The oldest trick in the American playbook is to point at a collapsed island and use it to veto a zoning board meeting. In a Fox News op-ed marking America’s 250th, “I was lucky enough to escape Cuban socialism. America’s 250th reminds me why” by Yali Nuñez, a visiting fellow with Independent Women, argues that because Cuba is a one-party disaster of empty shelves and political prisoners, the democratic socialists winning primaries in New York City must be on the same spectrum — and we should all celebrate American capitalism for its freedom. The piece confesses its whole game in a single line: “Socialism places faith in the state. Capitalism places faith in the people.” That sentence sounds deep and does not survive ten seconds of inspection. The capitalism practiced in the United States in 2026 is the capitalism of private-equity firms that load a nursing home with debt, sell the building out from under the residents, and leave town when the leverage collapses. That is “faith in the people” the way a payday lender has faith in its customers. It is a Sunday-school version of one country and a horror-movie version of the other, and the people selling you the choice are counting on you not to notice which is which.
Let’s get the concession out of the way, because she’s right about Havana and the writer who lived it is owed that much before she is disagreed with. Cuban communism is an unmitigated catastrophe — a one-party state with no free press, an economy that runs on remittances and nostalgia, twenty- and thirty-hour power outages, food shortages, citizens jailed for speaking out, a population sustained by checks from relatives in Miami. The misery is real, the archives are open, and I will not waste a single sentence defending a regime that starves its own people. I know what a command economy looks like when it eats itself. Conceding this is not optional. Anyone who refuses to concede it loses the right to be heard on the next sentence.
But conceding Cuba’s catastrophe is not the same as letting it end the argument.
Here is what “look at Cuba” actually does. It takes the worst example of one category — totalitarian communism, with no democratic exit ramps of any kind — and uses it to dismiss every example of a different category: democratic social democracies, with free elections, a free press, independent courts, private property, and a welfare state on top. The two are not the same thing. They have never been the same thing. Nuñez takes the word “socialist,” attaches it to Zohran Mamdani and the rest of the New York left, and points at Havana. The gap between a city councilor who wants to build public housing and a dictator who nationalizes the press is, to put it mildly, the entire history of the twentieth century — the entire history of the people who built the Swedish welfare state, the American New Deal, and the cooperative movement being the very same people who defeated the Leninists. When you erase the democratic left — the social democrats, the co-ops, the people who want universal childcare and a public option — you get to pretend the only alternative to a strip-mined Manhattan is a collapsed Caribbean dictatorship. Notice the reflex: the second the word “socialist” appears, Havana is rolled out, as if the spectrum of human economic organization is just two items on a menu. If you want to argue against public housing, argue about the zoning, the financing, the plumbing. Don’t argue about Havana. It is a scare tactic dressed up as a warning.
Let’s inventory what “look at Cuba” is being asked to dismiss.
Your Social Security check. Universal, federal, the most popular government program in the country. By the logic of this op-ed, Social Security is a step toward Havana. By the logic of the seventy million Americans who collect it, it is the thing standing between them and their parents eating cat food.
Your Medicare card. Single-payer healthcare for everyone over sixty-five. The “step toward socialism” crowd has spent thirty years trying to privatize it and has never once succeeded, because no politician who tried it survived the next election. Cuba is not what your Medicare card is about to become. It is a federal insurance pool inside a capitalist country, with private hospitals and private doctors.
The Bank of North Dakota. A state-owned bank, profitable every year since 1919. North Dakota is not Cuba. The bank is not a Politburo. It is a publicly owned financial institution that has made money for a hundred and seven years in one of the reddest states in the union, and nobody has ever called Bismarck the Kremlin.
The Alaska Permanent Fund. Public ownership of resource wealth; every Alaskan gets an annual check. Alaska is not Cuba. The dividend is a check, not a ration card.
Your credit union. Member-owned, not-for-profit, probably giving you a better rate than the bank down the street. You are a part-owner of a cooperative. The credit-union system has roughly a hundred and forty-five million members in the United States. That is a constituency Cuba has never had.
The rural electric cooperative that wires your county. Member-owned, member-governed, serving forty-two million Americans across fifty-six percent of the country’s landmass. Built because the investor-owned utilities would not bring power to places where the rate of return was too thin. That is how America electrified itself. Not by a five-year plan, not by a politburo — by a co-op.
None of these institutions abolished private property. None of them banned elections. None of them sent dissenters to labor camps. None of them put the secret police in charge of the corner grocery. They are the institutions of a social democracy — a high-tax, open-market, private-property capitalism with a welfare state on top. Denmark is not Cuba. Norway’s two-trillion-dollar sovereign wealth fund, which owns a slice of nearly every listed company on earth, is not Cuba. Neither country has ever held a one-party election. Neither has banned private enterprise. The Nordics didn’t abolish capitalism to build their model; they just put a floor under it and welded the exits shut so no one could fall through. The Danes treat universal healthcare the way we treat the interstate highway system: boring, useful, and theirs. You don’t have to flee a dictatorship to appreciate a floor under the economy.
So what do we build, if we stop letting the ghost of a one-party island veto the infrastructure of a functioning city? The same thing the people Nuñez wants to scare us away from are actually arguing for, which is just the boring, functional plumbing of a society that doesn’t treat a sick kid or a bad lease as a moral failing. We build a public option for healthcare, so that a diagnosis doesn’t mean bankruptcy. We build a child allowance — which, when we briefly tried it in 2021, cut child poverty by nearly half in a single year before Congress let it lapse. We build cooperative banks and public utilities that keep the money in town instead of extracting it to a distant shareholder. Build the public option. Build the child allowance. That is the menu we should be arguing about.
So: thank the author for her testimony. Cuba was a catastrophe. The men who ran it are dead or retired and the people they ruined are still trying to leave. That is not in dispute. But the next time someone tells you to “look at Cuba” as a closing argument against the welfare state, take out your wallet. Look at the credit-union card. Ask whether that card looks like Havana to you.
It doesn’t. It never did. Stop letting anyone tell you it does. Build the welfare state anyway.