled: a shortage crisis in which fuel, power, and food had collapsed into a single emergency. When fuel imports are constrained, power generation drops. When electricity fails, transport falters and food distribution unravels.

What looks, from the outside, like load shedding is actually the visible edge of an economic and geopolitical siege – each shortage feeding the next in a system designed, under pressure, to fail together. We arrived from SA, where we had been living through the worst of load shedding, and in that recognition we laughed: a deep, tired, cross-continental laugh. Two peoples from the Global South comparing notes on how many hours the lights had been out.

The kind of joke that is not entirely a joke

It was the kind of joke that is not entirely a joke. Even as we laughed, the comparison was already inexact. We had seen one edge of something. Cuba was living the whole of it.

But what stayed with me, long after the laughter, was this: Cuba had been carrying this weight not for months, as we had, but for decades. The outages were not a temporary strain on a system that would recover. They were part of a longer condition: scarcity shaped by isolation, by constrained access to fuel and trade, and by the accumulated effects of a system under pressure from both within and beyond its borders. Something hung in the air: the accumulated weight of 60 years of resistance. Of being the country that refused. Of carrying a defiance that the rest of us had, in various ways, outsourced to them.

We met most of the faces of Cuba. Political leaders, young and old, the outgoing generation determined to travel alongside the new, and the incoming generation bringing ideas that strained against the old forms. Artists and cultural workers. Sports people. Journalists. Advocates and organisers. People experimenting with new ways of building solidarity from within. People living the contradictions of a society caught between a dying world and a new one trying to be born, and doing so with more political clarity about what they were fighting for than almost anywhere I had visited before.

In Havana, at the Casa de África Museum, we met the war veterans. Among them was Comandante Víctor Dreke – Che Guevara’s second in command and president of the Cuba-Africa Friendship Association — who told stories about Che that made the room laugh with a kind of tender disbelief.

We met Angel Dalmau, vice-president of the association, who later served as Cuba’s Ambassador to SA – a close colleague of both Fidel Castro and Nelson Mandela. These were men who had fought at Cuito Cuanavale – the 1987-88 battle in which Cuban, Angolan and Namibian forces defeated the South African apartheid army and broke forever the myth of its invincibility. Nelson Mandela would later say that Cuito Cuanavale changed the entire history of southern Africa. The men sitting across from us had been there.

They did not speak with bitterness. They spoke with the particular dignity of people who had paid a price they believed was worth paying. They spoke of bonds of brotherhood – forged not in rhetoric but in red earth, in Angola, in the Congo, sealed in sacrifice. That phrase stopped the room. It still does.

Dreke put it simply: “Cuba came out of the DRC with the bodies of our brothers, not with gold and diamonds.” In that sentence is the entire distinction between solidarity and extraction – between what Cuba did on this continent and what everyone else did.

Medicine, Africa, solidarity, feminism, memory

At the same museum we met Ana Morales Varela, a doctor who had served in Cuban medical brigades in Africa, now a museum specialist and member of the Articulación Afrofeminista Cubana. In her single life: medicine, Africa, solidarity, feminism, memory.

Cuba had also named an academic chair after Nelson Mandela: the Cátedra Nelson Mandela, dedicated to anti-racial research and activism, housed at the Centre for Psychological and Sociological Research in Havana, named for him on the centenary of his birth in 2018. Mandela’s children are our own, we were told, in multiple registers, by multiple people, across the entire week. We felt this deeply, not as a diplomatic courtesy, but a statement of genealogy.

In Matanzas, travelling by bus on a day when news came through that Janusz Walus might be paroled, the group began singing in isiXhosa, and something electric happened: our Cuban hosts, recognising not the words but the register of struggle, of grief, of collective holding – moved toward the sound.

The African connection in Matanzas runs deep; at one point two-thirds of the population of the province were enslaved Africans, brought across the ocean to work the sugar plantations. When we visited the Castillo de San Severino, the slave castle and museum and part of the Unesco Slave Route Project, and walked the rooms where human beings had been processed as commodities, where the Orisha rooms preserved what survived the crossing, the grief in our group was visceral. It was recognition. We knew this story. It lived in our own bones.

We were also hosted by AfroAtenAs, a community project rooted in Afro-Cuban culture and identity, weaving together anti-racism, LGBTQ+ rights and community transformation. The young leaders we met moved through space in a way that declared: we are fully here, fully ourselves, fully revolutionary – refusing the false choice between who they are and what they fight for.

