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The point is that her photo, her slogan, her eyes that loom over San Francisco like T. J. Eckleburg, are part of the city’s culture, a culture that Kraft and Florida often find to be either discredited, misrepresented, or simply ignored by the snobs in “nightlife cities” like New York or Los Angeles.

But just because these crises can be attributed to external forces doesn’t mean that every decision of the state has been correct or that every mistake has been inevitable. Nor does it mean that we, as US socialists, should be apathetic to the internal issues and debates of Cuban socialism while we narrowly focus on our own ruling class. To truly learn from the revolution, and to arm ourselves with the best analysis and messaging to fight the embargo at home, we must learn from the whole of this socialist project’s successes and failures.

The discourse around DSA’s delegation and our relationship with the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC) ultimately distracts us from the central duty of socialists who live inside the belly of the US imperial beast: to dismantle the embargo imposed on the Cuban people for pursuing a socialist anti-colonial revolution.