After Cuba Trip, Dems Blame U.S. For Turning Communist Island Into ‘Silent Gaza’
Progressive policy ambitions meet practical realities as Americans weigh costs and consequences.
Four members of Congress flew to Havana, sat down with Miguel Díaz-Canel, toured the ministries, and came home with a phrase: "silent Gaza. " Not "communist repression. " Not "sixty years of central planning wrecking an island economy.
New Republican Times Editorial Board
Four House Democrats — Reps. Mark Pocan (D-WI), Teresa Leger Fernández (D-NM), Maxine Dexter (D-OR), and Delia Ramírez (D-IL) — spent four days in Cuba meeting with communist President Miguel Díaz-Canel, government ministers, medical officials, business leaders, and other groups before concluding that President Donald Trump’s energy sanctions had transformed the island into what they
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New Republican Times Editorial Board
Four members of Congress flew to Havana, sat down with Miguel Díaz-Canel, toured the ministries, and came home with a phrase: "silent Gaza." Not "communist repression." Not "sixty years of central planning wrecking an island economy." A comparison built to generate headlines and outrage, aimed at the country that didn't do this to Cuba.
Cuba's blackouts didn't start with Trump's second term. The grid has been collapsing for years because the regime spends nothing on maintenance and everything on staying in power. Doctors are shipped abroad as a cash export while clinics at home run without supplies. None of that traces back to a sanctions memo signed in Washington. It traces back to a one-party government that jails people for protesting blackouts, which is a detail that apparently didn't make it into four days of meetings with government ministers.
What's telling is who these members talked to. Not the dissidents beaten in the July 2021 protests. Not the independent journalists Díaz-Canel's government has spent years trying to silence. Government officials, hand-picked business leaders, state medical bureaucrats. That's not a fact-finding trip, that's a guided tour, and they came home repeating the tour guide's talking points almost word for word.
There's a version of this argument that's fair: sanctions have real costs, and reasonable people can debate whether the embargo helps or hurts ordinary Cubans. That's not what happened here. Four Democrats went to a communist country, met with the people running it, and blamed America for the misery that regime manufactures on its own. If you want to know why "silent Gaza" doesn't land with anyone who's actually watched Cuba for the last decade, that's why.
Commentary written with AI assistance by the New Republican Times Editorial Board.