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<a class="gmail-domain gmail-reader-domain" href="https://resumen-english.org/2025/07/who-is-the-failed-state-cuba-revolutionary-ethics-and-the-moral-bankruptcy-of-western-capitalism/">resumen-english.org</a>
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<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">Who is the Failed State? Cuba, Revolutionary Ethics and the Moral Bankruptcy of Western Capitalism</h1>
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<p>By Isaac Saney on July 30, 2025</p>
<div id="gmail-attachment_31242" class="gmail-wp-caption"><p><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-31242" src="https://i0.wp.com/resumen-english.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/8-1-isaac.png?resize=300%2C142&ssl=1" alt="" width="300" height="142" class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img"></p><p id="gmail-caption-attachment-31242" class="gmail-wp-caption-text">Haitian
women having their blood pressure taken at a mobile clinic staffed by a
Cuban medical brigade in Salomon market in Port-au-Prince.</p></div>
<p>The Cuban revolution endures despite more than 60 years of U.S.
attacks. One system exploits the people, while the other prioritizes
their needs. Which nation deserves the label of \u201cfailed\u2019?<span id="gmail-more-31241"></span></p>
<p>In an age where propaganda masquerades as truth and empire cloaks
itself in the garb of \u201cdemocracy,\u201d few lies are as pervasive\u2014or
politically useful\u2014as the assertion that Cuba is a failed state. This
accusation, deployed with relentless regularity by U.S. officials,
corporate media, and neoliberal ideologues, is meant to delegitimize a
revolutionary and socialist project that has refused to bow before
empire.</p>
<p>But what does it mean to be a \u201cfailed state\u201d? And more importantly, who gets to define failure?</p>
<p>Let us be clear: Cuba is a besieged state, not a failed one. Under
siege from the most powerful imperial force in the world\u2014the United
States\u2014it has endured more than six decades of blockade, economic
sabotage and subversion. The U.S. blockade is not merely a trade,
financial and commercial embargo. It is an economic war designed to
produce misery, scarcity, and discontent. It is a deliberate and cruel
attempt to collapse a sovereign society. And yet, despite this
onslaught, Cuba continues to pursue a project rooted in ethics,
equality, and human dignity. It does not hide its problems; it confronts
them.</p>
<p>Contrast this with the conditions in the so-called \u201cdeveloped\u201d West.
In the United States\u2014the wealthiest country in the history of the
world\u2014over 40 million people live in poverty, with millions more living
one paycheck away from destitution. Children go hungry. Entire
communities are criminalized. Access to healthcare is rationed by
income. Gun violence, mass incarceration, addiction, homelessness, and
the erosion of democratic rights are not aberrations; they are features
of a system in which profit trumps people.</p>
<p>In the United Kingdom, a country that once governed a vast colonial
empire, the situation is no better. Austerity has gutted public
services. Food banks have become institutionalized fixtures in
working-class communities. The National Health Service, once a global
model of publicly funded healthcare, has been bled dry by privatization.
Homelessness is rising. Inequality is deepening. And the political
class blames the poor for their own misery while rewarding the rich for
their predation.</p>
<p>So let us ask: who is the failed state?</p>
<p>Cuba, despite having a GDP per capita a fraction of the U.S. or UK,
provides universal healthcare, free education through to the doctoral
level, and a literacy rate that surpasses many wealthy nations. Life
expectancy in Cuba is on par with the U.S.\u2014a country that spends more on
healthcare than any nation on Earth, but still fails to provide it to
tens of millions. In the midst of devastating shortages caused by the
blockade, Cuba sent doctors to dozens of countries during the COVID-19
pandemic, while the U.S. hoarded vaccines and the UK prioritized profits
for pharmaceutical companies.</p>
<p>And perhaps most importantly, when confronted with rising inequality
and hardship, the Cuban state does not blame the people. It does not
pathologize poverty. It does not criminalize desperation. It does not
call the poor lazy, or the vulnerable expendable. It recognizes that
social vulnerability is a collective challenge, not an individual
failure.</p>
<p>As Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel recently affirmed, \u201cThe
Revolution does not hide its problems. It faces them with ethics and
social justice, even in the midst of extreme circumstances.\u201d This is the
essence of revolutionary responsibility: to claim one\u2019s people, even
and especially in their suffering. Unlike the leaders of capitalist
states, who see the working class and the marginalized as burdens or
threats, Cuban leadership speaks of the vulnerable as ours. \u201cOur
homeless. Our inequalities. Our vulnerable youth.\u201d In that single
possessive word, \u201cour\u201d, is a world of difference.</p>
<p>This is the living embodiment of Amílcar Cabral\u2019s revolutionary
axiom: \u201cTell no lies, claim no easy victories.\u201d Cuba does not pretend
all is well. It does not present a façade of invincibility. But it does
not give up. It does not disown the poor. It does not privatize social
suffering or profit from despair. It seeks, even amid crushing
sanctions, to provide care.</p>
<p>More than thirty targeted social programs have been launched in Cuba
to address inequality and social distress. These are not neoliberal
\u201cefficiencies\u201d or charity-based palliatives. They are redistributive,
rights-based initiatives aimed at repairing and restoring the social
fabric. And they are pursued not because they are easy\u2014but because they
are right.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, in Western nations that claim to be paragons of democracy
and development, politicians deploy rhetoric of \u201cpersonal
responsibility\u201d while enabling systems of exploitation. Homeless people
freeze on the streets while billionaires buy their next yacht. Prisons
expand while schools decay. Fossil fuel corporations rake in record
profits as the world burns. And rather than speak of our vulnerable,
Western leaders speak of \u201cthose people,\u201d as if inequality and
immiseration were a natural condition or personal choice.</p>
<p>Again, we ask: who is the failed state?</p>
<p>Failure is not the inability to avoid hardship. It is the refusal to
respond to hardship with dignity and justice. A failed state is not one
that suffers, but one that abandons. By this measure, it is not Cuba
that has failed. It is those Western states that have abdicated any
sense of collective responsibility, any commitment to equality, equity,
and any belief in solidarity.</p>
<p>Cuba, on the other hand, chooses the harder road\u2014the one lined not
with wealth but with principle. It stumbles, it struggles, but it does
not surrender. And in refusing to lie, to claim easy victories, or to
devalue human life, it reminds us of what a government can be: not a
guardian of the financial oligarchy but a steward of dignity.</p>
<p>So the next time the charge is made\u2014Cuba is a failed state, ask:
compared to what? To a world where billionaires fly to space while
countless millions can not afford rent? To a system that sacrifices the
poor on the altar of profit? To societies that punish vulnerability and
commodify health, education, even life itself?</p>
<p>Cuba is not perfect. No society is. But it is a project still rooted
in justice, still committed to the people, still alive with
revolutionary ethics. That, in a world drenched in cynicism and cruelty,
is not failure. It is the kind of success that capitalism will never
understand.</p>
<p>So let us ask again\u2014clearly, honestly, and with conviction: Who is the failed state? And which is the failed system?</p>
<p><em><strong>Isaac Saney </strong></em>is a Black Studies and Cuba
specialist and coordinator of the Black and African Diaspora Studies
(BAFD) program at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.</p>
<p>Source: <a href="https://www.blackagendareport.com/who-failed-state-cuba-revolutionary-ethics-and-moral-bankruptcy-western-capitalism">Black Agenda Report</a></p>
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