OPINION English edition of José Luis Tan Estrada’s column originally published in Spanish on March 22, 2026.
The comparison between Cuba and Haiti raises a truth the Cuban regime has spent decades trying to bury beneath propaganda. The island that supposedly built the hemisphere’s most advanced socialism now faces scenes of deprivation that recall those of Haiti: hunger, broken infrastructure and people who see no future at home.
This is a political comparison of hardship, not a statistical ranking proving that Cuba is poorer than Haiti on every measure. Its force lies in the images, the failures of daily life and the testimony of Cubans who would rather leave their country than continue enduring the intolerable.
Politicians who look for an external enemy to explain away their own failures are avoiding the question that matters: what have they done to their own people?
In this Spanish-language segment, Cubanos por el Mundo Live looks at a Cuba left without electricity and flooded while its leaders stay under air conditioning, under the title “Ni en Haití se vive así” (“Not even in Haiti do people live like this”).
What is most revealing is not the comparison alone. It is the role of corruption, failed institutions and unaccountable power in both countries’ suffering. There is one stark difference: Haiti, at least, does not have communism.
In this column
The embargo as an all-purpose excuse
When the Cuban regime explains its failures—endless blackouts, empty shelves, hospitals without medicine and crumbling roads—it always points in the same direction: the U.S. embargo. It is the catchall excuse that absolves those in power of responsibility.
Haiti is not subject to Cuba’s U.S. embargo. It trades with the United States and other countries and has received extensive international assistance. Yet it still faces extreme poverty, institutional breakdown, violence and hunger. An external embargo is plainly not a necessary explanation for national failure.
Systemic corruption, entrenched incompetence and repression can destroy a country from within. Those are the forces that have devastated Cuba for decades.
What the U.S. embargo does and does not block
The embargo is real, but it is not a ban on food or medicine. Under the Trade Sanctions Reform and Export Enhancement Act of 2000, U.S. agricultural commodities can be exported to Cuba, and the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security states that medicines and medical devices, “whether sold or donated, are generally approved.”
Haiti carries no comparable U.S. embargo. Even so, the World Bank describes Haiti as the poorest country in Latin America and the Caribbean, with an estimated 50.8% of its people living on less than $3.00 a day. Sanctions alone cannot explain the suffering in either country.
Cubanos por el Mundo has also examined Granma’s case against U.S. sanctions, the official newspaper’s attempt to present the embargo as a blockade.
Cuba and Haiti: the same abuses, the same suffering
Haiti and Cuba share a catalog of problems rooted in the exercise of power for the benefit of a narrow elite. Public resources are drained while ordinary people sink deeper into hardship. Corruption ceases to be an exception and becomes a way of governing. Those who challenge powerful interests can pay with their liberty or their lives.
“Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
Lord Acton, letter to Mandell Creighton, April 5, 1887.
READ ALSO: Cubans search for water to bathe in the ruins of a sugar mill.
Communism: the additional burden Haiti does not have
Cuba has an additional burden: communism as its legal, economic and political framework. In Haiti, private enterprise is not prohibited by a communist system, even though insecurity and institutional collapse impose formidable obstacles. In Cuba, entrepreneurial independence is treated as a potential political threat. The state monitors, restricts, fines and confiscates, and can turn economic disputes into persecution.
Cuba does not merely suffer from corruption and institutional decay. It also bears a system that treats independent prosperity as suspect and personal success as a potential offense against the Revolution.
In a 1945 Commons speech, Winston Churchill contrasted capitalism’s unequal distribution of benefits with what he called socialism’s “equal sharing of miseries.” The parliamentary record preserves that criticism.
Cuban socialism has failed to deliver prosperity, but it has succeeded at a different goal: concentrating power in a few hands, eliminating economic and political competitors, and keeping citizens dependent on the state.
A system that relies on resources generated by others eventually confronts the limits of that dependence. A society that punishes entrepreneurs, distrusts individual success and treats initiative as subversion condemns itself to misery through its own internal barriers.
The real blockade: the regime’s barriers against its own people
There is a real blockade in Cuba: the restrictions the Castro regime has imposed on its citizens for decades. They operate throughout daily life and have undermined the freedom to produce, trade and prosper.
They constrain farmers’ ability to sell their crops freely and workers’ ability to choose how to earn a living. Historically, the regime criminalized dollar possession and tightly restricted private enterprise. Subsequent concessions have not established secure, predictable rights to import goods, build a business or accumulate wealth independently of political permission.
The deepest deprivation is not simply a shortage of money. It is the absence of freedom to change one’s circumstances.
Private initiative is more than an economic mechanism. It is a concrete expression of individual liberty. The regime understands that connection: a Cuban who can support a family without depending on the state has less need of the regime.
A government that subordinates liberty to enforced equality risks depriving its citizens of both.
Cuba’s potential is still there
Haiti bears deep problems and a tragic history of interventions, dictatorships and natural disasters. None of that should be minimized. Its difficulties cannot be reduced to one cause, nor should the country be used as a caricature.
Cuba’s distinctive obstacle is a political ideology that turns state control into a permanent governing principle. The island has natural resources, an entrepreneurial population, an advantageous location and a prosperous diaspora willing to invest and build. Miami offers compelling evidence of what Cubans can accomplish in freedom.
Under a different political system, Cuba could become one of the Caribbean’s most dynamic economies. Those possibilities have been squandered since 1959.
A country that refuses to confront its history risks repeating the same failures.
The question is not whether Cuba can escape misery. It is how much longer Cubans will tolerate rulers who keep stealing that opportunity from them.
