People collect water from an exposed water line in the street during a blackout in Havana, Cuba, Tuesday, July 14, 2026. (AP Photo/Ramon Espinosa) At a recent House Foreign Affairs hearing, Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wisc.) told Ambassador Mike Waltz he would not take his advice on Cuba because Waltz had never been there. Pocan had returned days earlier from four days in Havana.
He is half right: Having been there matters. I was born in Cuba and raised there. In 1992, I left on a raft, eight hours to a boat and then several days crossing the Straits of Florida. The boat was sinking. There were sharks around it. Scholars estimate that at least one in four people who attempt that crossing never arrive.
But four days of government-arranged meetings is not the same as having been to Cuba, and neither is a family story. What decides whether you understand a country is who you were allowed to talk to.
Meeting President Miguel Díaz-Canel was not the mistake; you cannot change policy between two governments without talking to the other government. What they saw was real: Premature infants on ventilators that fail when the grid does. The problem is not that they met the government. It is that the government was the only party that got to describe the country to them.
Consider what happened in April, when an earlier delegation was on the island. Cuba’s government announced it was releasing 2,010 prisoners and called it a humanitarian gesture. Human Rights Watch, Prisoners Defenders, and Justicia 11J, which tracks cases from the July 2021 protests, went looking afterward. None could identify a single political prisoner among those freed. The government had said as much in its own announcement, which excluded anyone convicted of “crimes against authority,” the category Cuba has used for six decades to imprison people for what they said.
Two thousand people walked out of prison. Not one had been put there for speaking. Families in Cuba knew within a day; they were the ones at the gates.
My picture of Cuba is not a memory from 1992. For 20 years, I have mailed relatives what their hospitals lack: surgical instruments, needles and the thread to close the wound. But U.S. representatives were falsely told that this scarcity is recent.
Cuban authorities acknowledged chronic drug shortages in 2017 and named surgery among the worst-hit specialties in 2022. Since 2021. They have let travelers import medicine duty-free and without limit. The director of a Havana children’s hospital said this spring that Cuba has lived with this for decades and that it has now reached dramatic levels.
Both halves are true, but the delegation repeated only one.
None of that will settle the debate about sanctions. The claim I am making is narrower: A delegation that meets the president, the foreign minister and the national assembly has heard from one party to a dispute.
Estimates of Cuba’s political prisoner population run from roughly roughly 700 to more than 1,200, depending on who is counting, and there have been more than 175 new cases this year. Take the low estimate if you prefer. Seven hundred people is still 700 people, and not one of them or their families briefed the congressional delegation.
Members who travel to Cuba should request meetings in writing and in advance with families of imprisoned protesters, independent journalists and clergy operating outside state approval. They should then speak publicly when they are refused, since a refusal is itself information.
They should ask about named cases. Take, for example, the four teenagers arrested after blackout protests in Morón, in central Cuba. One is 15 years old, below Cuba’s own minimum age of criminal responsibility.
And members of Congress should publish their itineraries, showing who they met and who arranged it.
None of this requires anyone to change position on the embargo. It does require visitors to stop describing Cuba after speaking only with its government during brief visits.
I want the blackouts to end. I want my family to eat; I would take that from anyone willing to grant it.
What I cannot accept is the pretense that the Cuban state is the only Cuban voice with an address, and that the rest of us — the imprisoned, the drowned, and the ones who made it — are mere scenery.
Yenisel Cruz-Almeida is a professor at the University of Florida. She left Cuba by raft in 1992.
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