“Cuba After Castro” isn’t just another political documentary. It’s BreakThrough News putting a camera where U.S. media never does, and letting Miguel Díaz‑Canel speak without the usual censoring. The film, directed by Abby Martin and Matt Belen, is built around the first and only interview Díaz‑Canel has ever given to a U.S. outlet, and that alone tells you how tightly controlled the narrative around Cuba usually is. The documentary shows a version of the island that Western coverage rarely touches: a country shaped by collective values, still trying to survive under a pressure campaign that never really stopped.
The film digs into Díaz‑Canel’s life in a way that’s almost never shown. He’s not portrayed as some hand‑picked heir groomed for power since birth. He comes off as a quiet organizer who grew up inside the revolutionary system, someone who biked to work during the Special Period after the Soviet collapse, someone who didn’t expect to end up running a country that’s been in Washington’s crosshairs for more than sixty years. His background is laid out in the interview: his childhood, his early meetings with Fidel, his work in Nicaragua, and the long stretch of Cuban history that shaped him.
Cuba’s current crisis didn’t appear in a vacuum. With the tightening of sanctions under Trump and Marco Rubio, hundreds of new restrictions piled on top of the already‑suffocating blockade. It shows how the island was hit with a “perfect storm” — a U.S. economic chokehold, a global pandemic, a media war, and the July 11, 2021 protests that Washington immediately tried to spin as the beginning of regime collapse. The film doesn’t pretend Cuba is paradise. It shows the shortages, the blackouts, the frustration. But it also shows the context that’s always left out purposely in Western reporting: the U.S. has spent decades trying to break Cuba economically, and the current crisis is the result of that pressure, not some isolated failure of the Cuban system.
What stands out is how openly Díaz‑Canel talks about the existential threats facing the country. He describes the sanctions as a deliberate attempt to push Cuba to the brink — the Obama thaw, the Trump reversal, and the new threats of “liberating” Cuba militarily, including CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s visit to Havana with exactly that message. That context is important because it shows how the island keeps getting shoved into the line of fire, not because of anything it’s doing now, but because of what it represents: a government that refuses to bend to U.S. demands.
The documentary also highlights something that rarely gets airtime: Cuba’s public‑sector vaccine development during COVID‑19. While the U.S. was hoarding doses, Cuba was building its own vaccines through BioCubaFarma, a state‑run consortium. That’s the kind of detail that breaks the usual narrative of a failed state on the verge of collapse. It shows a country that, even under sanctions, still manages to produce things most wealthy nations can’t.
BreakThrough News positions the film as a counterweight to decades of propaganda. The documentary is clearly aimed at an audience that has only ever heard one version of Cuba — the version where socialism is always failing, where the government is always oppressive, where the U.S. is always the savior waiting in the wings. The film pushes back by letting Díaz‑Canel speak plainly about the Revolution, the social programs that still exist because of it, and the constant attempts to crush the island into submission. This documentary is a correction to a narrative that’s been distorted for generations.
Watching it in the context of today — with new threats of invasion, with the U.S. openly discussing “taking” Cuba again, with sanctions still tightening — the documentary is a warning. Cuba is being pushed toward collapse, and the people paying the price are the ones who’ve already endured decades of economic warfare. BreakThrough News doesn’t pretend the Cuban government is flawless. It strips away the context, doesn't pretend the crisis is self‑contained, and refuse to let the U.S. off the hook for the role it plays in every Cuban hardship. This is not about defending a government. It’s about telling the truth about the pressure being applied to a small country that’s been punished for surviving.
