In November 2022, I travelled to Cuba with a group of South African social justice leaders. What we found there - the contradictions, the humanity, the defiant solidarity - is difficult to recall now. The country we visited is being deliberately starved into submission. We should not look away.

When the plane landed at José Martí International Airport in November 2022, I felt something I had not expected: a kind of time warp. Seeing the word Cuba - not in a book, not in a speech, not in the reverent tones of the elders who had shaped my political formation - but on a sign, a real sign, in a real airport, on an island I was actually standing on.

I grew up knowing that somewhere beyond the walls of apartheid South Africa, there was a place that held our dreams. That sent its young men to die in Angolan soil so that we might one day be free. That place was Cuba. And now here we were: twenty social justice leaders from across our country, a cross-disciplinary group working in health, land, food politics, education, queer liberation, feminist organising, all of us in various ways children of a struggle that Cuba had helped make possible.

We had come to learn. And what we found was more complicated, and more human, than any of our frameworks had prepared us for.

We arrived during what Cubans were experiencing not merely as an electricity crisis, but as something deeper and more...