Cuba Was Also Built in Exile
It is a question that has been debated for more than 150 years. What does it mean to be Cuban? It is also a deeply political question because it influences who gets to speak for Cuba, who belongs to the Cuban nation, and who has a voice in its future.
When I hear people who are not Cuban confidently declare that Cuba's future will be decided only in Havana, I often wonder how much they know about Cuban history. The relationship between Cuba and its exile community is not a recent phenomenon. It is woven into the very fabric of the Cuban nation.
Consider a few historical facts.
José Martí spent more of his adult life in the United States than in Cuba. Many of his most important writings on Cuban nationalism were written in New York. The Cuban Revolutionary Party was founded in New York. The Cuban flag was designed and first sewn in the United States. Cuban newspapers debating the future of the island were published in exile. In Key West and Tampa, Cuban cigar workers raised enormous sums of money to finance the struggle for independence.
Cuba was not built only on the island. It was also built in exile.
Throughout Cuban history, exiles have helped keep alive the dream of a free and independent Cuba. When people on the island could not speak freely, exiles often became their voice. This was true during Spanish colonial rule. It was true during periods of dictatorship. And it remains true today.
My own family is part of that story.
I grew up in a proud Cuban family. We had no photographs from my parents' youth, no family heirlooms, no boxes of memories. We had only stories.
My father came from a poor family. As a young man, he participated in the struggle against Batista and supported the revolution that brought Fidel Castro to power. But when he realized that Castro was leading Cuba toward a communist dictatorship, he became involved in anti-revolutionary activities.
The government eventually gave him a choice: join the military and support the revolution, or go to prison.
Fortunately, my father had worked as a mechanic for a senior Pan Am official. Through that connection he was able to leave Cuba with nothing more than the clothes on his back. Many of my aunts and uncles were arrested. When they were eventually released, they too were forced into exile.
Not everyone left. My grandparents and several relatives remained behind. My mother would not see her family again for nineteen years. I was fifteen years old when I finally met my grandparents for the first time.
That is part of what it means to be Cuban: families divided by politics, ideology, and geography.
Years later, when the Obama administration eased some restrictions and tourism increased, several of my cousins benefited from the growing private economy. They earned money and improved their standard of living. But something interesting happened. Once they had economic opportunity, they wanted something more. They wanted a voice. They wanted to participate in shaping their future. They wanted the freedom to express their opinions.
That was not possible.
One by one, they also left Cuba.
Today only one member of the older generation remains on the island. She lives in my grandparents' house because if she leaves, she risks losing it. My great-grandfather's home was confiscated after other relatives emigrated.
Stories like mine are not unique. They are repeated thousands of times across the Cuban nation.
The Embargo Argument
The Cuban government tells a different story.
According to the official narrative, those who left are traitors, the revolution must be defended, and the embargo is responsible for Cuba's suffering. Remove the sanctions, the argument goes, and Cuba would flourish.
I do not believe the embargo is morally defensible. Squeezing an entire population in the hope that their suffering will produce political change is wrong. The people who pay the price are not the Communist Party leadership. They are ordinary Cubans.
But the embargo argument, however morally convenient, does not hold up to scrutiny.
During the Soviet era, billions in aid flowed into Cuba and the Communist Party elite accumulated privilege and power while ordinary Cubans remained poor. When the Soviet Union collapsed and that lifeline disappeared, the party adapted. It did not open Cuba. It created new mechanisms of control and extraction.
When the Obama administration eased restrictions and tourism increased, a new economic class emerged but it was not a broad-based entrepreneurial class. The most valuable sectors of the Cuban economy became concentrated in military-controlled conglomerates and networks closely connected to the political leadership. The opening created opportunity, but the party made sure it knew where that opportunity flowed.
And now, even as senior officials denounce the embargo and demand that Washington lift sanctions, some of their own relatives live, invest, and participate in the American economy they publicly condemn. That contradiction is not incidental. It reveals something important about who the Cuban system actually serves.
The embargo did not create this. The Communist Party did.
This does not mean sanctions policy is working. It is not. But it does mean that lifting sanctions alone will not free the Cuban people. What Cuba needs is not just economic opening. It needs a political system that stops treating its own citizens as a resource to be managed and starts treating them as people with rights.
Identity and Sanctions Are Not the Same Question
I want to say something directly about sanctions because the debate over the embargo has become entangled with questions of Cuban identity in ways that are deeply unfair to everyone involved.
Many Cuban exiles support sanctions. They do so not because they want to hurt the Cuban people. Most of them are the Cuban people, or descended from them. They support sanctions because they have lived through or inherited the trauma of what the Cuban government did to their families. They watched relatives imprisoned, property confiscated, lives destroyed. They saw a revolution they initially supported betray everything it promised. Their support for sanctions is an act of political desperation born from decades of exhausted hope, a belief that external pressure is the only remaining lever available to force a system that has shown no willingness to change on its own terms.
You may disagree with that position. I have my own reservations about it. But disagreeing with someone's political strategy does not make them less Cuban.
The Cuban Communist Party has spent sixty years telling the world that those who oppose the revolution are traitors, gusanos, enemies of the people. That narrative has served the party well. It delegitimizes dissent, silences criticism, and frames every external pressure as an attack on the Cuban nation rather than on the system that governs it.
We should not reproduce that logic.
The debate over sanctions — whether they work, who they hurt, what they should be conditioned on — is a legitimate political debate. It belongs at a negotiating table, between Cubans and their international partners, where evidence and argument can be weighed honestly. It does not belong in a conversation about Cuban identity.
A Cuban in Miami who supports sanctions and a Cuban in Havana who opposes them are both Cuban. Their disagreement is political. It is real and it matters. But it does not determine who belongs to the Cuban nation.
What It Means to Be Cuban
First, if a government forces you to choose between prison and exile, and you choose exile, you do not cease to be Cuban.
Second, if you maintain family ties, cultural ties, and emotional ties to the island, you do not lose your right to speak about its future.
Third, if you were born abroad to Cuban parents who were forced to leave, your Cuban identity is not somehow less authentic. You inherit a history, a culture, and a story that is part of the Cuban experience.
The Cuban story has never belonged exclusively to those on the island or exclusively to those in exile. It belongs to both.
When the day comes that Cuba opens itself to a more inclusive future, it will be Cubans on the island and Cubans abroad who rebuild the nation together, just as they have contributed to building it throughout history.
Being Cuban is not easy. It is emotional. It is political. It is often controversial.
But it is an identity of which I am profoundly proud.
An Invitation
And perhaps one of the most important tasks ahead is not choosing between Cuba and the exile community, but healing the divide between them.
I can imagine historians from different perspectives writing a shared history of the last seventy years. I can imagine dialogues between those who lost property and those who inherited it. I can imagine conversations between political opponents who have spent decades speaking past one another. I can imagine a series of structured dialogue processes that help Cubans come to terms with their past and build a shared future.
Reconciliation is never easy. But I also know from 25 years of working in some of the world's most difficult conflicts that it is possible. It begins with listening. And it begins with the willingness to sit across from someone whose story is different from yours and stay in the room.
That is the work I have spent my life doing. And I believe it is possible for Cuba too.
So this is my invitation to all Cubans and to anyone who genuinely wishes Cuba well: join that conversation with respect, humility, and an openness to hearing stories different from your own.