Originally published in Spanish on May 14, 2026.
Opinion | A political and historical response to those who accuse Cuban exiles of waiting for others to do what they have not dared to do themselves.
Whenever the Cuban regime enters another seemingly terminal crisis, an old genre returns to social media: the moral indictment of Cubans abroad. The wording is always familiar. We are supposedly lying around waiting for the Americans to fix everything. We supposedly issue demands from air-conditioned comfort, asking others to die for us. Calling for decisive U.S. action, we are told, is begging — and begging, as Maceo said, is for cowards.
The curious part is that this accusation does not come only from Havana. Some of the regime’s most brazen advocates repeat it from the United States. They write from apartments in Hialeah, Tampa or New Jersey, spared the misery ordinary Cubans endure, with three meals a day, uninterrupted electricity, running water, unlimited internet and the freedom to criticize America without going to prison for doing so. People sustained by the very system they claim to despise have become some of the fiercest preachers of guilt against the Cuban exile community. The hypocrisy scarcely needs refuting. But it needs naming, or it will keep poisoning Cuba’s public debate.
This reproach has appeared across three centuries. Autonomists directed it at Martí. Liberal Party intellectuals repeated it against the veterans of 1895. Under Castroism, regime loyalists used it against those who left on the Freedom Flights, the Mariel boatlift, rafts and, later, the routes through Central America after the July 11 protests. The messengers change; the script does not. In the historical moment addressed by the May 11, 2026, Axios report on possible U.S. military action, the accusation deserves a serious answer. Arguments, rather than insults.
Table of Contents
The selective memory of 1898
Those who invoke the U.S. intervention of 1898 to reproach today’s exiles usually offer a sentimental version of history. The fuller account is different. Cuba’s independence fighters, the mambises, struggled for three decades, from the uprising at Yara in 1868 through the renewed war of 1895. Cuba will never finish repaying their sacrifice.
But the calls for American involvement did not come only from generals in the Cuban countryside. The Cuban Junta in New York, led by Tomás Estrada Palma — the exile community so often dismissed today — worked for resources, press coverage, lobbying and political support in Washington. Without Tampa, Key West and the New York cigar factories where Martí addressed workers who financed the war, the fighters would have lacked weapons, ammunition and international recognition. Exile was one of independence’s two pillars.
Another fact is often omitted: the United States, like any great power, acts according to its strategic interests. That is a historical constant to confront honestly. The serious question is whether those interests align with the Cuban people’s. In this column’s assessment, they do, for the first time in many decades.
First, there is national security. Cuba has become a platform for rival powers roughly 90 miles from Florida. Reports about Chinese technology at the Bejucal listening facility, visits by Russian military vessels and Havana’s ties with Iran and Venezuela inform the argument that the island now presents a strategic threat. Confronting that presence serves a legitimate American interest. It also serves Cubans seeking to recover the sovereignty the regime has surrendered, piece by piece, to Moscow, Caracas, Beijing and Tehran.
Second, there is narcotics trafficking. Those who portray the Castro regime as an innocent victim of imperialism overlook testimony dating to the 1980s. Medellín cartel figures, notably Carlos Lehder, have alleged in U.S. court proceedings that senior Cuban officials participated in cocaine smuggling toward the United States. The author reads the 1989 trial and execution of Arnaldo Ochoa and other officers as an attempt by the regime to erase compromising links. Cuba’s role in that history cannot simply be wished away. Fighting the networks involved serves U.S. interests and Cuba’s future institutions alike.
Third, there is migration. An uncontrolled collapse could send another immense wave toward Florida. Supporting a transition, rather than passively awaiting chaos, would serve an American interest that coincides with the Cuban desire to avoid another human exodus like the one of the preceding four years.
American interests therefore make cooperation possible. Major historical alliances are built on concrete interests that align, not on shared sentiment alone.
What the Cuban exile community has actually done
The accusation that three generations of Cuban exiles have sat on a couch, eating steak and demanding that others fight, runs into the historical record.
It was Cubans who landed at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961. Brigade 2506 lost 114 men, and 1,189 became prisoners of the Castro regime. This was no exercise conducted from an office. Exiled Cubans faced Soviet machine guns after a Democratic administration withheld the air support they had expected.
