Dear Editor,
A group of former CARICOM heads of government wrote an open letter “to all nations of the world,” urging a vote on October 28 to end the US embargo on Cuba. They call Washington’s measures “the law of the jungle,” accuse it of trying “to starve the Cuban people into submission,” and assure us that Cuba “is not a threat to any nation or any person on planet Earth”.
Tell that to Anna Sofía Benítez Silvente.
Anna is 21, a Christian content creator in Havana who posts as Anna Bensi. In March her mother filmed a plainclothes State Security agent serving a summons at their own front door, and Anna posted the video. For that, mother and daughter were charged with violating the officer’s “privacy.” Anna was placed under house arrest, barred from leaving the country and interrogated for more than ten hours (CSW, 2026). On 1 October, after a four-hour trial, a Havana court sentenced both women to two years of “limited freedom,” supervised by the regime’s neighbourhood organisations and convertible to prison if they fail to “respect the norms of socialist coexistence” (Havana Times, 2026). Four of Cuba’s largest Protestant denominations took the extraordinary risk of speaking up for them, describing an island falling apart from hunger, illness and shortages of water, electricity and medicine.
Not one word about Anna appears in our former leaders’ letter. They write that the embargo “derogates from the most elemental human rights of a people.” Which rights? Cubans cannot vote their government out, form an opposition party, publish freely or, like Anna, even leave the country. When thousands marched on 11 July 2021 chanting “Patria y vida,” the regime arrested more than a thousand and handed some protesters sentences of up to 25 years (Human Rights Watch, 2022). The regime is the threat to ordinary Cubans.
For decades Caribbean governments have welcomed Cuban medical brigades while the regime kept most of the doctors’ pay, conditions UN special rapporteurs warned in 2019 could amount to forced labour (Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, 2019). We owe those doctors more than a letter defending the people who in my view, exploit them.
The pattern is familiar. Criticism of Washington: always. Criticism of socialism: never. It is the same selective conscience in my view, that drives so much of today’s anti-Zionism, where hatred of the Jewish state, and too often of Jews themselves, passes for principle, while the regimes in Havana, Tehran and Gaza that jail, starve and silence their own people escape a single word. Sovereignty belongs to the Cuban people, not to the party that rules them.
So here is my open letter to all nations of the world. Free Anna Bensi and her mother. Free Cuba’s political prisoners. Free Cuba from the one-party state that has ruled it since 1959. Free Iran, where women are beaten and jailed for refusing the hijab. And to Israel, which knows what it means to survive those who wish it gone: Am Israel Chai. Free the Caribbean, and the world from group-think, and collective hypocrisy.
I am,
Francesca Tavares