For years, Cuba’s hardships have been explained primarily as the fault of the United States. External pressure can be real. But when the same explanation is repeated year after year, decade after decade, it becomes something else: a convenient refusal to confront internal failure, mismanagement, and the incentives that steadily destroy competence, initiative, and hope.
Singapore offers the contrast that Cuba’s regime keeps avoiding.
Decades ago, Singapore was, by any common definition, a third-world developing nation — small, poor, lacking natural resources, and surrounded by larger and more powerful neighbors. Its founding prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, chronicled that transformation in his memoir From Third World to First: The Singapore Story, 1965–2000. Yet Singapore became a global benchmark for competence, execution, economic dynamism, and institutional effectiveness. It did so while facing geopolitical realities that made survival anything but certain, including dependence on international trade and constant pressure from larger powers.
What makes Singapore’s example so difficult to dismiss — and should make it so urgent — is the timeline. Singapore did not take generations to build a functional economy and effective institutions. It produced results with remarkable speed by designing government to work, demanding performance, making rules credible, and creating an economy in which ordinary people could produce value, build businesses, earn a living, and create a future.
Cuba chose a different path.
For 67 years, its dictatorial leadership has taken what could have been a trajectory of modernization and repeatedly used the language of struggle to justify stagnation. External excuses do not keep factories running, spur innovation, align education with labor market needs, reward work, reduce corruption, or build institutions capable of delivering results. Those are choices. Those are systems. Those are decisions its government controls.
Cuba once showed considerable promise in Latin America. It had prosperity that attracted attention, a growing middle class, institutions with the potential to support modernization, and a population capable of extraordinary achievement. Even Cuba’s own history contradicts the claim that the country was somehow doomed from the beginning.
If the dictatorship truly believes that the United States is the decisive cause of Cuba’s failures, then the question must be asked: Why, after 67 years, has it failed to build a system capable of overcoming them? Continuing to blame the same external enemy while refusing to change the internal system is not strategy.
It is drift.
A 67-year drift.
Singapore’s success is not a romantic story. It is a practical one, and its lesson can be measured in the very things Cuba’s dictatorship has refused to prioritize: competent administration that executes plans instead of merely announcing them; credible rules instead of discretionary political power; merit and performance instead of favoritism and political loyalty; economic openness that creates jobs and opportunity instead of centralized substitution that produces shortages; individual initiative that rewards people for working, creating, investing, and taking risks; and institutions that serve the public rather than a political system that demands the public serve the institutions.
Singapore’s lesson is not that Cuba has suffered too little. It is that suffering is not destiny. Leadership determines whether hardship produces renewal — or becomes an excuse for continued mismanagement.
If the regime wants to continue blaming the U.S., do it privately. In public, stop demanding patience while refusing the reforms that would earn it.
Cuba needs a break from the pattern. Stop treating slogans as substitutes for results. Stop protecting failing systems because they are politically useful. Stop calling every setback someone else’s fault while ordinary Cubans pay the price — again and again.
Singapore proves that a small country, confronted by enormous challenges and limited natural advantages, can build prosperity, competent institutions, and opportunity in a remarkably short period of time. Cuba could have done the same. And Cuba still can.
But not while its leaders continue to hide behind the past, defend the indefensible, and demand that their people endure another generation of failure.
If the dictatorship truly wants to honor Cuba’s future, it should stop hiding behind the past. Get out of the way. Let freedom and liberty begin building the institutions, incentives, and reforms that can deliver visible improvements — measurable, durable, and fast.
THE QUESTIONS ‘DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISTS’ KEEP DODGING
Cuba does not need another explanation.
It needs competence.
It needs urgency.
It needs execution.
Things the regime has proven incapable of providing.
Carlos L. Valdes is a retired businessman, former Florida legislator, and author. He writes on public policy and civic affairs from a conservative perspective.