Cuban-born singer Camila Cabello is speaking out on her home country, and though she has publicly supported President Biden, she signaled that his administration is getting the protests wrong.
The “Senorita” songstress posted a lengthy video to TikTok over the weekend, specifically citing socialism as the cause of Cuban suffering.
“I am Cuban-Mexican. … My mom is Cuban, lived and was born in Cuba. And so, this movement is really important to me as I still have family on the island,” she began before dismissing the Democratic talking point that pandemic policies caused the pro-democracy protests.
“A lot of people think the protests are about a lack of COVID resources and medicine, which is really just the latest layer in a 62-year-old story of a Communist regime and a dictatorship,” she said before explaining how the dream of socialism has become Cuba’s nightmare.
“For 62 years Cuban people have been living under oppression,” she said, “What started out as a socialist ideal of free healthcare, free education and food for all turned into present-day Cuban people have to wait hours in line at the grocery store to come in and find that basic staples like beans and rice are ten times more than what the average even medical doctor in Cuba can afford.”
The 24-year-old then went on to educated her followers about realities on the ground under Cuba’s dictatorship. “What has the government done in response?” she asked rhetorically, “They’ve put the country’s leading activists behind bars, physically beating protestors and taking down the island’s Wifi so protestors can’t organize anymore. And so we can’t see what the government is doing over there.”
Finally, she offered a historical perspective on how Communism has driven the Cuban people to flee to the U.S. to escape persecution.
“The fact that Cubans for the past few decades have been willing to risk their lives trying to make it to Florida by making homemade rafts, a lot of them drowning or being eaten by sharks, really tells you a lot about the state that Cuba is in.”
As political commentator Brad Polumbo wrote in a Washington Examiner op-ed, Cabello’s take is a far cry from what high-profile Democrats have been saying.
“When celebrities weigh in on politics, the result is usually vapid virtue-signaling and surface-level liberal talking points. But pop star Camilla Cabello just offered an exception to this rule with her stirring and personal denunciation of the socialist tyranny in Cuba.
Now, many left-wing politicians, such as Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have denounced the Cuban regime’s repression of its people. But they conveniently omitted any mention of how socialist ideology led to the tyranny Cuba now faces. It took the Biden administration days to acknowledge the failures of communism in Cuba, only belatedly doing so under massive pressure after its first several statements failed to mention this root cause … Unlike many Democratic leaders, Cabello pulled no punches …
Polumbo finished, “Rare as political wisdom from pop stars and celebrities may be, Cabello deserves enormous credit for acknowledging the true root of Cuba’s problems despite it being politically inconvenient for her side of the aisle.”