But regime change in Cuba would not mean a progressive, Black-led utopia. It would mean a return to the pre-1959 gangster capitalist condition: a neo-colony where Cuban sovereignty is auctioned to the highest foreign bidder, where public healthcare is privatized, where education becomes a commodity, and where the descendants of the enslaved once again become cheap labor for foreign hotels, farming and mining companies. The pseudo “Black Left” influencers, whether wittingly or not, are amplifying the very narrative used by the Make America Great Again (MAGA) infused Republican Party and the hyper anticommunist Cuban-American rightwing cabal to justify the blockade’s intensification. They are the useful idiots of imperialism.

The Cuban Revolution is not a museum piece. It is a living, breathing, and besieged experiment in human dignity. The fact that young Black influencers in the imperial core can scroll through decades of Cuban history to find images of poverty is not an indictment of the Revolution; it is an indictment of the embargo that has strangled that Revolution. Cuba’s infant mortality rate for Black children is the same as for white children. Its Black population has life expectancy equal to its white population. No other nation in the Americas can make that claim. And the current medical supplies and fuel blockade by the US is a central factor in the deterioration of Cuba’s free world-class healthcare system for all.

The fight against racism in Cuba is not over, but the ground was cleared by the Revolution, and every tree planted since—every Black doctor, every Black university professor, every Black revolutionary intellectual—grows in that soil.