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The Cuban writer and historian Enrique del Risco published an analysis on Facebook this Sunday, following his participation in a panel at the LASA 2026 congress held in Paris. He claims that the only real achievement of Castrism is having survived for 67 years, and that this achievement should be measured against a human cost that historians often overlook.
Del Risco, a professor at New York University (NYU) and a graduate in History from the University of Havana, recounted that during the panel he used the example of the Egyptian pyramids to discuss the cynicism of certain historians who admire the monuments without considering the suffering of those who built them. His fellow panelists, he mentioned, "shifted uncomfortably."
Reflecting on that exchange, Del Risco acknowledged that he had a much closer example: the so-called Cuban Revolution. "The deference that historians often show towards an event so catastrophic for the society it intended to build is worthy of a better cause," he wrote, even rejecting the use of capital letters to refer to what he describes as "a tyranny with an excellent public relations and marketing department."
For Del Risco, Castroism was never a project of social transformation, but rather an exercise in the accumulation and retention of power. "Regardless of the preferred period, Castroism has always been about power, without regard for the costs, whether economic or human," he stated. In this context, he pointed out that the regime has "no pyramids to showcase," nor, he wryly noted, "even a more or less passable national highway."
The writer dismantled one by one the most common arguments of the regime's defenders. The literacy campaign of 1961, one of the most frequently cited symbols, was reinterpreted as "part of the counterinsurgency plan deployed at the height of the anti-Castro guerrillas," with the literacy instructors turned into "unwitting agents of ideological indoctrination, spies in enemy territory, and potential martyrs."
Regarding advancements in education, health, and sports, Del Risco was also critical: "discounting statistical and emotional manipulations, they proved to be unsustainable without Soviet subsidies." A reality that today's Cuba confirms abundantly: the Cuban economy has experienced a contraction of over 23% since 2019, and by 2026, an additional decline in GDP of between 6.5% and 7.2% is projected.
The central thesis of the analysis is striking: "The only clearly indisputable achievement of the so-called Cuban Revolution is the mere existence of the regime over 67 years." Those nearly seven decades of survival are, in his metaphor, the pyramids that must be weighed against the cost it took to construct them.
This cost, precisely outlined by Del Risco, includes "the executions, deaths at sea, tens of thousands of political prisoners, family separations, the disappearance of democratic institutions, the silencing of an entire population, the destruction of the economy, and the extermination of civil society," in addition to the devastation caused by Cuban international adventurism in Africa, Latin America, and other contexts.
The context in which Del Risco writes these reflections is that of a rapidly collapsing Cuba. Tourism on the island fell by 55% in 2026 compared to previous years, blackouts reach between 20 and 25 hours daily, and more than 1.4 million people are estimated to have left the country between 2020 and 2024, which is about 20% of the population.
Del Risco, who in June 2025 gathered over 2,300 signatures from intellectuals in support of Cuban university students protesting against ETECSA's rate increases, concluded his analysis with a direct warning to those who consider it sufficient for Cuba to exist as a "symbolic village of Asterix in front of the empire of the moment": if that is enough for them to legitimize the regime, "they will have to acknowledge that the lives of generations of Cubans matter to them as much as the lives of the slaves upon which the wealth of past societies was built."
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