Is communism about to fail in Cuba? The island is erupting, American socialists are squirming, and the scene is teaching some stark lessons about ideology and real life.
Is communism about to fail in Cuba? It sure seems like it, with Cubans storming the communist party headquarters over the weekend and setting fire to the building. For almost 70 years, Cubans have lived with the crushing weight of communism; the government provides the people just seven pounds of rice, one pound of beans, half a bottle of cooking oil, small amounts of chicken, eggs, milk (prioritized for children), sugar, coffee, and soap/toiletries.
Those rations are estimated to provide only 30 to 60 percent of a person’s daily caloric needs, and the tiny roll everyone once got has been cut from the list. Meanwhile, the communist party brass live high off the hog while ordinary people struggle to eat. That contrast is fueling rage and action on the streets.
Leftists often call that kind of inequality “equality” and pretend shortages are a price worth paying for utopian ideals. They also naively believe that most of them will be poets and Twitch streamers while the government pays for their daily needs. In reality, most people will work in factories, farms, or mines if they are not discarded when the party decides they’re no longer useful.
There are lessons to be learned here if Americans are willing to pay attention, especially as socialists gain local and national ground. We have elected socialists like Zohran Mamdani and watched the Democratic Socialists of America push for more candidates in office. We need to look to Cuba to see a) the devastation communism causes and b) realize the only way out of communism is bloody and violent.
It’s best not to go down that road at all. Many Cubans who escaped the Castro regime lean conservative or outright Republican because they remember what lived under totalitarian rule. Years ago, when I worked at a college, the Leftists who ran the show insisted we ignore those voices because they interfered with the Left’s agenda; if ignoring failed, they recommended attacking or silencing dissenters.
Gee, what happened to the Left’s love of “lived experiences”? That lasted about as long as the Cuban food rations. Now the DSA has decided it’s going to travel to Cuba to tell people who have lived with crushing poverty and tyrannical government that their experience somehow harms the DSA’s cause here in America. That move reads as tone deaf at best and insulting at worst.
I absolutely love the optics of a bunch of rich, privileged white socialists attempting to tell Cubans they’re wrong about the communism that’s destroyed their nation and repressed its people for the past seven decades. Consider some prominent American democratic socialists: Zohran Mamdani, whose parents own a compound in Uganda and who attended high-priced private schools; Cea Weaver, who opposes private homeownership for others while her family owns a mansion in Tennessee and she lives in an apartment in Crown Heights. These are not examples of people who have suffered systemic deprivation.
Seattle’s socialist Mayor Katie Wilson hasn’t held a real job until she was elected to an office she’s wholly unqualified for (and it shows), and she worked as a barista for years while mommy and daddy paid her bills. Socialist Calla Walsh talks about dismantling the United States while enjoying expensive comforts of life, including pricey consumer goods. The pattern repeats: privilege wrapped in moral outrage and presented as righteous reform.
These activists often sound like caricatures of radical purity, arguing for sweeping economic change without the slightest experience of the consequences. For many of them, choosing which designer shoes to wear or what to eat from a private chef has been the hardest part of life. They’ve never swung a hammer on a factory line, farmed a field, or faced the kind of scarcity that drives people into the streets.
Despite their lack of real-world hardship, they promote an ideology that has caused immense human suffering across history and then cast themselves as the moral heroes. I am firmly on the side of the Cuban people throwing off the burdensome yoke of communism. It seems they will succeed, even though the DSA is trying desperately to stop them.
My only hope is that the DSA livestreams any attempt to keep the Cuban people down, although I doubt there would be enough popcorn in the world for us to eat as we watched the Cubans put the commies in their place.