Thousands of Cuban Americans have served in the U.S. armed forces, from Vietnam to Afghanistan. Those who claim that exiles have never joined the American military erase the men who fought and died at Khe Sanh, Fallujah and Kandahar.
Cuban exiles also sustain families left on the island. Remittances pay for food and other necessities that the state economy fails to provide. Helping the people while pressing the regime that oppresses them is one of the most difficult moral dilemmas any diaspora faces. The Cuban exile community has carried that burden without turning away.
For six decades, exiles have kept the Cuban cause alive in international forums where the regime sought to bury it. They built news outlets, human rights organizations, bipartisan congressional advocacy, victim archives and academic centers. Work sustained across generations helped create the political moment in which a Cuban American headed the State Department. That did not fall from the sky. People built it.
Calling all of this comfort reveals an ignorance of history. The Cuban exile community has not been sitting idle.
Why 2026 is not 1895
The demand that Cubans at home and abroad take up machetes, enlist, organize and overthrow the regime with their own hands has an epic ring. It draws moral force from the saying attributed to Maceo: freedom is not begged for; it is won with the blade of a machete. But 2026 is not 1895.
In 1895 there were forests, mountains and terrain that made guerrilla warfare possible. Colonial surveillance depended on slow telegraphs, cumbersome military columns and a corrupt administration. Ports admitted arms, men and supplies. International reporters could cover the fighting. There were material conditions for a conventional armed insurrection.
In 2026 Cubans faced something else: a totalitarian state built over decades with Soviet and East German assistance and, later, ties to Chinese and Iranian security services. The Interior Ministry’s apparatus includes informants, neighborhood Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, electronic surveillance and controls over internet access. Severe prison sentences for dissent are part of that system.
Its willingness to use force has been demonstrated repeatedly: in the sinking of the 13 de Marzo tugboat in 1994, which the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights documented as killing 41 people, including children; in attacks involving boats carrying people trying to escape; in the imprisonment of July 11 protesters; and in sustained repression of the Ladies in White, the San Isidro Movement, artists, priests and independent journalists.
Asking unarmed Cubans to confront that apparatus alone, without viable underground organization, geographic refuge or concrete international support, is asking for suicide. What Cubans have shown they can do, when circumstances allow, is protest peacefully and in large numbers, as they did on July 11, 2021. That is the realistic front inside the island: take to the streets unarmed, calling for “Homeland and Life,” so the world can see the regime’s cruelty.
A Cuban filming a police officer beating a mother, a teenager in handcuffs or a Lady in White being dragged by her hair does more for freedom than the token charity offered by Puentes de Amor. Unarmed, exhausted Cubans cannot win this struggle alone. Images, testimony, international pressure and U.S. support can help them, as external support helped the independence movement against Spanish colonial rule.
The political moment addressed in this column differs from the Obama White House’s rapprochement, symbolized by John Kerry’s visit and photographs in Havana while dissidents were repressed nearby. It differs from the Biden administration’s four years of policy ambiguity. In the author’s judgment, decades of Democratic faith in dialogue and constructive engagement gave Havana time, breathing room and international legitimacy without delivering the promised reforms.
Marco Rubio, a Cuban American and son of exiles, brought both personal conviction and institutional authority to the State Department. His familiarity with the regime’s repression and its operators in Latin America matters. The difference, from this perspective, is between decades of indulgence and a change of doctrine.
Maceo was a strategist as well as a hero. Today he would use intelligence, international alliances, information, sustained economic pressure and opportunities for divisions within the state’s military apparatus. He would also recognize a moment when the hemisphere’s leading power aligned with the Cuban cause. Serious exile organizations have spent decades building toward that opening. Cubans protesting peacefully and showing the world the regime’s true face can help bring it to fruition.
Two fronts in the same struggle
The Cuban who took to the streets in Havana, Holguín or Palma Soriano on July 11, knowing prison or a beating might follow, is a hero. So is the Cuban American who spent four decades voting, donating, organizing, writing, documenting abuses and pressing the Cuban cause in Washington. Both fronts are legitimate and necessary. There is no moral hierarchy between them. Each works where it can.
That was Martí’s approach. While Maceo fought in Oriente, Martí organized in New York. While Gómez directed the military campaign, Estrada Palma worked for diplomatic pressure in Washington. None dismissed the others. Independence required both fronts. To call the Cuban exile community’s political work cowardice more than a century later is to misunderstand Martí.
