
There’s this fascinating mythologizing phenomenon called “Cuba de Ayer.” The wealthy mostly white Cubans who left immediately after the revolution and got all their shit taken created this mythology that everything was perfect before the revolution, not acknowledging all the racism and economic inequality because they were up top.
This then got transmitted to the new generation of migrants, who mostly left because of Cuba’s bad economic situation. This creates this idea by Cuban-Americans that everything bad in Cuba is because of socialism. It ignores the impact of sanctions and that quality of life is consistently better than before the revolution.
I’m all for criticizing the Cuban government. Corruption does exist. It is authoritarian. Their economy has been absolutely fucked in a large part by an over-reliance on sugarcane. But none of that is shit that wasn’t the case during the Batista days. This mythology doesn’t go “the Cuban government is flawed” it goes “capitalism makes everything good and everything bad is socialism”