Democratic members of U.S. Congress visit Cuba and compare U.S. energy embargo to 'silent Gaza'

Four sitting members of Congress flew to Havana and came back comparing an energy embargo to Gaza. Not sanctions in the abstract, not "US-Cuba relations need work." Gaza. A place where tens of thousands have died in an actual war is now the rhetorical shorthand for a Caribbean island that can't keep the lights on because its government would rather bankroll a security state than buy fuel on the open market.

Cuba's power problems are not a mystery imported from Washington. The regime spends what little hard currency it has propping up itself, not its people. Venezuela used to subsidize Havana's energy needs and has mostly stopped, because Caracas has its own collapse to manage. None of that shows up in "silent Gaza." What shows up is a rhetorical trick: borrow the moral weight of a genuine humanitarian catastrophe and staple it onto a communist government's self-inflicted failures, so the embargo becomes the villain instead of six decades of one-party rule.

It would help if these lawmakers spent five minutes with a Cuban exile community that has watched this movie before. Every few years a delegation goes down, gets the guided tour, comes back talking about suffering caused by American policy, and somehow never mentions the political prisoners or the blackout protests met with riot police. The embargo is not sacred and reasonable people can debate its usefulness after sixty years. But comparing it to Gaza isn't analysis. It's theater, and it insults the people actually enduring the thing it borrows the name from.