Michael Lucchese is the founder of Pipe Creek Consulting and an associate editor of Law & Liberty.
In recent years, Cuba has been largely offstage in geopolitics, left to quietly crumble under communist misrule. But lately, the island nation has been thrust into the news.
First, Cuba was a featured player in the recent seizures of oil tankers from Venezuela. The Cuban economy, such as it is, depends heavily on oil provided at cut-rate prices from the Chavista regime in Caracas. After the United States arrested Venezuela’s socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro on Saturday, President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio turned the spotlight on Cuba, suggesting its leaders might be next.
Before marchers in Brooklyn and San Francisco start any “Hands off Cuba” campaigns, they would do well to consider the recent words of Cuban dissident José Daniel Ferrer. They were uttered in November at a ceremony in his honor: The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, in conjunction with the Embassy of Lithuania, presented Ferrer with their Truman-Reagan Medal of Freedom in recognition of his struggle against the communist regime oppressing his homeland. His speech is a profound warning against the West’s complacency toward radicalism.
Ferrer did not win this award in 2025. He was originally recognized in 2020, but at that time, he was sitting in a jail for his bold opposition to the Cuban regime’s heinous oppression of its own people. Cuba’s communist government had arrested Ferrer more than 100 times since 2003, in addition to conducting a harassment and intimidation campaign against his friends and family. He said he had been assaulted in his own home, in front of his wife and children, and subjected to inhumane torture and humiliation in prison. The regime finally released him into exile in October 2025, bending to a pressure campaign led by the U.S. and the Vatican.
“After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, I thought the Cuban regime would collapse as well,” Ferrer said in his remarks. “I was optimistic because I was young,” he admitted. That optimism ultimately proved false. The Cuban regime has only clung more tightly to power as its confederates in revolution have toppled.
Ferrer made it clear that he has learned communism is an imperial ideology. Not only do revolutionaries victimize their own people, he said, but they also pose an incalculable threat beyond their borders. Communists, from the time of Vladimir Lenin until today, have always sought to remake the whole world according to their materialist ideology, and compromise is not possible with regimes committed to this totalizing vision. As Ferrer’s experience shows, they will brook no dissent or opposition to their diabolical schemes, and there is no depth of depravity to which their tyrannies will not sink.
Lithuanian Foreign Minister Kestutis Budrys spoke at the event, later remarking that “José Daniel Ferrer has stood tall against the Cuban communist regime despite years of oppression.” Ferrer had noted in his speech that it is fitting that the Embassy of Lithuania participated in the award ceremony, because Eastern Europe has once again become a front in the fight against despotism. Both Budrys and Ferrer linked the struggle against communism in Cuba to Europe now being threatened by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s revanchist expansionism, on display most vividly in neighboring Ukraine.
Even decades after the end of the Cold War, the specter of authoritarian extremism looms large. From holdout regimes in Cuba and North Korea, to the much stronger and more terrifying powers of Russia and China, tyrants across the globe seek to undo the forward march of liberty and reorder the world around their totalizing vision. The fight against these kinds of despotism has not ended; it has only entered a new phase.
Unfortunately, new radicals are rising across American politics. Inspired by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, many look to the rotten ideology of socialism to give them a sense of hope for a better life. They have clearly not reckoned with the human toll caused by the revolutions of the 20th century — or their ideological successors still imposing tyranny around the world today, including in our own hemisphere.
That makes the witness of José Daniel Ferrer all the more important, both as a warning and an inspiration. The free world desperately needs men and women with his indomitable will to withstand the gathering storm. Revolutions may tempt the young with their simplistic solutions to various ills, but Ferrer’s example is an enduring reminder that only true freedom remains worthy of our sacrifice.
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