I spent 11 years in Cuban prisons. Stop romanticizing Cuba
Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet
May 31, 2026, 6:01 a.m. ET
I am writing to you from Havana, by the light of an old lantern, because there is no electricity again. Earlier in May, the government admitted what every Cuban already knew: The country has run out of fuel to keep the lights on. This is the worst crisis I have seen here in decades, and I have seen many.
I want to speak to those of you in the United States who have spent years believing that the Cuban revolution was a noble thing. Many of you are people of conscience. You marched for civil rights and opposed wars you believed were unjust. You looked at the poverty across Latin America and thought Cuba, for all its hardships, had chosen a better path – the one romanticized by Che Guevara’s image on T-shirts and protest banners long after the revolution turned more repressive.
The cost of speaking
I spent more than 11 years in Cuban prisons. Not for any act of violence. I refused, as a physician, to stay silent about infants left to die after late-term abortions. I hung the national flag of Cuba upside down, the sailor’s signal of a ship in distress, because I believed my country was one. I met with other Cubans who wanted to speak their minds. For that I spent years in a solitary cell I could cross in a few steps.
When they freed me, almost everyone took it for granted that I would leave for good. I refused. I could not abandon my people to hopelessness; having raised the torch of liberty – a light of hope for my own oppressed people – I could not extinguish it nor abandon it for those thirsting for freedom.
You may wonder how it is that I have the freedom to write this. The truth: It is an act of defiance by a free thinker. The political police still watch me closely and detain me often enough to make sure I get the message. Part of what protects me now is the solidarity of many good, pro-democracy people outside Cuba. That is why your attention is no small thing.
I am not asking you to hate my country. I am asking you to stop making excuses for the men who run it.
They have jailed thousands of Cubans, many for nothing more than marching in the street and asking for food and a say in their own lives. The government has lasted this long partly because so many admirers abroad preferred the romance of the revolution to the plain fact of its repression and its firing squads.
In Cuba you can go to prison for what you say. Reporters who are not on the state payroll are harassed and arrested. Families speak in low voices even in their own homes, never sure who is listening. When thousands of Cubans filled the streets in 2021 and called for freedom, the government answered with arrests and severe prison terms. Those people were not traitors or foreign agents. They were ordinary Cubans who had simply lost hope.
60 years of one excuse
For 60 years, the revolution’s defenders have blamed everything that goes wrong here on a single villain of their own making: the American embargo. But the embargo did not force this government to ban every party but its own, to jail dissidents, to beat peaceful marchers, or to let the men at the top live well while the rest of us wait in line for bread and aspirin. Those were the choices made by Cuba’s rulers.
In what other country would you defend a government that jails reporters, silences priests, lets the people vote for no one but the ruling party, and then waves away every complaint by pointing at a foreign enemy? You would never accept that from a government you disliked. Please do not accept it from one you admire.
Judge a country by a simple test: Can an ordinary person speak, worship and live without fear? By that test, the revolution failed long ago. Most young Cubans now dream of one thing, getting out, and millions already have.
Remember, too, that Cubans are not chips in someone else’s argument. We are people, with the same wish for a decent life that you want for yourselves. Too many foreigners look at this island and see only a cause, a business opening or a strategic prize. But Cuba is our home, not a theory. Our future should not be decided by the men who oppress us, nor handed to outsiders who see in our suffering a chance for profit or politics. We want what you would want: to speak our minds, to worship as we choose, to pick our own leaders.
I learned my politics from Martin Luther King Jr. and from Mahatma Gandhi, not from generals. Cuba will not be healed by hatred or revenge. Change will come – through conscience, through civic spirit and through Cubans finding the courage to speak honestly with one another again.
Tonight I sit in the dark, with every reason to give up – but I will not. Cuba will be free, and we Cubans are working toward that liberation. When that day comes, I hope you will be remembered not as friends who admired our jailers from a safe distance, but as friends who told us the truth when it mattered.
Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet is a Cuban physician and human rights leader who spent more than a decade as a political prisoner in Cuba, where he still lives today.