This is Riri. Model. Influencer. And a face–obliquely–of the U.S. embargo against Cuba, and of the Cuban government’s own incompetent, stubborn refusal to reform.
Five weeks ago, Riri suffered a terrible trauma that left her badly burned over her entire body. As she explains in the video, medics have given her only a 30 percent chance of survival.
It breaks my heart!
She is strong. A guerrera (fighter). An astonishingly brave woman, not least for the unimaginable fortitude to say to camera that doctors have given her only a one-in-three chance of surviving, and to post it for the world to see.
This Wednesday, I’ll fly to Havana with bags bulging with items to help Cubans improve their lives, including antibiotic ointments and specialized dressings for Riri. She and I had talked about photographing together. I have assured her that when she recovers physically and emotionally, it will be an honor to take photos as we had planned to celebrate her beauty.
So why am I turning this political?
Because I loathe the wicked embargo, the immoral and hateful hypocrites who support it, and the deleterious impact it has on the health of wonderful Cubans such as Riri, and on the Cuban healthcare system’s ability to function.
Firstly, let’s be absolutely clear… Cuban medics have been dedicated to giving Riri the best possible treatment with their tragically limited resources. I know the Cuban medical system well, including Cuban doctors, not least my “bestie” Hannah (an anesthesiologist) and from having personally led medical fact-finding missions to Cuba OBO the Children’s Cancer Foundation and UCSF Medical Center. Two years ago, I slept five days in hospital in Sancti Spíritus, Cuba, alongside a client whose life was saved following a motorcycle accident by caring and dedicated surgeons and hospital staff earning a pittance as a monthly wage.
Rural community in the community of San Juan, Cienfuegos province.
Cuba has since the very first days of the Revolution dedicated itself to ensuring universal free healthcare to all Cubans (instead of the lucky—and mostly white—few before the Revolution). Their admirable accomplishments also include producing more doctors per 100,000 people than any other country on earth… sending more medical missions to assist needy countries than any other country on earth… and a biopharmaceutical industry (the only industry in Cuba that can be called “world-class”) that has produced many unique medicines.
This, despite six decades of a U.S. embargo that has attempted to strangle the Cuban economy, to thwart Cuba’s medical advances and contributions, sabotage its international medical missions, and to use the Cuban populace as pawns in the hope that by making their lives ever-more miserable, they will rise up and overthrow their own government. It’s the reason that every year the United Nations votes almost unanimously to denounce the U.S. embargo on Cuba.
Results of 2021 vote in the United National to condemn the U.S. embargo on Cuba. The only two countries votes against the resolution were those of the USA and Israel
As a report in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet makes clear…
“In 1992, the… Cuban Democracy Act (CDA) “exempted” the sale of medicines from the embargo. However, the Helms-Burton Act in March, 1996, [which drastically expanded the embargo and codified it into permanent law] undermined the purpose of the medicine exemption… The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has informed the US Government that such activities violate international law and has requested that the US take immediate steps to exempt food and medicine from the embargo.” [Alas, the restrictions remain.]
While Riri was struggling in hospital, heartless Cuban-American congressional representatives were calling for a TOTAL embargo on goods and services to Cuba… including the family remittances that are the very lifeblood for struggling Cubans to buy food and medicines in an economy collapsing around them. (These privileged whites in Miami also denounced President Obama’s deal to permit Cuba’s unique CimaVax-EGF lung cancer vaccine and Herbeprot-P treatment for diabetic foot ulcers to go to trial in the USA. Yet they call themselves Christians?)
Explanation on the medical experts situation vis-a-vis the USA and Cuba. Source: Christopher P. Baker lecture to the UCSF Medical Center, Fresno, California 2012
Given all this, why am I also pissed at the Cuban government?
Well, despite its absolutely genuine dedication to providing the best possible healthcare to all Cubans, it’s ability to do so until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was based on having created an economic structure totally dependent on Soviet largesse. P.J. O’Rourke described it best: “The Cubans got the luxury of running their economy along the lines of a Berkeley commune, and like California hippies wheedling their parents of crash, someone else paid the tab.” Soviet funding made Cuba’s health system and biopharmaceutical achievements possible.
