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Jeremy Lewin, Under Secretary for External Assistance at the State Department and senior advisor to Secretary Marco Rubio, characterized the Cuban communist system as a “cruel lie” in a post on X this Sunday, in direct response to a report by the AP agency about the collapse of the rationing system on the island.
The official responded to the article documenting the critical state of state-run warehouses in Havana during April and May of 2026, where the shelves appear practically empty and thousands of families struggle to find food.
"The store shelves are completely devoid of basic products due to decades of corruption and unimaginable incompetence from the regime's elites," wrote Lewin.
The official accused the regime of channeling resources solely towards internal repression and state tourism businesses, "which only serve to fill the foreign accounts of GAESA and the regime's kleptocrats."
Lewin concluded by stating that "it's no surprise that more than a million Cubans fled to the U.S. just during Biden's years" as a direct consequence of that system.
The report that prompted his statements depicts an unprecedented crisis. The Havana trader José Luis Amate López, who serves 5,000 assigned customers, had not a single customer for almost two weeks at the end of April.
That month, her pantry only had rice, sugar, and split peas.
"Nobody in Cuba can truly survive on the products from the ration book," declared Amate López to the AP.
Ana Enamorado, a 68-year-old woman from Havana, was only able to buy peas and one kilogram of sugar in April. Her salary and pension total 8,000 Cuban pesos, which is equivalent to about 16 dollars a month.
"In the notebook, there's almost nothing. We're practically living off air," he said. "Now we have to cut back, eat once a day, and live on memories."
This situation is part of the collapse of the rationing system that has reached historic levels in 2026. Cuba imports up to 80% of the food it consumes, but the regime no longer has the funds to sustain that system, according to Professor William LeoGrande from American University, who pointed out that the government has "squandered" the monetary unification of 2021, resulting in inflation as high as 470%.
Lewin's statements are not isolated. In February, the official had already claimed that the Cuban regime has deliberately kept the country in misery to maintain its total control. In March, he described Cuban medical missions as one of the worst examples of modern slavery, noting that the State retains between 70% and 85% of the doctors' salaries.
On the same day that Lewin published his message, Díaz-Canel acknowledged before foreign communists gathered in Havana that Cuba "will eat what we are capable of producing," an implicit admission of the failure of the subsidized import model.
The food crisis has alarming figures: deaths from malnutrition increased by 74.42% between 2022 and 2023, and 96.91% of the population lacks adequate access to food, according to Food Monitor Program.
Eighty percent of Cubans believe that the current situation is worse than the Special Period of the 1990s.
Rosa Rodríguez, 54 years old and without remittances from abroad, earns 4,000 pesos—about eight dollars—a month, and in April she only received a donation of four pounds of rice at her store.
"Everything is scarce here, everything, even that damn bread they give us. If I buy beans, I can't buy sugar. If I retire, I will die," he declared to the AP.
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