Thank you, Cuba, for the 60 years they’ve been trying to make us forget
Fact-Check Results
“When the plane landed at José Martí International Airport in November 2022, I felt something I had not expected: a kind of time warp.”
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INSUFFICIENT EVIDENCE
— No evidence found in archive to confirm or refute the claim about experiencing a time warp at the airport.
“Cuba was a place that held our dreams and sent its young men to die in Angolan soil so that we might one day be free.”
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INSUFFICIENT EVIDENCE
— No evidence found in archive to verify Cuba's role in South Africa's anti-apartheid struggle through Angola.
“We arrived during what Cubans were experiencing not merely as an electricity crisis, but as a shortage crisis in which fuel, power, and food had collapsed into a single emergency.”
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INSUFFICIENT EVIDENCE
— No evidence found in archive to confirm the interconnectedness of fuel, power, and food shortages in Cuba in 2022.
“The outages were part of a longer condition: scarcity shaped by isolation, by constrained access to fuel and trade, and by the accumulated effects of a system under pressure from both within and beyond its borders.”
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INSUFFICIENT EVIDENCE
— No evidence found in archive to verify the attribution of electricity shortages to isolation, fuel access, and systemic pressures.
“Cuba had been carrying this weight not for months, as we had, but for decades.”
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INSUFFICIENT EVIDENCE
— No evidence found in archive to confirm the description of Cuba's shortages as a decades-long systemic issue.
“Cuba came out of the DRC with the bodies of our brothers, not with gold and diamonds.”
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INSUFFICIENT EVIDENCE
— No evidence found in archive to verify Cuban forces' withdrawal from the DRC with casualties rather than material gains.
“Cuba named an academic chair after Nelson Mandela: the Cátedra Nelson Mandela, dedicated to anti-racial research and activism, housed at the Centre for Psychological and Sociological Research in Havana, named for him on the centenary of his birth in 2018.”
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INSUFFICIENT EVIDENCE
— No evidence found in archive to confirm the establishment of the Catedra Nelson Mandela in 2018.
“The African connection in Matanzas runs deep; at one point two-thirds of the population of the province were enslaved Africans, brought across the ocean to work the sugar plantations.”
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INSUFFICIENT EVIDENCE
— No evidence found in archive to verify the enslaved African population in Matanzas province during the 18th century.
“The director said: 'Some things that are easy in Cuba, like access to specialists, are difficult in other countries. Whereas other things that are easy in other countries, like access to food and transport, are difficult in Cuba – mostly because of the American blockade.'”
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INSUFFICIENT EVIDENCE
— No evidence found in archive to confirm Cuban officials' attribution of food/transport issues to the American blockade.