Worth's questions about American policy produced another revealing exchange. During nine days of travel, he had not met a single person who blamed Donald Trump or the United States for their situation.
He sometimes reminded people about the blockade and asked whether conditions had worsened. Retired engineer Guillermo Almeida told him he saw no change since January. Venezuelan oil, he explained, had not been reaching ordinary Cubans anyway. Another man offered a concise explanation: "It seems to us that the real embargo is inside of Cuba." Worth's questions suggest he was trying to establish the consequences of Trump's blockade. The Cubans' answers kept taking him back to the consequences of their own government.
Worth acknowledged that the pandemic devastated tourism and reduced remittances from relatives abroad. Those developments made an already depleted state weaker. They do not explain six decades of political control, economic mismanagement, and repression. The Atlantic Council's examination of Cuba's state-run economy describes a failure years in the making.
Worth also visited a Catholic nursing home in Havana. Its residents included former government employees and military officers abandoned by the state and their families. One former soldier had fought in Angola and carried a tattoo of Che Guevara, acquired when he was eighteen. He had once believed in the revolution. Now he wanted its leaders gone. Even men who had served the revolutionary project were spending their final years in an institution run by the Church.
Worth's final stop was Santa Ifigenia Cemetery in Santiago, where Fidel Castro's ashes are kept. The grounds were immaculate. Soldiers in pressed uniforms performed a precise changing of the guard to patriotic music. Then a breeze carried the acrid smell of burning garbage across the cemetery.
The revolutionary shrine was pristine. The country it left behind was not.
There is an irony in Worth's reporting. He went to an island celebrated by the American Left for its socialist achievements. He encountered a priest feeding the hungry, elderly women begging for survival, a nurse struggling without supplies, and citizens who had lost faith in their government. His reporting placed socialism's celebrated promises beside the lives of the people who were supposed to benefit.
For Cuban-Americans, the contrast is deeply personal. Here in the United States, we take pride in our Cuban roots. We celebrate our heritage, culture, food, music, and the history our families carried with them. We did not leave Cuba because we were ashamed of being Cuban. We left because a political system made it impossible to live with freedom and dignity.
Worth encountered people on the island who had not lost their Cuban identity. They had lost hope in the country where they were born. Here, Cuban is a badge of honor. There, it has become a burden of birth.
Worth may not have set out to write an indictment of socialism. But his reporting brought him face to face with the distance between the socialist ideal celebrated abroad and the reality endured at home. Whether he has reconciled that contradiction is his question to answer. The journalist's journey is the story. His tribulation is the confrontation between what he thought he knew and what he discovered.
Cuba's collapse is the evidence. The people's testimony is the indictment.
Luis Gonzalez writes about power, politics, and what happens when you look behind the story.
Image: Pixabay
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