Calling for action is not begging
Here is the central question: is the Cuban exile community begging when it asks Washington to take decisive action against Havana’s regime?
Begging means doing nothing and holding out a hand. Citizens and taxpayers organizing voting blocs, supporting campaigns, serving in Congress and the executive branch, building bipartisan coalitions, shaping legislation and exercising media influence are using political power available to every democratic community.
Irish Americans organized advocacy in Boston and New York. Jewish Americans built AIPAC. Polish Americans in Chicago supported Lech Wałęsa’s Solidarity movement. Armenians, Ukrainians and Taiwanese have organized as well. They were practicing politics, as effective diasporas do.
The greater irony is that Havana spends its days asking the world for help. Oil from Venezuela and Iran. Credit from China and Russia. Humanitarian aid from the European Union, the United Nations and any organization prepared to listen. An end to the embargo in every multilateral forum. Medicine donations, debt forgiveness and political protection from sanctions. The regime that condemns exiles for asking Washington for action asks endlessly itself. That double standard exposes the argument.
The hemisphere’s moment
If the intervention discussed in the May 2026 Axios report were to materialize, it would not show that exiles had lazily waited for Americans to solve everything. The author’s argument was that geopolitical conditions had aligned: Chinese, Russian and Iranian relationships with Havana, reports about listening facilities, military port visits and energy cooperation had made Cuba a strategic concern for Washington.
A renewed interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine, combined with a Cuban American heading U.S. diplomacy, could make the Caribbean a renewed priority. That would be geopolitics. It would also reflect three generations of sustained political work by Cuban exiles.
Without that pressure, Cuba’s cause might long ago have been forgotten. Without the exile community’s memory, the regime might have completed the international rehabilitation it repeatedly sought. History has authors, and the Cuban exile community is one of them.
The final question
To those who ask reproachfully what Cuban exiles have done over six decades, the answer is long and documented. But another question deserves an answer: what have you done?
History is written with organization, patience, discipline and generations that understand a people’s freedom is a long project. The front inside Cuba and the front abroad are equally necessary and honorable.
The author’s conviction at the time of writing was that Cuba stood closer to freedom than at any point since 1959. When that freedom comes, it will belong to those who resisted inside the country and those who organized abroad. As Martí put it, the homeland is an altar, not a pedestal. It must belong to everyone. History will give each contribution its due.
A free Cuba.
Editor’s note: As historical context, we reproduce below an English translation of the letter General Máximo Gómez, commander of the Liberation Army, addressed to President Grover Cleveland on February 9, 1897. Gómez asked the leading power in the hemisphere to act against Spanish atrocities toward Cuban civilians, while explicitly distinguishing that appeal from a request for intervention in Cuban affairs. The letter records a longstanding tradition of seeking outside support for Cuba’s freedom. Its nineteenth-century generalizations about Spaniards are reproduced as part of the historical document.
General Máximo Gómez’s letter to President Grover Cleveland
Sancti Spíritus, February 9, 1897
Mr. Grover Cleveland
President of the United StatesSir:
Allow a man whose soul is torn by the sight of unspeakable crimes to raise his voice before the supreme leader of a free, cultivated and powerful people.
Please do not regard this action as an untimely official gesture. You yourself authorized it by giving me a place in your last message to Congress.
Furthermore, I beg you not to consider it a request for intervention in our affairs. We Cubans entered this war trusting in our own strength. The wisdom of the American people alone must determine what course they should take.
I shall not speak of Cubans under arms. No; I raise my voice only on behalf of unarmed people of the Americas, victims of appalling cruelty. I raise it for weakness and innocence sacrificed in disregard of the elementary principles of humanity and the eternal maxims of Christian morality. They are brutally sacrificed in the closing years of the nineteenth century, at the very gates of the great nation that stands so high in modern culture, by a declining European monarchy whose sad distinction is to represent the horrors of the Middle Ages.
Our struggle with Spain has an aspect of great interest to the humanity of which you are such a noble example. To that aspect I wish to draw your distinguished attention.
Look around the world and you will see how everyone, with the possible exception of the peoples of the Americas, watches with indifference or merely sentimental sympathy the war that reddens the beautiful fields of fertile Cuba. They watch as though it had nothing to do with their interests or those of modern civilization, as though forgetting the duties of social brotherhood in this way were not a crime.
