For years, Cuba’s hardships have been explained primarily as the fault of the United States. External pressure can be real. But when the same explanation is repeated year after year, decade after decade, it becomes something else: a convenient refusal to confront internal failure, mismanagement, and the incentives that steadily destroy competence, initiative, and hope.

Singapore offers the contrast that Cuba’s regime keeps avoiding.

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Decades ago, Singapore was, by any common definition, a third-world developing nation — small, poor, lacking natural resources, and surrounded by larger and more powerful neighbors. Its founding prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, chronicled that transformation in his memoir From Third World to First: The Singapore Story, 1965–2000. Yet Singapore became a global benchmark for competence, execution, economic dynamism, and institutional effectiveness. It did so while facing geopolitical realities that made survival anything but certain, including dependence on international trade and constant pressure from larger powers.

What makes........

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