1. Havana Sent Soldiers When Ethiopia's Survival Was on the Line
In 1977, Somali tanks rolled into the Ogaden, and within weeks Somali forces had overrun nearly 90 percent of the territory. Ethiopia's own army, in the chaos following the fall of the monarchy, could not hold the line alone. Fidel Castro sent it — somewhere between 15,000 and 18,000 Cuban troops, many of them fresh off the battlefields of Angola, alongside tanks, MiG fighters, and a unified command structure with Ethiopian and Soviet officers. By March 1978, the Somali offensive had collapsed and Ethiopian territorial integrity was restored.
This is not a footnote. Cuba, an island of roughly nine million people at the time, with its own economy strangled by a superpower ninety miles from its shore, still found the capacity to send tens of thousands of soldiers across an ocean to defend a country it had no colonial history with, no resource extraction agenda, and nothing to gain except the survival of a fellow project against imperial encirclement. That is what internationalism looks like when it's not a slogan.
2. What Cuba Built Anyway
Judge Cuba by what it did with what it had left after the embargo took its cut. Cuba's own 2016 filing to the United Nations placed the cumulative cost of the U.S. embargo at over $753 billion when adjusted for the dollar's depreciation against gold — a staggering sum extracted, in effect, from a nation smaller than the state of Pennsylvania. And still: Cuba eliminated mother-to-child transmission of HIV and syphilis in 2014, a public health milestone the United States has not matched. It built a literacy rate near 100 percent, ranking 13th in the world — ahead of the United States, according to the same comparative data. Life expectancy and infant mortality rates in Cuba sit in the range of wealthy nations, achieved, in the words of medical-ethics researchers, without wealth, through the deliberate organization of the resources it did have.
And Cuba did not hoard what it built. Its medical brigades have treated millions of patients across Latin America, Africa, and the Caribbean, including deployments to Ethiopia itself. A blockaded island has sent more doctors abroad than most G7 nations. Sit with that.
3. Five Claims About Cuba Worth Actually Examining
"Cuba is poor because socialism failed, not because of the embargo." Run the counterfactual: no nation on earth has been cut off from its natural trading partner, banking system, and shipping routes for sixty consecutive years and been expected to perform as though none of that happened. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and Cuba lost 35 percent of its economy overnight, the government's response was not to cut healthcare and education — it protected both while cutting everywhere else it could. That is not the choice of a system failing on its own terms; it's the record of a system absorbing an external shock most economies would not survive at all.
"Cuba's medical missions are forced labor." This is Washington's framing, and it is a live dispute, not a settled fact — U.S. officials have used trafficking language to describe the missions since 2019, while the doctors' host countries and many participating physicians describe the program as voluntary, paid service abroad that funds Cuba's domestic system in turn. Both realities exist: some individual doctors have publicly described pressure to participate, and that criticism deserves to be taken seriously rather than waved away — but treating every one of tens of thousands of medical volunteers as a trafficking victim, as U.S. policy increasingly does, tells you more about the politics of the accusation than about the program itself.
"Cuba only survives on Venezuelan or Russian subsidies." External support has ebbed and flowed for decades — Soviet, then Venezuelan, now diversified — but the literacy campaign, the health system's architecture, and the international medical corps all predate any single patron and have outlasted more than one. A system this durable across multiple shifting alliances is not a system running on one lifeline.
"The embargo doesn't really block medicine or food, so it's not to blame for shortages." Pharmaceutical and shipping companies routinely decline to do business with Cuba specifically because of the extraterritorial reach of U.S. sanctions law, even when the underlying goods (medicine, food) are nominally exempt — a well-documented chilling effect that functions as a blockade in practice, whatever the letter of the statute says on paper.
"Cuba is a totalitarian state with no freedoms." This is the one claim in this list that deserves a straight answer rather than a rebuttal, because it is substantially true and pretending otherwise would make the rest of this article less credible, not more. Cuba is a one-party state. Independent journalists, artists, and protesters — most visibly during the July 2021 demonstrations — have been imprisoned, and human rights organizations have documented real, serious restrictions on speech and assembly. Solidarity with Cuba's international project and honesty about its internal politics are not mutually exclusive, and an analysis that pretends otherwise isn't solidarity — it's propaganda with extra steps.
The Honest Complication, Closer to Home
There's a second honesty required here, and it's about us, not them. The Ethiopia that received those 15,000 Cuban soldiers in 1977 was not a neutral, sympathetic democracy — it was Mengistu Haile Mariam's Derg, the same regime that within two years would launch the Red Terror, a campaign of mass killing against its own political opposition that claimed tens of thousands of Ethiopian lives. Cuba's solidarity in 1977 was internationalist in spirit, but it was solidarity extended to a government, not vetted against what that government would go on to do to its own people. A serious accounting of this history holds both facts: Cuban soldiers helped defend Ethiopian territorial sovereignty against a foreign invasion, and the regime they defended was, within two years, murdering its own citizens by the thousands. Solidarity with a people and solidarity with whichever government happens to rule them are not always the same act, then or now.
Why This Is Actually About Us
Here is the part that should keep you up at night rather than just make you nostalgic for 1977: the debt-distress classification hanging over Ethiopia right now, the currency float that doubled your rent, the creditor committee deciding your country's fiscal future in a room you'll never sit in — Cuba has been living some version of that siege for six decades, and it has refused, at extraordinary cost, to let a superpower dictate the terms of its survival. We are not spectators to that fight. We are next in line for the same machinery, just wearing IMF letterhead instead of a trade embargo. Solidarity with Cuba is not charity for a country that once helped us. It's recognition that the empire testing its tools on a small island ninety miles from Florida is the same empire negotiating our debt schedule from Washington right now. Helping Cuba stand is, in the most literal sense available to us, rehearsal for standing ourselves.
Sidoc Haytu is an Ethiopian writer and researcher focused on political economy, class dynamics, and anti-imperialist movements in the Horn of Africa. If you are ready to build, not just read, contact the author at pfle-dialogue@proton.me or follow Sidoc Haytu on Facebook.
