|
Hello Reader,
Essay: The Price of ¡Libertad?
When the lights went out across all of Cuba last Monday — the sixth total blackout in 18 months — the press had its villain ready before the darkness even settled.
During Iran's uprising, I urged readers to ignore the media — and listen to the Iranians. They weren't chanting "Death to America." They were chanting "The enemy is here" — pointing directly at the mullahs.
Now listen to the Cubans.
In Havana last week, residents banged pots and chanted "Down with Communism." In Morón, protesters stormed the Communist Party headquarters, hurled its furniture into the street, and set it ablaze, chanting "Libertad!"
Not "Down with America!" Not "More communism, please!"
Before the ashes cooled, Díaz-Canel went on state television. "The government is not at fault," he declared. "The Revolution is not at fault. The National Electro-energy System is not at fault. The blame lies with the energy blockade imposed on us by the United States."
He said talks would proceed only on the basis of "respect for both countries' political systems."
The BBC, the New York Times, and the Washington Post seem to agree. CNN ran "Cuba Is Going Dark Under U.S. Pressure." The Times produced a video titled "How the U.S. Is Crippling Cuba's Economy" and declared separately that the oil blockade "is causing a severe crisis for Cuba."
The system of government that has catastrophically failed 10 million people, apparently, beyond question. Little ink has been spilled analyzing it.
But the Cubans chanting “Libertad” know who built their prison.
To understand Cuba's collapse, follow the patrons. For six decades, the regime survived not through productivity but through subsidy — first from the Soviet Union, then Venezuela, two of the most economically ruinous dictatorships of their eras, each impoverishing its own citizens while bankrolling the Castros. When the Soviets collapsed, Cuba lost 70-80% of its imports overnight. When Maduro fell in January, the second lifeline snapped. That is not a sanctions story. That is a dependency story the regime chose — and now owns.
The result is an economy of staggering, self-inflicted failure. The government controls nearly all enterprise, sets prices, and stubbornly misallocates resources into failing industries while printing money to cover the losses — destroying the peso and rendering state salaries nearly worthless. A typical monthly salary now buys barely a dozen eggs. Sugar exports — once the economy's backbone — have collapsed 90% since 1990. Total exports fell 75% between 2000 and 2025. According to The Economist, Cuba's entire foreign income in 2025 roughly a quarter of what Honduras earns with a similar population.
Cuba produces only 40% of the oil it needs daily, and its Soviet-era refineries are so inefficient that even arriving crude wastes significant fuel in processing. The military conglomerate Gaesa pumped over 70% of its investments into tourism over the past decade while the grid crumbled. A 2025 survey found 89% of Cuban families in extreme poverty by World Bank standards. The $3 billion in annual remittances keeping those families alive comes overwhelmingly from the exiles the regime drove out. The diaspora is subsidizing the cage that expelled them.
More Accountability, Fewer Crises
This is precisely the dynamic Nobel laureate Amartya Sen spent decades documenting — and it bears repeating here. Democracies don't produce famines, not because their governments are more virtuous, but because in a democracy, accountability travels upward. British India produced catastrophic famines, including the Bengal famine of 1943 that killed three million people. Independent, democratic India has not had one since. The mechanism is simple: governments that let their people starve get removed. Cuba's government jails them instead. After the 2021 protests over these exact conditions, over 1,000 Cubans received sentences of up to 30 years.
The sanctions excuse also collapses under basic geography. Prior to January’s oil embargo, Cuba was free to trade with nearly every country on earth. A government that cared about its citizens would have diversified its economy and its energy supply over six decades. It didn't. That is not American policy. That is Cuban policy.
The Moral Dilemma
To be clear: the current oil embargo causes genuine suffering, and deploying a humanitarian crisis as leverage is a legitimate moral debate. But there is a profound difference between causing a crisis and exploiting one the regime created.
It's fair to believe no strategic goal justifies this level of civilian suffering. It's equally fair to ask whether the price buys a better future for the Cuban people.
Now comes the harder question. Trump declared this week he believes he'll have "the honor" of liberating Cuba — or taking it. One is hopeful. The other is ominous. Cuban Americans — among the most entrepreneurial and economically successful immigrant communities in American history — are praying he means the former.
Many fear he won't go far enough. Cuba's lead negotiator is Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro — Raúl Castro's 41-year-old grandson, a former bodyguard with no official title but a direct line to the 94-year-old patriarch. There has been no discussion of removing the Castros from power. The U.S. appears focused on pushing out Díaz-Canel alone, while leaving the Castro cartel's grip intact.
Listen to the Cubans. Bryan Calvo — the Cuban-American mayor of Hialeah, Florida's most Cuban city — got it right: "The Castros have to go," said "You need free and fair elections. That's the only way we're going to have lasting change."
The Cubans know who built their prison. The question is whether Trump will tear down the walls — or just change the guard.
A More Perfect Union
If you missed it last week, "A More Perfect Union" is back for good. The Friday edition was formerly only on domestic U.S. politics. Instead, we now cover domestic stories that intersect with the most profound questions facing free societies everywhere. The kind of analysis you won't find in a Tuesday roundup.
A Fox to Guard the Henhouse
These pages have chronicled the media's abysmal Iran war coverage—it's been lazy, credulous, and often wrong. But the only thing worse than a misleading press controlling the narrative is the government controlling it.
FCC Chair Brendan Carr proved that Saturday. Hours after Trump attacked a Wall Street Journal story—claiming its headline about five Air Force refueling planes was "intentionally misleading," then conceding all five were damaged—Carr threatened broadcasters with license revocation for failing to serve "the public interest." His stated mission: restoring "faith and confidence in the media."
