Cuba: Postmortem of the Communist Revolution

But they can also get much better. With proper reforms overseen by the highly educated and well-heeled Cuban diaspora, the island’s economic growth could mirror that of Chile, which implemented free-market economic reforms after the overthrow of the Marxist President Salvador Allende in 1973, or Poland, which started its transition from communism to capitalism with the Balcerowicz Plan in 1989. Both countries were once basket cases, but are now widely recognized as regional success stories. If that happens, other desirables, such as renovated town centers, functioning sewage systems, better roads, and cleaner hospitals, will follow.

But one of the lessons that even a well-executed transition from communism to capitalism teaches us is this: Change takes time and is disruptive. A worker who loses his job because a loss-making enterprise (“loss-making” is the crucial term here) ceases to be propped up by the taxpayer does not blame the central planner for designing a factory that produces stuff that nobody wants to buy. He blames the capitalist who reallocates capital and human resources toward enterprises that can produce goods and services that people at home and abroad desire. Jobs are destroyed, and new ones are created. That churning is the essence of capitalism. It is, in part, what makes Americans rich.

Then there is the money illusion, or the human tendency to focus on nominal prices. Economic transitions are often accompanied by inflation. The Cuban peso, like Eastern European currencies before the fall of the Berlin Wall, is not freely traded. Its value is set by the authorities, leading to as high as a 24-fold gap between (imaginary) official and (real) black-market rates. The same can be said of foodstuffs. Bread is dirt cheap but rationed, and so it commands much higher prices on the black market. That is an old communist trick. Keep the official prices low to boast of how much ordinary people can afford relative to wages, even though, in practice, officially priced goods are hard to come by. When the peso starts floating freely, expect its value to plummet and prices of many goods to skyrocket.

Also, privatization of previously nationalized or state-built enterprises can be accompanied by corruption. That is especially true when the privatizing entity, usually a government-appointed board of some kind, either consists of or is connected to members of the former regime. As was the case in Slovakia, Hungary, and—most notoriously—Russia, self-dealing can have several deleterious consequences. First, it rewards, rather than punishes, ex-communists. Second, it extends ex-communist influence in society. Third, it leads to incompetent management and prolongs economic adjustment. Therefore, extreme care must be taken to offload state assets in a maximally transparent way (such as a blind auction) and, preferably, under international supervision. Importantly, privatization should be open to foreign (including diaspora) entrepreneurs who will bring with them tacit knowledge, including best accounting and production practices.

These issues matter, because humans suffer from selective memory and nostalgia. Returning to the Central (formerly “Eastern”) Europe of my childhood, as I occasionally do, I am struck by what people remember and what they have forgotten about life under communism. Gone are the recollections of long lines in front of stores selling stuff sophisticated Western customers would not glance at. Gone are the memories of widespread bribery that greased the wheels of commerce: “Are you sure you are out of this particular medicine?” Here is a bit of money “to look again.” Shortages? Never heard of them. Conversely, people love to remember (official) prices and contrast them with the present. Wage increases are seldom factored in. Capitalism is blamed for all that still ails society, while socialism is more fondly remembered by the old and idealistically reimagined by the young.

Left-wing demagogues use such quirks of human psychology to salvage from a century of socialist disasters some “positives” and to minimize the salutary effects of free enterprise. That is particularly true of Cuba—a tiny island nation that has for decades withstood the pressure from the American behemoth, thereby winning progressive admiration. Thus, before the Cuba of Che Guevara and the Castro brothers disappears over the memory horizon, it is vital to set the record straight and separate the reality from the myth.

Let us start with the promise of the Cuban Revolution that brought the communists to power in 1959.

Novelist Norman Mailer said Castro was “the first and greatest, hero to appear in the world since the Second World War.” Susan Sontag wrote, “Ever since my three-month visit to Cuba in the summer of 1960, the Cuban revolution has been dear to me, and Che, along with Fidel, have been heroes and cherished models.” French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre called Che Guevara “the most complete human being of our age.” His partner, Simone de Beauvoir, wrote of her visit to Cuba, “For the first time in our lives, we were witnessing happiness that had been attained by violence.” Activist Malcolm X praised Cuba’s race relations, while the once-influential sociologist C. Wright Mills praised the revolutionaries for their humanity.

Obviously, things turned out differently.

According to Cuban American journalist Frank Zimmerman’s new book 12 Myths about Cuba: The Power of Narrative, Cuba’s communist regime bears responsibility for thousands of dead and millions forced into exile. From the outset, Castro reinstated the death penalty, ordered firing squad executions, and interned tens of thousands in prisons and forced-labor camps. Che Guevara personally directed summary executions at La Cabaña fortress. Between 25,000 and 30,000 Cubans were sent to forced-labor camps for being gay, religious, or ideologically “deviant.” State-induced scarcity, economic collapse, and a tourism-driven survival economy pushed many Cubans, including minors, into prostitution during the Special Period in the 1990s.

The regime proclaimed the end of racism by decree in 1959, then systematically betrayed Afro-Cubans. For example, the “pre-criminal social dangerousness” law, which allowed imprisonment without a crime, was most frequently applied to young Afro-Cubans. During the July 11, 2021, protests over deteriorating economic conditions made worse by the COVID-19 pandemic, black Cubans were prominent among those arrested, beaten, and given sentences. Structural racism was replaced not with equality but with superficial, folkloric representation on state media. Diversity is permitted only when it applauds power. The moment Afro-Cubans organize autonomously or dissent, repression follows.

