At the end of January, I had the pleasure of speaking at the Chicago Cuba Coalition’s event titled “War in the Americas, Cuba, Colombia, Immigrants in the Crosshairs, What’s Next? What Can We Do?” During this event, I spoke about my experience on the DSA Cuba delegation. This event took place days after Trump’s new executive order, which seeks to further limit fuel going into Cuba. Trump’s executive order on Cuba, paired with the toppling of Venezuelan president Nicholas Maduro, exacerbates the humanitarian crises unfolding in Latin America. My goal was to capture the beauty and resilience of the Cuban people despite every attempt to cut them down. I hope to carry that spirit of revolutionary struggle – which is still alive and well in Cuba today – into our local work, which takes place within the belly of the imperialist beast that is the United States of America.
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Transcript of speech by Lyra Spencer, delivered January 31, 2026 at Chicago Teachers Union Headquarters. Text edited for clarity.
Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Lyra Spencer, and I am one of the two co-chairs of Chicago DSA. It is such a privilege and an honor to share the stage with such scholars, experts, and fighters who have been working to end the blockade for many years.
I come to bring my experience and perspective as someone who had the privilege to travel to the island in October along with my DSA comrades in solidarity with Cuba. Thank you for giving me this space to share my experience. Cuba, interestingly enough, was my first trip abroad. It was a life changing experience for many reasons.
I want to start by foregrounding the humanitarian crises unfolding in Cuba inflicted upon that nation by the United States. While I was there in October, Cuba was really struggling. Older buildings in Havana’s city center were crumbling and trash started piling up in places due to the lack of fuel for trash collection. There was actually a moment when we were passing a field on our bus where two 12-year-old boys carrying a trash can emptied it into a nearby lot. The hospitals are in desperate need of supplies, and they experience frequent power outages.
Cuba is facing a currency crisis. The Cuban peso has taken such a hit that many of the smaller peso units of currency are worthless now. Cuba, despite its robust public healthcare program, has a shortage of doctors now because the median wage is paid in pesos at $25 dollars per month. Cuban residents can find much more lucrative wages working in tourism, where currency and tips are often exchanged in U.S. dollars. A restaurant server often makes far more money than doctors.
A local Cuban journalist described the situation, stating that there used to be a baseline in Cuba where everyone had their basic needs met. No one was particularly wealthy, but no one was forced to live in extreme poverty either. However, because of the blockade, many of Cuba’s residents are falling into a type of destitution that few have experienced before. All of this was prior to the illegal kidnapping of Nicholas Maduro in Venezuela, and before the executive order on Cuba.
I can only imagine how hard things must be for the people of Cuba now. I wanted to ground us in this place upfront to acknowledge the rough spot that Cuba is in as a result of U.S. imperialism. The reason why I chose to foreground this is because I do not believe that the full story is one of sadness and sorrow, but one of beauty, resilience, and liberation.
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The most shocking thing about Cuba wasn’t the problems that ail its society today. For me as an American, it was seeing a society centered around the wellbeing of humans and not the maximization of shareholder value.
While in Cuba, we visited three main places that I want to highlight. The first being one of the main hospitals in Cuba, where we learned from some of the top doctors about the Cuban healthcare system. In Cuba, everyone has access to free healthcare, and it is considered a fundamental right. Healthcare was one of the main tenants of the Cuban revolution, and Fidel Castro demanded equal access to healthcare for all Cubans as a part of his two-hour denunciation of the Batista regime following his arrest for his involvement in the failed attack on the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba on the 26th of July, 1953.
Immediately after the revolution, doctors were sent to every corner of Cuba which had been previously neglected to survey the population and find out the needs of the public. They immediately set up a primary care system and started treating the most common ailments of the day. Cuba has historically had lower infant mortality rates than the United States, as well as a similar life expectancy and more equal health outcomes along race and income lines. The people of Cuba enjoy far better access to primary care, with doctors and nursing teams located at the neighborhood level, and residents having access to frequent preventative screenings. Even with Cuba’s current doctor shortage, they still have a higher doctor-to-population ratio than the U.S.
