Tim Walz said some weeks ago that “One person’s socialism is another person’s neighborliness.” If he wasn’t the vice presidential nominee in this race, it wouldn’t be that awful. It would be just another liberal with zero knowledge of history. 

Cuba, the beautiful island where I was born, is now destroyed by a socialist dictatorship. Those journalists who try to tell what is happening there are in jail or are harassed by the political police. This is happening 90 miles from the U.S. Don’t let it take root here.

The Truth is the most hated enemy of socialism. For this reason, free expression and the free press are constantly in the crosshairs of the Castro regime. That is why the Cuban socialist tyranny, although sinking economically, does not stop allocating resources to repress those of us who are willing to tell the truth.

The Cuban Institute for Freedom of Expression and Press (ICLEP) — which was recently hacked — revealed in a recent report that there were at least 169 arbitrary arrests and 24 cases of imprisonment against independent communicators and citizens who were exercising their rights to express themselves freely in 2023. Among them is the veteran dissident Yuri Valle Roca, imprisoned until recently for filming the launch of anti-Marxist leaflets in Havana.

As Reporters Without Borders recalls, television, radio, and newspapers are closely monitored by the State, and the private press remains prohibited by the Constitution. The television networks Tele Rebelde and Cubavisión are the most important in the country, while the radio station Radio Reloj is the most listened to. The Granma newspaper is the most widely distributed and is controlled by the State, like the rest of the media. Independent journalists are monitored by agents who try to limit their freedom of movement, arrest them, and erase the information they have. 

In October 2023, officers of the National Revolutionary Police threatened journalist Alejandro Hernández Cepero in such a way that, as he confessed to me, he would give up journalism and activism against the injustices of the State out of fear for the safety of his children, a State which attempts to be both father and mother at the same time.

Our first homeland is family. That is why its members are viciously attacked by the socialists.

In the summer of 2023, Camila Acosta was walking near her house when two women, dressed in civilian clothes, stopped her. They said they were political police officers and, with one push, they put her into a police car. Missing for hours, she was left without her cell phone.

Weeks later, private audio clips from her phone were broadcast on national television, proving the surveillance that each of us who have done journalism under totalitarianism suspects — and sometimes confirms.

It is not only reporters, but any Cuban who chooses to tell the truth and expose it on their social networks (what we can call “citizen journalism”) also suffers the consequences. Such is the case of YouTuber Ivan Daniel Calás, a Baptist teenager, who has focused for years on the abuses against Christians on the island.

The morning he turned 21, he was summoned to a Havana police station, infamous for having been a center of torture and ill-treatment for several Cubans.

Imagine that your child has to go to a place of death like that, on the day they should be celebrating their birth.

Cubans like the audiovisual producer Sandy Cancino and the surgeon Oscar Rivero, brave defenders of freedom of conscience and the Right to Life, have been included in the blacklist of the “Regulated” — which prohibits them from leaving the country — in retaliation for expressing through social networks their opposition to what the State has incorporated since 2018 as another official ideology, that of gender.

Based on these and other stories, many of us wonder why some members of the Organization of American States offer recognition to the Marxist regime. We wonder why the European Union and the current Democratic administration in the United States continue to collaborate with the last totalitarian state in the Western Hemisphere through the “Political Dialogue and Cooperation Agreement” and economic exchange, respectively.

I said it in Cuba to the henchmen of Castroism and to every diplomat who asked me: it should be suspended. Now I repeat it in exile: it must be suspended.

Cuba continues to be one of the worst places in the world to be a journalist. Such a reality cannot be rewarded with funds from the taxpayers of free nations. It is deeply immoral.

*This article is adapted from a speech the author gave at the XV meeting of the Cuba Network of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and its Special Rapporteurship for Freedom of Expression.