This op-ed was written by Elena Gutiérrez, Global Exchange’s Mexico–U.S. Program Director, and was originally published in Spanish in La Jornada on May 24, 2026. The following is an English translation.
Since January 2026, when the intensification of U.S. policies aimed at suffocating the Cuban people began, I have had the opportunity to travel to the island three times. Each time I return with my heart a little more broken, but also with a stronger conviction that we need to defend Cuba.
As a Mexican, I have received, on behalf of my compatriots, thousands of expressions of gratitude and thousands of hugs that the Cuban people send to the Mexican people. As my good friend Amado tells me: for us, you are Mexico. Every time I am there, I speak about the empathy and understanding we have toward Cuba, about the great efforts ordinary Mexicans make to bring a few kilos of rice to collection centers; and when I listen to Cubans, I learn a little more about the deep history that unites us.
But as a Mexican American and a binational activist, I also carry the weight of understanding the average U.S. citizen. After many years of living in and trying to grasp the United States, I continue to be surprised by how deeply the dream of democracy lives within people there, despite the fact that the country has been experiencing a deepening democratic crisis for years.
What the bipartisan system of so-called U.S. democracy has done to the Cuban people for decades — despite the efforts of the Obama administration — is now being reflected within the very core of the empire itself. It is suffered not only by migrants, Native Americans, Black communities, and the historically oppressed. Today, that same yoke has reached a white middle class that is beginning to feel the collapse of freedoms originally created for them.
What does the United States have to learn from Latin America? The U.S. people can learn from a long history of struggle against their own empire and from the long construction of democratic processes from below that go far beyond elections themselves. What does the United States have to learn from Cuba? Everything, absolutely everything.
The resilience and social fabric the Cuban people have built are unique, just as unique as the oppression caused by the blockade the U.S. government has maintained for all these decades. The United States needs public healthcare, free access to university education, affordable housing. It needs to stop investing the millions it spends on war and instead invest them in its own people. Cuba has done that.
The dream of democracy in any country is built beyond the ballot box, through projects that people themselves embrace and carry out. Today, the United States has the opportunity to prove to itself and to the world that the mistakes committed by its government do not reflect the desires of the U.S. people. Today, as C. Wright Mills said 60 years ago, “Cuba’s voice must be heard in the United States, because the United States is too powerful and its responsibilities to the world and to itself are too great for its people not to hear the voices coming from the hungry world.”
The United States is preparing for another electoral cycle while its policies of war and interventionism throughout the Global South gets reaffirmed.
At the same time, the island of 10 million inhabitants is preparing to continue resisting in the face of the possibility of an attack. In its “Family Guide for Protection in Case of Military Aggression,” one can read recommendations for what to pack in a backpack: identification, a radio, candles, food, medicine, and toys to help distract children.
A recently published poll by the Center for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), a think tank based in Washington, D.C., reveals that more than 60 percent of U.S. citizens oppose a war with Cuba. At the same time, solidarity networks with Cuba in the United States — which have existed since the beginning of the blockade — are reactivating with renewed strength.
But can U.S. citizens truly stop the madness their own empire imposes on them and on the rest of the world? Let us hope so, because only the people of the United States — and no one else — can carry out the transformations their own country needs. Only then will Cuba, the United States, Mexico, and the rest of the world be free.