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.

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........

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