In Cuba, US media only films the darkness

Michelle Ellner decries US media coverage of Cuba that obscures more than it reveals.

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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 segment on Cuba by the US television network CBS offered viewers a familiar script: a ‘failed’ island, an ageing 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.

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, primetime segments like CBS’s recycle Cold War clichés.

In this segment, people are invited to remember pre-revolutionary 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 upwards. 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 neighbourhoods, workers who believed sovereignty meant something more than a flag.

Like any other country, Cuba has real internal problems. Bureaucracy exists. Economic errors exist. Frustration is real. Emigration is real. And yet, these realities are routinely seized upon by Washington as the readymade justification for intervention, pressure and policies that deepen the very conditions they claim to condemn.

For decades, the United States has built an external wall around the island brick by brick. Sanctions. Financial penalties. Shipping restrictions. Fuel pressure. Banking obstacles. Threats against companies that trade. Punishments for third countries. Obstacles to medicine, parts, credit, investment and entrepreneurs. Policy papers described the logic openly generations ago: Create hardship, provoke desperation, generate political unrest.

This is where media like CBS plays a critical role by showing the suffering while obscuring the system that produces it. By rendering US policy as background noise rather than as an active force shaping the very reality being filmed. And this is not an isolated editorial choice. It is a pattern.

But when infant deaths rise sharply during a period of intensified external strangulation, honesty demands more than repeating those talking points. It requires naming cause and responsibility. And it requires asking a more uncomfortable question: If the Cuban system is truly destined to fail on its own, why has so much power been invested in making sure it does?

You don’t spend decades trying to suffocate something that poses no alternative. Why isolate, sanction and punish a model you believe is irrelevant? Unless the fear is not that it will fail. Unless the fear is that it might, even with all its contradictions, suggest a different way of organising society. One where people are not reduced to clients, markets or consumers to be captured, but are honoured as human beings to be nourished, protected and allowed to flourish.

When I walked through Havana during a blackout, I saw neighbours calling across courtyards, playing dominoes by candlelight. Someone on the corner had a speaker with half a battery and enough music for three buildings. Two young people kissed along the Malecón. Someone cursed the government. Someone cursed the blockade. Someone cursed both. Someone laughed. I saw human beings remain stubbornly human.

Why does CBS not cover that? Because they film the darkness. But the real story is not the candle in the window. It is the hand that cut the fuel, the policy that constricted the hospital, the silence that normalised preventable deaths, and the infants whose names will never appear in the broadcast.                                

Michelle Ellner is a Latin America campaign coordinator of CODEPINK, a feminist grassroots organisation working to end US warfare and imperialism, support peace and human rights initiatives, and redirect resources into healthcare, education, green jobs and other life-affirming programmes. This article is reproduced from Common Dreams (www.commondreams.org) under a Creative Commons licence (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

*Third World Resurgence No. 367, 2026/2, pp 35-36