That implication runs throughout the piece. Readers enter waterfront mansions, private clubs, law offices, and hotel conference rooms. They meet billionaires, heirs, lobbyists, and political insiders. Cuba appears as a “distressed asset.” Lawyers and businessmen anticipate a swing at the “Cuban piñata.”
The article contains legitimate reporting about wealth, access, and potential conflicts of interest. Its presentation, however, reduces a politically diverse community, formed through successive waves of repression and migration, to a circle of affluent men positioning themselves for profit.
Cuban Americans did not leave their country in pursuit of a future investment opportunity. They escaped political imprisonment, executions, confiscations, surveillance, and ideological persecution. Many arrived in the United States with little and rebuilt their lives from the ground up. Exile did not erase their families, memories, or national identity.
Some are now considering what could happen if the regime loses power. They are studying the electrical grid, airports, investment rules, property claims, constitutional arrangements, and the mechanics of an eventual election. Those questions may seem premature until a government collapses. Then every unanswered question becomes a crisis.
Cuba will require extensive preparation. Its electrical and water systems are failing. Hospitals lack basic supplies. Infrastructure has deteriorated, while courts, banks, registries, and electoral institutions remain subordinate to the Communist Party.
The people developing transition proposals deserve scrutiny. Plans affecting Cuba should be transparent. Financial interests should be disclosed. No businessman, exile organization, or Washington official has the right to appoint Cuba’s future government. Cubans on the island must determine the country’s permanent political arrangements through free and credible elections.
The Journal could have pursued these concerns without constructing an exile caricature.
Consider how the evidence is arranged. Wealth, private access, and commercial opportunity establish the opening frame. The “piñata” metaphor tells readers how to interpret everything that follows. One exile participant supplies a highly memorable and offensive quotation describing Cubans on the island as “backward.” Only after this picture has taken hold does the story emphasize that island residents are largely absent from the planning.
That absence matters, but it requires context.
The Cuban government dismantled independent civil society, prohibited political competition, censored the press, and punished organizations outside state control. It imprisoned dissidents and pushed millions of citizens into exile. Generations of Cubans learned that political candor could cost them their education, employment, freedom, or family life.
Open transition planning inside Cuba is dangerous by design. Miami became a center of Cuban political activity because Havana criminalized such activity at home.
The condescending quotation deserves criticism. Cubans who survived communism do not need lessons in intelligence, dignity, or citizenship. Yet one man’s words cannot define a community encompassing several generations, social classes, and political traditions.
The Cuban exile includes former political prisoners, workers, veterans, scholars, entrepreneurs, artists, and recent migrants. Its members disagree over sanctions, negotiations, military action, restitution, and the proper role of the United States. Wealthy activists represent one part of that community.
The Journal’s scrutiny also falls disproportionately on Miami. The article closely examines the money, personal relationships, and political access of Cuban Americans. It devotes far less attention to the regime’s preparations for survival.
Cuba’s military establishment controls large portions of the national economy through armed-forces-linked conglomerates. Its intelligence services have a long record of activity against exile organizations and inside the United States. Regime officials have access to state assets, security files, and foreign partners that are unavailable to ordinary Cubans.
Havana has strong incentives to manage any transition. A controlled opening could allow party officials, military officers, and their relatives to exchange political privilege for protected economic power. Elections might occur even as old networks retain control over money, information, and coercive institutions.
Russia, China, and Iran also have strategic interests on the island. Each would seek to preserve access and influence after any political change. Their officials and commercial partners are surely studying possible outcomes.
A comprehensive investigation would follow those preparations as closely as it follows meetings in Miami. It would track military-controlled enterprises, the movement of state assets, and foreign commercial arrangements. It would ask which purported reformers enjoy the confidence of the security services and whether exile initiatives are being penetrated or manipulated.
Those are not speculative side issues but concerns about who would possess real power on the morning after a transition.
Property claims deserve similar care. The revolutionary government used confiscation to eliminate independent economic power and consolidate political control. Resolving those claims will be difficult. Some may warrant restitution, others compensation. Many will require compromises that protect current occupants and prevent mass displacement.
Reducing the issue to wealthy families seeking lost fortunes erases the political purpose of the original seizures. It also adopts one of Havana’s oldest propaganda devices: presenting the exile as a reactionary class determined to recover privilege at the population’s expense.
That caricature has served the regime for decades. It allows officials to dismiss democratic opposition without addressing demands for civil liberties, political pluralism, and accountable government. A story constructed around mansions, fortunes, and private deals risks reinforcing the same message.
Cuba’s future cannot be designed exclusively in Miami. It cannot safely be left to officials in Havana who already control the state’s weapons, records, and assets. A legitimate transition will need dissidents, churches, civic groups, independent professionals, recent emigrants, and the wider diaspora.
Advance planning can help them establish safeguards before a crisis. Waiting for a collapse would favor the organized forces already embedded in the system. They possess command structures, intelligence files, capital, and foreign relationships. Democratic actors cannot afford to begin thinking about the future only after the lights go out.
Cuban Americans should be prepared to answer difficult questions about their plans. They should disclose conflicts, reject paternalism, and make room for leadership from the island. Journalists should examine every participant who expects public power to produce private gain.
They should also apply the same scrutiny to the dictatorship, its economic networks, and its foreign patrons.
Preparing for Cuba’s reconstruction does not make the exile an enemy of Cuba. After nearly seven decades, exile remains one of the few places where Cubans can openly prepare for life after communism.
The Havana Regime is responsible for that reality.
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By: Dr. Rafael Marrero,
President/Founder and Chief Economist
Miami Strategic Intelligence Institute