In the same society critics rightly point to for its democratic deficits, there were young Cubans holding their identity and their revolutionary politics not in tension but in conversation. They were among the most alive political minds I encountered anywhere.

We visited a public health facility where the provincial director of health had assembled doctors and nurses to meet us. What struck me was not the individuals but the organising logic behind what we saw: a primary health care model built on the principle that health is a collective responsibility, not a commodity.

Care is organised at community level: a family doctor and nurse embedded in each neighbourhood, supported by polyclinics and specialists. The relationships between doctors and nurses reflect that logic: care is continuous, preventive and shared, not episodic, hierarchical and rationed by ability to pay.

The director said something I have not forgotten: “Some things that are easy in Cuba, like access to specialists, are difficult in other countries. Whereas other things that are easy in other countries, like access to food and transport, are difficult in Cuba – mostly because of the American blockade.” Not defensiveness. Not propaganda. Just the plain, dignified naming of a contradiction he lived with every day. In that single sentence was the whole system: energy, food, transport, economy: each dependent on the other, each vulnerable to the same constraints.

Entrenched hierarchy

What we saw in that clinic was a health system whose outcomes are shaped not by the wealth of its users, but by a political decision that health belongs to everyone. It is hard to stand in that room and not think of our own: where primary care remains underdeveloped, hierarchy is entrenched, and your chances of being well depend too often on where you were born and what you can afford.

In that same room, some of our delegation members spoke of having personally received care from Cuban doctors in SA through the Mandela-Castro programme, which had posted Cuban doctors in some of the most underserved parts of our country for years.

During Covid-19, Cuban doctors came again, extending our capacity to care for people in places the system had never adequately reached. It was contested, as solidarity always is when it makes the comfortable uncomfortable. But it happened. And in that health facility in Cuba, people who had been treated by Cuban hands in their darkest moments of need were now sitting across from Cuban doctors who asked, warmly, genuinely, about their colleagues. The circle, in that moment, closed in a way that no speech could have manufactured.

We also travelled, throughout that week, with Cuban journalists, people who were devout in their love for the revolution, who wanted to hold a mirror to all its faces, not only the shiny one. There were places we could enter where they could not follow. We spoke about this directly, at length. What struck me was that they were not stewing in outrage. They found the situation unacceptable: being treated as if they were proxies of imperialism’s propaganda network, when what they wanted was a Cuba that was more fully what Cuba had promised to be.

Their complaint was not that they wanted what America had. It was that they wanted Cuba to be honest enough about itself to become more fully itself. I understood, in some part, why a country under 60 years of siege might want to control the narrative. And I also felt the wrongness of it. Both things were true, and they remain true. And in that tension, you glimpse what it means to hold a political project under sustained external pressure.

On our last afternoon in Havana, I came across spontaneous street dancing in the middle of the city. Not a performance. Not for tourists. Just people dancing, and other people – who had been walking somewhere, who had been living their lives – gradually, inevitably, beginning to move. Something in that image is the truest thing I can say about Cuba: a country that, in the face of everything, finds a way to keep moving.

I have been thinking about all of those faces constantly in recent weeks.

‘We have returned to the Stone Age’

On 16 March 2026, Cuba’s electrical grid collapsed entirely, leaving roughly 11 million people in darkness – the third major nationwide blackout in four months. Cubans race through brief bursts of electricity to cook, to do laundry, to charge devices before the dark returns and food spoils in powerless refrigerators. During one thirty-six-hour blackout, men cooked over burning tree limbs on the pavement of one of Havana’s main avenues. “We have returned to the Stone Age,” one called out – in a voice described as disarmingly cheerful.

These blackouts are not isolated failures. They are the outcome of a system under sustained strain: reduced fuel supply, ageing infrastructure, limited foreign currency, and tightening external pressure. When fuel becomes scarce, electricity falters. When electricity falters, food systems and daily life begin to unravel. What we glimpsed in 2022 as a shortage crisis has become, by 2026, a civilisational siege.

That cheerfulness undoes me. The Cuban habit of dignity in the face of designed humiliation.

On 29 January 2026, US President Donald Trump signed an executive order imposing a fuel blockade – described by the United Nations as the first effective blockade of Cuba since the Cuban Missile Crisis. After US-backed forces ousted Venezuela’s Maduro, Cuba lost its primary fuel source almost overnight. Mexico, which had become Cuba’s largest oil supplier, temporarily halted shipments under American pressure.

