Danny Shaw, a professor at the City University of New York (CUNY) and a regular defender of the Cuban regime, posted a video on X from Cuba this Wednesday in which, unintentionally, he revealed one of the most telling contradictions of the pro-regime discourse: he openly admitted that he can only move around the island because he has dollars.
In his post, Shaw described the transportation conditions while traveling in a cargo truck between Las Tunas and Bayamo, waiting for hours on the road as part of the "typical transport" in Cuba.
"Most Cubans have little to no mobility. I can only travel within Cuba because I have dollars," wrote the academic.
Shaw also noted that a liter of gasoline in Cuba costs today 6,000 pesos, equivalent to 12 US dollars, and that this amount represents three monthly salaries for many Cubans.
The data is consistent with the fuel crisis the island is experiencing: the price per liter on the black market soared from between 700 and 1,500 pesos in January 2026 to the current 6,000 pesos, while the average monthly salary in Cuba in 2025 was just 6,930 pesos, roughly 13 to 15 dollars at the informal exchange rate.
Shaw's involuntary confession exposes the gap between foreign visitors with hard currency and the Cuban population trapped by the crisis.
In Santiago de Cuba, for example, queues of 15 to 24 hours were reported to obtain a maximum of 20 liters of gasoline at state-owned gas stations.
The energy crisis has structural roots that Shaw overlooks in his analysis.
The supply of Venezuelan oil—the island's main source of fuel—was interrupted in December 2025, and Mexico (Pemex) halted its shipments on January 9, 2026, worsening a shortage that the regime has been unable to resolve.
Instead of pointing out the responsibility of the Cuban government, Shaw attributed the mobility crisis to the "Trump administration's war against Cuba," sidestepping decades of poor economic management and energy dependency.
In January 2026, he defended the Cuban elections in X as a "genuine participatory democracy" and described the protests of July 11, 2021, as "agitation funded by USAID."
Similarly, in April 2026, he signed a letter with 150 academics demanding an end to the embargo, published in the official Cuban newspaper Granma.
The irony of his publication did not go unnoticed: a defender of the regime who travels across the island in cargo trucks thanks to his U.S. dollars, while describing in his own words the paralysis suffered by ordinary Cubans.
As he noted in his video: "Crossing the country has definitely not been easy."
The UN Resident Coordinator in Cuba, Francisco Pichón, described in April 2026 that on the island's transportation and telecommunications, a reality that Shaw inadvertently documented with his own camera.
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