Nothing would destroy it faster than a license revocation on flimsy partisan grounds.
Carr’s threat exploits an anomaly unique to broadcast journalism. Print, cable, and online outlets enjoy full First Amendment protection. Broadcast networks don't—because they use public airwaves, giving regulators a historical foothold for content oversight. The FCC's "hoax" and "news distortion" rules exist, but both require knowingly false information causing direct, substantial public harm. Even CNN and Fox News’ most egregious headlines don’t come close.
What Carr wants is the power to be the arbiter of truth—the very shape of tyranny. Every authoritarian who has silenced the press invoked the same rationale: the public interest demands it. Even Republican Sen. Ron Johnson issued a stern rebuke, calling it "heavy-handed."
As Carr himself posted to X in 2019: "Should the government censor speech it doesn't like? Of course not. The FCC does not have a roving mandate to police speech in the name of the public interest."
The hypocrisy is staggering. Trump said he was “thrilled” by the threat.
Coming Next Week: Paid Subscriptions
A reminder: starting March 27th, Friday deep-dives move behind a paywall. More details on signing up coming within the next few days.
As a founding subscriber, you have early access to the introductory rate: $75 per year or $8 per month. That offer closes April 10th.
Counterstrikes
Where lazy and misleading government and media narratives, political spin, and conventional wisdom get challenged.
No, Russia and China Are Not Winning This War
"Russia Is the Big Winner," declared the Wall Street Journal. "As Vladimir Putin emerges as the winner," a Bloomberg article began. Three weeks into the war, a consensus has hardened in Western media: Russia and China are the real victors. The argument rests primarily on two claims — surging oil revenues and depleted Western interceptor stocks. Both deserve straight answers. Neither touches the argument that matters most.
The oil spike is real. Russia's Urals crude nearly doubled after Hormuz closed, from roughly $40 to $72 a barrel, pulling Moscow's budget back from the edge. But Putin himself called it "certainly temporary" and told his own officials to plan accordingly. The other side of the ledger: Iran's Shahed drone factories — which fed Russia 44,000 drones in 2025 alone, including an 810-drone single-night assault on Ukrainian civilians in September — are now rubble. Ukraine has been the world's most brutal testing ground for drone warfare. Those destroyed production lines matter more to Kyiv's survival than any temporary oil spike hurts it.
The interceptor shortage is the critics' strongest argument. Rubio acknowledged the U.S. produces only six or seven PAC-3s monthly while Iran’s manufactured 100 missiles in the same period, and the Gulf campaign has burned through stocks Ukraine desperately needs. But this was already a problem before the war, and Iranian missile production capacity has been decimated. What the critics missed: in January, Lockheed Martin signed a landmark agreement to triple PAC-3 production — from 600 to 2,000 annually by 2030. The shortage is real today. The trajectory runs the other way.
That leaves the deterrent effect, which few Western media outlets are covering. As always, those closest to tyranny see it most clearly. "The regimes in Russia and Iran are brothers in hatred," Zelenskyy told Britain's Parliament last week, "and that is why they are brothers in weapons." He has watched Russia deploy Iranian technology against his people for four years.
The war's outcome is uncertain. The rubble of that alliance's armory is not.
China loses on every axis. It was buying 1.38 million barrels of Iranian oil daily — 12% of its total crude —quietly relabeled as Malaysian to evade sanctions. That lifeline is severed. Combined with lost Venezuelan supplies, Beijing faces roughly an 18% shortfall in cheap oil. Its flagship air defense export was simultaneously exposed: HQ-9B batteries protecting Tehran's nuclear sites fired no interceptors across 12 hours of American strikes — the same system that failed against India in May.
20% of world oil flows through Hormuz. The war has shown, in live footage, what happens when a hostile power controls those four miles — and what it costs when that power is destroyed. The Taiwan Strait carries an estimated 40 to 50% of global container trade. Beijing has now watched American resolve respond to a closed chokepoint in real time, as 115 nations — a record at the UN's maritime body — lined up to condemn Iran's closure.
165 Little Girls
An Iranian father got a phone call. His daughter had survived the first strike on her school in Minab. He rushed to her. Before he arrived, a second missile hit, and she was gone.
The Shajareh Tayyebeh girls' elementary school — its walls painted with crayons and flowers — was struck three times on the morning of February 28th. At least 165 girls between seven and 12 years old never came home.
It now appears increasingly likely the U.S. is responsible. The NYT, CNN, and Washington Post all report a preliminary Pentagon investigation found officers used outdated targeting data, placing the school — 74 meters from an IRGC compound — on the strike list. Video shows a Tomahawk cruise missile, striking the adjacent site. Trump said last week: "Based on what I've seen, that was done by Iran." He later claimed Iran "also has some Tomahawks" — dismissed by every munitions expert on record. The Pentagon says it is investigating.
War is hell. Fog of war is real. But that is no excuse for a catastrophic intelligence failure.
We must also bear witness to what Iran's regime has cost its own children — and those of others. The hundreds of Iranian children gunned down in the streets on January 8th and 9th. Mahsa Amini beaten to death at 22 for a loosened hijab. The Syrian children buried under rubble in a war Tehran funded and prolonged. The Ukrainian families torn apart by Iranian Shahed drones. They had families too.
But there is no making this right. There is only one thing that matters now: that Trump's lie cannot stand. Iranians have been lied to by their own government for 47 years. They deserve truth from the country that dropped the bomb — and the voice in their government to ensure it never happens again.
These 165 little girls must not have died in vain.
Refer a Friend:
If you've enjoyed this episode of Dispatches from the Rebellion, please consider referring a friend. Forward this email and ask them to click on the "Subscribe" button below to sign up.
|