Why Cuba Is More Dangerous Than We Think

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It’s difficult for Americans to see clearly what’s happening inside Cuba, both because of the communist regime’s powerful propaganda apparatus and because of the American left’s lingering romanticism about the revolution’s supposed ideals.

That’s why I wanted to sit down with Gelet Martínez Fragela, the founder of ADN Cuba, an independent outlet reporting on the island’s human rights abuses and the regime’s efforts to destabilize democracies across the Western Hemisphere. (The site, naturally, is banned in Cuba.)

In our conversation, Gelet—who fled the island as a child refugee—offers an unflinching look at daily life under dictatorship: ration cards that dictate what families can eat, “volunteer” labor camps that amount to forced servitude, and a surveillance system where neighborhood committees double as informant networks. She paints a picture of a society where any kind of dissent is met with harassment, imprisonment, or exile.

Gelet has made it her mission to counter the Western media’s “sanitization” of left-wing dictatorships. She highlights stories that rarely break through in the U.S. press—from the Chinese paramilitary organization training Cuban riot police to the so-called Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples (ICAP), which hosts radical groups, including coalitions tied to Hezbollah, for training and mobilization abroad.

This episode challenges the comforting myths: that the U.S. embargo is the root of Cuba’s misery, that socialism “works” there, and that repression is somehow a thing of the past. As Gelet makes clear, the Cuban system is designed for only one goal: the survival of the regime at any cost—and it continues to adapt in ways that should deeply concern our country.