Fine, but…
After the Soviet collapse, Cuba was left with a deteriorated, dysfunctional, and totally unsustainable communist system marked by inefficiency, ineptitude, and arrogant mismanagement: A state-run economy largely sustained since the late 1990s by a tourism boom that has (since COVID) collapsed, along with agriculture, the electrical power grid, and the once-gorgeous Malecón boulevard.
Cuba’s governmental elite (most of them living large in the former homes of the wealthy whites who fled Cuba) have steadfastly refused to make the reforms essential to create a truly viable, self-sustaining economy that serves the Cubans’ desire for far greater economic well-being and self-autonomy of their daily lives. They dropped that ball when Obama’s openings offered them the chance to open more fully, and especially to model themselves on Vietnam–today an ostensibly Communist nation with a thriving mixed socialist-oriented market economy.
President Barack Obama speaks live on Cuban TV from the Gran Teatro de la Habana. Source: Christopher P. Baker lecture to the UCSF Medical Center, Fresno, California 2012
Yes, today there IS a large self-employed class, including a growing body of vitalic MiPymes (small-scale private enterprises) in Cuba. But their scale is miniscule in comparison with Cuba’s ever-more-urgent needs. The massive GAESA business conglomerate run by the Cuban military controls the lion’s share of economic enterprises. Where all the money goes is opaque. There’s no transparency, no public accountability. (The truth may be more nuanced and sordid: While tourism has crashed, Gaviota, a subsidiary of the military-run conglomerate GAESA, has continued to pour billions of dollars into building huge new hotels, most of which have only a handful of guests. On 3/5/2026, The New York Times quotes Paolo Spadoni, of Augusta University, Georgia, saying “’to the Cuban military, these are real estate investments more than tourism’… Military officials are likely taking the ‘long view’ by wanting to be in control of valuable properties should the Communist government transition to democracy.”)
Meanwhile, the Cuban government is bankrupt. The hospitals are now threadbare, pharmacy shelves almost bare, and Cuba is operating—if one can even use that term—with apagones (electricity blackouts) stretching for days. Everywhere I go, families I interact with are begging for aspirins and other basic medicines. (Everything about Cuba is a paradox. A huge percentage of its own pharmaceuticals are exported for hard-currency cash.)
The governmental elite still blames all this on the U.S. embargo while refusing to acknowledge that its non-viable, rust-bucket system accounts in equal part.
The Revolution achieved many marvelous things. Not only free guaranteed health care. The ‘Great Literacy Campaign’ eradicated illiteracy entirely! Fidel’s top-down determination to eradicate racism was a noble and notable achievement that largely succeeded, equalizing the playing field through education (Cuba is remarkable for its degree of racial equality and integration). Soviet largesse and a barter system–Cuban sugar for pretty much everything Cuba needed–raised the living standards for millions of impoverished Cubans (millions of new homes were built and given FREE to the homeless and those living in Haitian-style hovels). The achievements were real… at the cost of destroying the middle- and upper-class wealth base while creating an absolute dependence on the single-party State and its Alice in Wonderland economic system that simply can no longer deliver,
The face of a Communist loyalist. Copyright: Christopher P. Baker LLC
Now, Trump’s oil embargo threatens finally to bring the teetering pack of cards crashing down. Regardless (unless secret negotiations are truly happening, as Trump claims) the Cuban government is, at least verbally, steadfastly refusing to change its failed and sclerotic state-run model that is literally running on fumes as I type.
As a result, people like Riri suffer the consequences… Fewer and fewer medicines… Fewer doctors and nurses due to the brain drain… Less and less fresh produce available for a healthy diet… Stagnant wages eroded daily to rampant inflation… Longer and longer blackouts… And, for the majority of Cubans who remain totally dependent on the State and don’t have access to dollars, ever diminishing rations and, for many, incipient malnutrition.
