Every official visit begins with an itinerary. In Havana, the itinerary is often the argument.
A visitor is received at the Palace of the Revolution. He is shown institutions that can be photographed. He meets officials, representatives of approved civil society, people whose presence affirms that the country still possesses a social conscience beneath the shortages and the darkness. Then the itinerary returns him to the airport, and the state is left with what it wanted from the beginning: not a verdict, exactly, but a picture of itself waiting to become one.
On July 22, Miguel Díaz-Canel received George Katrougalos, the United Nations independent expert on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order. Cuban state media said Katrougalos had come on an academic visit, met with officials and UN representatives, and visited the Latin American School of Medicine and a social-care program in Havana. Díaz-Canel used the meeting to describe the United States’ economic and energy pressure as a violation of the Cuban people’s essential rights. (granma.cu)
The setting is almost too precise. Cuba is a country whose government has spent sixty-seven years insisting that its moral case must be heard internationally, while arranging domestic life so that Cubans themselves cannot make a comparable case without permission. The regime understands the architecture of legitimacy. It knows that a conference room, a visiting expert, a delegation badge, and a carefully chosen institution can make a system of coercion appear less like a prison and more like a dispute.
The trick is not that every fact presented to the visitor is false. The trick is that truth can be rationed.
Cuba’s emergency is real. The energy restrictions imposed by Washington have deepened a crisis already punishing families who did not design the Cuban state and cannot vote its leaders out. Havana and Santiago de Cuba have faced major water-supply disruptions tied chiefly to the lack of fuel for pumping, the United Nations said this month. A country cannot sustain hospitals, kitchens, transport, refrigeration, or ordinary dignity on slogans. (un.org)
That is the strongest case for taking Díaz-Canel’s complaint seriously. No defender of liberty should pretend that economic strangulation becomes humane because its target is an authoritarian government. The elderly waiting for water, the mother trying to preserve food, the patient searching for medicine do not become agents of the Communist Party merely because the Party claims to speak for them. Washington’s policy can injure a regime and a population at the same time. It does.
Katrougalos is therefore not wrong to examine the international order that has made Cuba’s present misery more acute. An independent expert who ignored the material consequences of external pressure would be performing a different kind of pageantry: the pageantry of moral cleanliness from a safe distance.
But an itinerary is not an investigation.
The Cuban government wants the world to see the harm done to Cubans by the United States. It is much less eager for the world to see what it does to Cubans when there is no American official in the room. Human Rights Watch reported this month that hundreds of people remain imprisoned after the July 2021 demonstrations and that former detainees described beatings, solitary confinement, and inadequate medical care. Amnesty International has likewise documented state repression against independent activists and rights defenders. (hrw.org)
These are not marginal defects in an otherwise functioning system. They are the system’s load-bearing walls.
A government that speaks grandly of a democratic international order while denying political pluralism at home is asking foreign visitors to accept a peculiar division of labor. The world is invited to defend Cubans’ right to health, food, development, and sovereignty. Cubans are not invited to exercise sovereignty over the state that claims those rights in their name. They may endure the shortage. They may applaud the resistance. They may emigrate. What they may not reliably do is organize an independent alternative and test it at the ballot box.
That is why the regime’s language sounds increasingly like a room with all the doors painted on.
The tragedy is that Cuba once had a different door, briefly ajar. Between 2015 and 2017, the opening between Havana and Washington did not promise innocence or redemption. It did not erase the machinery of repression, or dissolve the military economy, or make the Communist Party suddenly answerable to the people it governed. It did something smaller and more dangerous: it reduced the usefulness of the permanent siege.
That was the opening’s real threat to Havana. A Cuban government deprived of its oldest external alibi might have had to explain more of its failures in the plain language of governance. Why was food scarce? Why was enterprise constrained? Why were independent voices treated as enemies? Why did so many young Cubans see departure as the only reform that reliably arrived?
The window closed because neither government could sustain that exposure. Washington returned to punishment as ritual. Havana returned to resistance as absolution. The 2015-2017 opening cannot be reassembled now from the pieces on the floor. The trust is gone, the conditions are worse, and both capitals have learned to prefer theater to risk.
So the visiting expert’s itinerary matters. Not because it proves that Cuba’s complaint is empty. It is not. The island is being harmed, and ordinary Cubans are paying for decisions made in Havana and Washington alike.
It matters because a route can be honest without being complete.
A visitor may see a medical school, a care center, a ministry, a palace. He may hear, correctly, about fuel, water, medicine, and the cruel arithmetic of pressure. But until the route also leads to the people whose words the state cannot safely script, the itinerary remains what it began as: a line drawn carefully around the country Cuba’s rulers do not want anyone to see.
Natalia Suyos writes for Cuba Journal on Business.