But you know that the matter concerns more than Cuba. The Americas, all Christendom and all humanity are outraged by Spain’s terrible barbarity.
The Spaniards fight desperately and are ashamed to explain the methods they employ in this war. But we knew those methods and expected them.
We accept it all as another sacrifice on the altar of Cuban independence.
Such conduct is consistent with the nation that expelled Jews and Moors; established and strengthened the terrible Inquisition; created the tribunals of blood in the Netherlands; annihilated the Indigenous people and exterminated Cuba’s first inhabitants; murdered thousands of its subjects in the South American wars of independence; and filled the cup of iniquity in the last war in Cuba.
It is natural for a people to act this way when superstitious and fanatical education, together with the vicissitudes of social and political life, has brought it to a kind of physiological deterioration that has set it back whole centuries on the scale of civilization.
It is unsurprising that such a people should proclaim murder as a system and a means of suppressing a war caused by its hunger for money and power. Killing the suspect, the criminal, the defenseless prisoner, the helpless wounded and anyone who might obstruct its devastating action: all this accords with the way the Spaniards have always understood and conducted war.
But to refuse to stop at the sacred and honored home, the embodiment of all that is peaceful and noble; to spare neither women, the emblem of weakness, nor children, the overwhelming symbol of harmless innocence; to bring constant, cruel destruction, ruin and murder upon them — ah, sir, how horrible this is! My pen falls from my hand at the thought. At times I doubt human nature as I contemplate, with tear-filled eyes, so many violated hearts, so many sacrificed women, so many children cruelly and needlessly destroyed by Spanish columns.
Unable to exercise sovereignty over Cuba’s interior, the Spaniards have forced farmers to concentrate in villages, where misery is expected to compel them to serve in the armies of a government they detest. These unfortunate people are forced to abandon the only livelihood that sustains them and are made to starve. They are also branded firm supporters of our arms, and a terrible, cruel persecution is directed against them, their wives and their children.
Should a civilized people tolerate such deeds? Can the powers of humanity, forgetting the fundamental principles of the Christian community, allow this to continue? Can a civilized people consent to the sacrifice of unarmed and defenseless men? Can the American people watch with guilty indifference the slow but complete extermination of thousands of innocent people of the Americas? No. You have declared that they cannot, that such acts of barbarity must neither be permitted nor tolerated. We have seen your admirable initiative in vigorously protesting the slaughter of Europeans and Christians in Armenia and China, denouncing it with sincere force.
Knowing this, I address you today frankly and faithfully, and declare that I cannot wholly prevent the acts of vandalism I deplore.
It is not enough to protect the families of Cubans who join us, or for my troops, following civilization’s example, to respect and immediately release prisoners of war, tend the enemy’s wounded and avoid reprisals. The Spaniards appear unmoved by any persuasion unbacked by force.
Ah, sir, the hardships of this cruel struggle have caused great pain in the heart of an old and unfortunate father. Yet nothing has made me suffer as much as the horrors I describe, unless it is seeing you remain indifferent to them.
Tell the Spaniards that they may fight us and treat us as they wish, but that they must respect the peaceful population, must not violate women and must not massacre innocent children.
You have a noble and admirable precedent for such action. Read the infamous proclamation of the Spanish General Balmaceda in 1869, which in practice announced a repetition of this war, and remember the honorable and noble protest the Secretary of State made against it.
The American people rightfully lead the Western Hemisphere. They must no longer tolerate the cold, systematic murder of defenseless people of the Americas, lest history hold them complicit in these atrocities.
Follow the noble example you previously set. Your conduct will also rest firmly on the Monroe Doctrine. It cannot concern only the usurpation of American territories without defending American peoples against European ambitions. It cannot mean protecting American soil while leaving its defenseless inhabitants exposed to the cruelty of a bloodthirsty and despotic European power. It must extend to defending the principles that animate modern civilization and form an integral part of American culture and life.
Crown your honorable career as a statesman with a noble act of Christian charity. Tell Spain that murder must cease, that cruelty must cease, and place the seal of your authority upon your words. Thousands of hearts will invoke eternal blessings upon your memory, and God, the most merciful, will see in it the most worthy work of your life.
I am your humble servant,
Máximo Gómez
