When the lights go out in Havana, the foreign cameras arrive to film the darkness.

They come for the blackout glow: candles in apartment windows, families sleeping on balconies, mothers fanning infants through another airless night. They come for the line outside the pharmacy, the bus that never comes, the refrigerator gone warm.

They come for the darkness.

A recent CBS segment on Cuba offered viewers a familiar script: a “failed” island, an aging revolution, refugees in Florida, and Washington once again contemplating what to do with the place 90 miles away. But the segment was also built on an omission so large it swallowed the truth: that while these cameras speak of shortages and collapse, babies are dying under a policy designed to create both.

If the Cuban system is truly destined to fail on its own, why has so much power been invested in making sure it does?

A new report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research has found that the expansion of US sanctions beginning in 2017 was likely the primary cause of a dramatic rise in infant mortality in Cuba. According to the report, Cuba’s infant mortality rate surged by 148% from 2018 to 2025. Had the rate remained stable, approximately 1,800 babies who died during those years would likely still be alive.

Read that again. Babies.

The report links the rise to the tightening of unilateral US coercive measures under the first Donald Trump administration, the continuation of most of those measures under Joe Biden, and further escalation under the second Trump administration. Instead of telling that story, prime-time segments like CBS recycle Cold War clichés.

In this segment, people are invited to remember prerevolutionary Cuba as a lost paradise. But beyond the casino lights were cane cutters; domestic workers; rural families without doctors; children without schools; Black Cubans denied the full rights, dignity, and opportunities the government claimed to promise; workers, surviving in an economy where much of the wealth flowed upward. For many Cubans, the revolution was a rupture with dependency.

It is common in US media to shrink the Cuban Revolution into one beard, one speech, one man. As if millions of lives, shaped by inequality, dictatorship, and foreign domination, could be reduced to nothing more than a personality cult. Fidel Castro was central to Cuba’s history, but so were peasants who wanted land, teachers who crossed mountains to teach literacy, doctors who stayed in poor neighborhoods, workers who believed sovereignty meant something more than a flag.

Like any other country, Cuba has real internal problems. Bureaucracy exists. Economic........

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