In 1958, Cuba’s per-capita GDP topped the equivalent of $24,000 in today’s dollars, placing it among the most prosperous economies in Latin America. By 2025, official figures put it at roughly $7,500—a number Zimmerman finds far too high. Poverty was never eliminated. Instead, it was centralized, rationed, and weaponized as a control mechanism. Private enterprise was dismantled, and independent economic activity criminalized. The military conglomerate GAESA captures an estimated 37 percent of GDP. George Orwell, reflecting on the communist assertion that, “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs,” once famously retorted: “Yes, but where is the omelet?” That’s a question as appropriate regarding Cuba as any other socialist disaster zone.

And so, the left-wing salvage operation got underway.

In 2016, Barack Obama said to Raul Castro, “Look, you’ve made great progress in educating young people. Every child in Cuba gets a basic education. That’s a huge improvement from where it was. Medical care—the life expectancy of Cubans is equivalent to the United States despite it being a very poor country, because they have access to health care. That’s a huge achievement. They should be congratulated.” (To his credit, Obama also noted that the Cuban “economy is not working.”) In 2020, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders said, “We’re very opposed to the authoritarian nature of Cuba. But you know, it’s unfair to simply say everything is bad. When Fidel Castro came into office, you know what he did? He had a massive literacy program. Is that a bad thing? Even though Fidel Castro did it.”

Likewise, Justin Trudeau opined that “Mr. Castro made significant improvements to the education and healthcare of his island nation.” “They have a superb health system, perhaps the best on earth,” Jimmy Carter explained. Lesser figures, such as Ted Turner and Michael Moore made similar observations. Finally, Nicholas Kristof opined on the pages of the New York Times, “Cuba in health care does an impressive job that the United States could learn from … an American infant is, by official statistics, almost 50 percent more likely to die than a Cuban infant. … A major strength of the Cuban system is that it assures universal access. Cuba has the Medicare for All that many Americans dream about.”

What do the facts say?

Before the revolution, Cuba already had a 76 percent literacy rate, among the highest in Latin America. The pre-Castro republic had functioning universities, a pluralistic press, competing political parties, and educators like Ana Echegoyen Montalvo, who led a national adult-literacy campaign in the mid-1950s. That history was deliberately buried because the regime needed the fiction of an illiterate past to make its harsh rule more defensible. The 1961 literacy campaign did not teach reading so much as it brainwashed the populace. To learn the letter “F,” Cuban children read, “The rifle is Fidel’s; faith sharpens his ideas; the island puts its faith in him.” Every letter was saturated in ideology. What Western leaders praised as emancipation was, in practice, the regime’s first attempt at mass indoctrination.

The same logic governed formal schooling. From primary school onward, children were enrolled in the José Martí Pioneer Organization, chanting daily, “Pioneers for communism: we shall be like Che.” University admission depended less on academic merit than on ideological reliability, including participation in the Union of Young Communists, attendance at political rallies, and demonstrated conformity to official doctrine. Chile, Uruguay, and Costa Rica achieved comparable educational outcomes without criminalizing dissent or converting classrooms into instruments of surveillance.

The infant mortality figures, the life expectancy comparisons, and the doctors-per-capita ratios similarly fail to describe what really happens when an ordinary Cuban gets sick. Two medical systems operate on the island simultaneously. One serves party cadres, senior military officers, and foreign visitors with hard currency, at showcase institutions like CIMEQ—a well-stocked, functional, and carefully photographed center for medical and surgical research. The other is endured by everyone else: hospitals where operating rooms lose power without warning; where antibiotics are a luxury; where patients are routinely told to bring their own syringes, gauze, painkillers, and bed linens.

According to Zimmerman and other Cuban writers, the average Cuban wage in 2025 stood at approximately $17 a month, which is not enough to purchase basic medicines. What the regime presents as universal healthcare dissolves, at the hospital door, into an informal economy of bribes, favors, and political connections. Care follows loyalty, not clinical urgency. Dissidents report deliberate denial of treatment and medical records share filing cabinets with political profiles.

The island’s medical export program—currently about 25,000 Cuban doctors are deployed in 56 countries—is often held up as proof of the revolution’s success and generosity. It is, in practice, the island’s most lucrative industry and, by the account of serious international observers, a system of forced labor. Host governments pay the Cuban state between $10,000 and $12,000 per doctor per month. The doctors themselves receive between 2.5 and 20 percent of that sum, meaning a physician in Venezuela might pocket $250 to $300 while Havana collects more than $10,000, and one in Qatar keeps roughly $1,000 of the $5,000 to $10,000 paid on his behalf. In 2018, this arrangement generated approximately $6.4 billion for the regime, accounting for Cuba’s single largest source of foreign revenue. The U.S. State Department’s Trafficking in Persons Report has cited that figure as evidence of forced labor.

If economic and political freedoms survive, future generations will not have to wait in lines for basic goods. They will not have to memorize the propaganda alphabet or bribe the pharmacist for aspirin. They will encounter Cuba the way most people encounter much of history: through the curated myths of admirers, the selective memory of nostalgists, and the romantic imagination of ideologues who never had to live inside the system they celebrate. That is precisely why the Cuban record matters. The literacy campaigns were indoctrination. The hospitals were a two-tier lie. The doctors were, by any serious legal definition, coerced labor. Cuba was not a social-justice experiment that failed for want of resources. It was a system that could not produce resources. It was also a system designed to concentrate power, and it succeeded at that completely. Forgetting these facts about Cuba is not compassionate. It is the precondition for repeating it.