Not only does Cuba provide excellent healthcare for its citizens, it also exports its doctors around the world to help other Global South countries in need. The only limitation to the Cuban healthcare system are the restrictions placed upon it by the U.S. embargo. It is ironic, despite its immense wealth, that the U.S. government is doing everything in its power to remove access to healthcare for millions of Americans. Despite the hardships imposed on them by the blockade, the people of Cuba are doing everything it can to keep quality care and expand it to other countries in need.
During the trip to this hospital, I noticed something that I rarely see here in Chicago: Black doctors in prominent leadership positions within Cuba. In fact, Cuban society was fairly integrated, at least in Havana. Not only doctors, but professors, museum curators, lawyers, and countless other professions had their fair share of Afro-Cubans working together in Cuban civil society.
This was one of the first stark differences I noticed, as a Black woman residing in a northern neighborhood in Chicago. Back home, I could go days without seeing someone who looks like me, despite Chicago being 30% Black. Furthermore, professions are often unofficially segregated by race in the U.S., just as the neighborhoods in Chicago are. On our way out of the hospital, one of the doctors revealed that she was in her seventies, which was a shock to all of us. On the trip someone asked how she manages to look so youthful, she replied, “The revolution keeps me beautiful.”
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The second place I want to talk about is the Latin America School of Medicine in Havana. There, we learned that Cuba sends doctors to other Global South countries around the world as a humanitarian service to the poor. The country takes in students, houses them, and trains them to return to practice medicine in their own countries free of charge. The head instructor told us that they share what they have with the community, including educational instruction, supplies, and temporary housing. But in exchange they also share some of Cuba’s problems, such as blackouts and limited access to food. The head instructor told us that recently fresh water hadn’t been available at the school for twenty days, and the students operated to distribute water pipes sent to them in equitable ways. In some communities in Latin America, over 70% of the doctors came from the Latin American School of Medicine. I also found it interesting that this school has also trained doctors from poor communities within the U.S., having hosted over 244 U.S.-American students since the academy’s founding. Eight U.S. students will be graduating this year.
The last place I want to cover is Cenesex. Cenesex is the Cuban National Center for Sex Education. It handles most of the country’s sex education, along with advocacy and essential services for queer people. The organization works to educate the population on all things related to queer and trans people, domestic violence, and sexual abuse.
Cenesex was one of the main institutions responsible for the update to the family code that was passed through a nationwide referendum in 2022. It legalized same-sex marriage and adoption and recognized non-traditional family structures outside of the nuclear family, focusing on the rights and wellbeing of children over parental authority, mandating equal sharing of domestic responsibilities and gender equality, banning corporal punishment for children, and setting the minimum age for marriage in the country to eighteen. Cenesex was one of the main drivers of the advocacy campaign in favor of the new code, hosting public input and educational forums all across the country. It also helps trans individuals navigate transitioning, preparing them for surgeries, offering them and their families counseling, and connecting them to much-needed resources.
One moment that was the cornerstone of this trip was leaving Cenesex. There were three trans people on this trip, and we all cried after the visit. It was truly shocking to see a government institution actively care about our wellbeing instead of trying to erase our identity, call us “groomers,” and eradicate us from existence. We are told by our government that Cuba is a danger to the United States, yet each and every one of us trans women on this trip felt far safer in Havana than we did crossing through the Miami airport to get there.
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The reality of Cuba that I experienced is one of resilience. Despite our government’s best efforts, Cuba has created a society that centers around the wellbeing of its population. While I was there, I saw very little military and police. I saw integration. I saw a government and people trying as hard as they could to get by in spite of the situation. Like any government, it makes mistakes. However, the central point of Cuba’s state planning is to center human wellbeing.
The only danger that Cuba presents to the United States is the danger of U.S. citizens seeing what a government with a fraction of our country’s resources can do to take care of its people and its struggling neighbors. That is why our imperialist government is fighting so hard to finish the job of its predecessors and destroy the revolution once and for all.
I left Cuba with a renewed sense of responsibility. The only people that have the power to stop what our government is doing is us. We must carry the strength, beauty, and resilience of the Cuban people in our struggles against this fascist Trump regime. We must stand united in the belly of the beast.
Thank you.
