Cuba and the Migratory Paradox: Between Propaganda and Economic Siege

If in Latin America migration to the United States can be explained by structural inequality and the seduction of the “American dream,” in Cuba that dynamic acquires an even more complex dimension. Here we are not only speaking of the comparison between economic models, but of more than six decades of systematic harassment, economic blockade, and hostile propaganda, which have turned the act of emigrating into a response conditioned by a political and media machinery designed in the North.

Cuba, despite its shortages, guarantees what in much of the region remains a luxury: free education, universal healthcare, public safety, and access to culture and sports without exclusion. And yet, a significant portion of its population dreams of emigrating. Contradiction? Yes, but not a spontaneous one: it is the result of a silent and prolonged war.

The economic blockade imposed by the United States for more than 65 years is not collateral damage; it is a planned instrument of pressure. Every shortage of medicine, every difficulty in food production, every limitation in technological connectivity is crossed by that siege. The objective is clear: to generate within the population the sensation that the Cuban social system is unviable, that life on the island is a dead end.

To this material asphyxiation is added the deceptive advertising of the “American model.” Through the internet, television, music, and movies, an idyllic image of abundance and freedom is transmitted—carefully edited to conceal inequality, structural racism, labor precariousness, and the internal violence of U.S. society. It is a psychological bombardment that functions as a complement to the blockade: the Cuban is deprived of basic goods and, at the same time, offered a mirage from the North.

This is no accident. It is the classic strategy of undermining a people’s morale in order to fracture its project of independence and submit it to the market. The Cuban migrant does not flee only from the real difficulties of his country; he also flees from a scenario manufactured by external harassment. Migration, in this context, is the result of a double pressure: artificially induced shortages and the ideological attraction of a consumption made impossible under the blockade.

The Cuban paradox is brutal: a country that resists, that maintains social achievements under siege, sees part of its population abandon those very achievements under the influence of a narrative that reduces life to consumption. The drama is not that people seek better conditions—that is legitimate—but that they do so convinced by a machinery that turns the desire to emigrate into a political weapon.

In short, Cuban migration to the United States cannot be analyzed as a simple “individual decision.” It is a profoundly political phenomenon, the result of a long economic and ideological war, whose ultimate objective is not the migrant’s well-being, but the surrender of a people that has spent more than half a century defying empire in its own backyard.

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miércoles, 3 de septiembre de 2025

Cuba and the Migratory Paradox

Cuba and the Migratory Paradox: Between Propaganda and Economic Siege

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