I detest Trump’s vile actions, which reflect the same old unethical playbook dictated by the powerful Cuban-American lobby: Cause such misery for the average Cuban that they’ll rise up against the government. (Uncle Sam’s constant phraseology is “to deny the Cuban military,” cleverly twisting reality. Not least, even if that were the actual motive instead of a smoke screen, you don’t need to be a rocket-scientist to understand that if you deny the Cuban government resources, you deny them the ability to service their health system, once-world-class educational system, and other social services essential to a functional polity.)
Yet the Cuban government is treating its own populace equally like pawns in the high-stakes cat-and-mouse chess game with Uncle Sam. The Cuban masses (not the governmental, military elite mind you) are supposed to tighten their belts even further for the long haul. “Socialism or death!” They deserve better!
Hopefully the Cuban government will see that Trump is also offering a golden opportunity for the former to actually do good by the Cuban people. Forget “socialism or death” (most Cubans I speak to are sick of that strait-jacket bullshit!) Fortunately, this past week President Miguel Díaz-Canel announced new economic reforms to enhance the private sector. But once again it’s too little, too late…. mere tinkering at the edges of the core problem. The socialist economy itself is dead. A rotting carcass. The Cuban government can no longer provide. End of story! No wonder Cubans are leaving like rats from a sinking ship!
In 1996 I arrived Guantanamo for the first time to be greeted by this billboard, including Fidel’s famous phrase: Socialism or Death! Copyright Christopher P. Baker
Trump, it appears, wants above all to force Cuba to grant open access for U.S. businesses, although his bombastic diatribes are, as always, ever-changing flavors of the day. (Even Rubio, who truly does want regime change, speaks of “openings” and “stages” and that the end game—regime change–doesn’t have to come at once.) Of course, Trump has it within his means to squeeze Congress to end the embargo, but that is only likely to happen as a reward for a huge concession from the Cuban government (not least, he’s probably still hoping to get the hotel and golf course he was deviously planning some years ago). Playing the good guy—as Obama did, with huge success that resulted in opening up Cuba’s private sector and more access for U.S. businesses—isn’t Trump’s style. Pissed and jealous of Obama, he hsa overturned pretty much every Obama Cuba initiative as a matter of retributive principle.
Trump has long dreamed of opening a hotel, casino, and golf course in Cuba. Source: Christopher P. Baker lecture to the UCSF Medical Center, Fresno, California 2012
For the Cubans, the game is heavily laden. The Revolution was in large part about ridding Cuba of U.S. hegemony to finally achieve “true” independence. They are loathe to return to those days.
But the offer is there. It’s a golden opportunity for Cuba to begin the transition to a social democracy (perhaps modeled on Scandinavia) and thereby halt the evolving humanitarian crisis and Cuba’s current slide towards utter chaos and potential collapse. And that alone might salvage a now failing health care system that was once the envy of most of the world.
Venezuela showed that this doesn’t have to be an “O.K. Corral” showdown; that this could be a potential win-win for both sides. Trump/Rubio have hinted strongly that a deal can be done. It’s not a stretch to see how this could be the beginning of the end of the embargo. Alas, on the Cubans part, it requires a whole new paradigm shift that is perhaps impossible while Raúl Castro is still alive.
As a businessman, Trump isn’t in favor of the embargo, as he told Wolf Blitzer on CNN prior to announcing his run for president in the 2016 election. Source: Christopher P. Baker lecture to the UCSF Medical Center, Fresno, California 2012
And if no deal?
My fear is that if Trump succeeds with his Iran fiasco (ie. if it doesn’t devolve into a horrendous catastrophe on the scale of Iraq), then Cuba will assuredly be his next target. And, if the missiles fly, how many innocent Cubans will end up like Riri?
Watching the horror-show that is Iran, Lebanon, and Gaza, that is a nightmare Cubans don’t want nor deserve to face.