The UN has reported that the food supply is deteriorating, social protection is weakening, and five million people living with chronic illness face disrupted treatment – including thousands of cancer patients requiring continuous care. Children search through piled-up rubbish for food in Havana.

This is not collateral damage. This is the point.

Trump has been explicit. The US has confirmed that regime change in Cuba is its goal by the end of 2026. He told CNN he believes Cuba is going to fall soon.

What is being attempted here is not pressure. It is erasure. The deliberate starvation of 11 million human beings until their government bends, breaks, or is swept away by the desperation of its own people. It is collective punishment on a civilisational scale – and it is not met with the response it demands.

There is solidarity. Flotillas have sailed. The Black Feminist Fund is mobilising across Africa and the diaspora. Trade unions are beginning to stir. Latin America is loud. Friends of Cuba organise in SA. But solidarity that exists and solidarity that is heard are not the same thing. What is growing is being drowned – by Gaza, by Iran, by the sheer weight of simultaneous crisis.

Cuba keeps slipping below the surface, not because no one cares, but because the machinery of global attention was not built to hold this many emergencies at once. I want to name that, not as an accusation, but as a condition we need to refuse. SA can do more. The African Union can do more. Those of us who invoke solidarity as a value must say something as Cuba is pushed toward what analysts are calling its worst crisis since the 1930s.

The Cuba debate

There is a version of the Cuba debate conducted entirely on the terms set by Havana’s enemies – political prisoners, the democratic deficit, the repression of dissent. These are not fabrications. Cuba’s government has repressed its own people. The journalists who could not enter the hotel with us knew this better than any of Cuba’s foreign critics – and they were not asking for liberal democracy. They were asking for a revolution honest enough to look at itself.

A conversation about Cuba’s democratic deficits that ignores the 60-year economic war being waged against the island is not an honest conversation. It is a frame designed to make the punishment invisible while keeping the prisoner in view.

The question is not whether Cuba is perfect. No country is. The question is whether any nation has the right to be starved into submission for refusing to submit.

A 33-year-old Cuban told journalists recently: “Beyond physical exhaustion, it is psychological exhaustion that overwhelms us. It is the uncertainty of not knowing when we will have power. Nothing can be planned.”

I read those words and I thought of our laughter on arrival, the shared recognition of the lights going out. How we did not know – could not have known – that what felt like a shared inconvenience was something fundamentally different. In SA, load shedding was a managed response to a failing system that still had access to capital, fuel and global markets. In Cuba, the outages were embedded in a wider constraint – where energy, economy and geopolitics converge, and where recovery is not simply a matter of technical repair. SA eventually turned its lights back on. We found our way through the load-shedding years, imperfectly and painfully. Cuba did not get that chance. The darkness deepened instead.

Cuba has been carrying the weight of resistance for many of us. The rest of the Global South has, in various ways, been able to move on: make compromises, integrate, negotiate. Cuba held the line that the rest of us quietly stepped back from. That weight hung in the air when we visited, heavy and ancestral, accumulated across generations of defiance.

Institutions of solidarity

I think of Comandante Víctor Dreke, who fought alongside Che and who told funny stories about him, and who spent the decades after the war building institutions of solidarity so that the bonds of brotherhood would outlast the men who forged them.

I think of Angel Dalmau who knew both Fidel and Madiba, who watched SA be born, and who now watches SA stay silent. I think of the AfroAtenAs, dancing and organising and refusing to be erased. I think of the journalists who loved their revolution enough to want it to be honest, standing at thresholds they could not cross. I think of Ana Morales, who took her medicine to Africa and came back to tend the memory of what that connection means. I think of the doctors and the nurses they respect as equals, and the South Africans in our delegation who had already been held by Cuban hands before they ever came to say thank you in person.

And I think of a woman we met who grew vegetables on her plot and was genuinely surprised when asked whether she sold them. That was not what they were for, she said. They were for her community. In that answer is a whole different paradigm, one that Cuba built, and that an imperialist power has spent 60 years trying to destroy, because a world that believes health and food and dignity are not commodities is a world that asks uncomfortable questions of everyone else.

These are the people Trump says will fall soon.

The least we owe them is to say clearly, now, when it costs them everything and costs us almost nothing: we see you. We remember what you did. We have not forgotten who stood with us when standing with us was dangerous.

Say it in our Parliament. Say it in the AU. Say it in our streets.

The street dancing in Havana was not for us. But we were there, and we moved too. That is what solidarity looks like when it is real – not a statement, not a position, not a performance of outrage. Just the willingness to be present, to be moved, and to refuse to look away. DM