Ishaan Tharoor
This is embarrassing. One can criticize the Cuban regime and the U.S. blockade at the same time. It's not hard. You can't face the national conversation possessed by — or in fear of — internecine left purity tests.
Stu Smith
🚨 DSA Co-Chairs Squirm When Pressed on Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua This is a longer clip, but it captures the best parts of a broader discussion DSA national co-chairs Ashik Siddique and Megan Romer had with The Moment hosts Jorge Ramos and Paola Ramos. Jorge repeatedly presses them on whether Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua are dictatorships. They repeatedly avoid giving him a direct answer. Romer eventually responds that “Cubans have access to their democracy in a way that we do not,” pointing to Cuba’s 2022 Family Code referendum as evidence. That referendum was only four years ago, making it an especially curious answer to Jorge Ramos repeatedly pressing her on decades without multiparty elections. Ashik Siddique fares little better. Asked whether Cuba is a dictatorship, he pivots to the U.S. embargo and the state of American politics, responding that “it’s hard for us to judge other countries being dictatorships when we have Donald Trump as president.” Paola eventually steps in and identifies the problem at hand. DSA can be anti-imperialist without becoming apologists for these regimes. They should still be able to recognize and explain what makes them authoritarian. When it comes to international politics, DSA is often at its most revealing. Siddique and Romer are not even among the organization’s most die-hard internationalists. This is really just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to how radical DSA’s international politics can get.