Much of the world’s attention has since lamentably moved on, but what happened over the weekend in Cuba should not be dismissed or ignored. In this country, people take to the streets in outrage every time a police officer forgets to brush his teeth, but in Cuba leveling criticism against anything except the United States runs very real, very brutal risks.

And yet, life is so wretched in that island-prison that despair often overcomes even the state-inculcated-and-enforced fear. What makes the uprisings of last weekend so remarkable was their spontaneity, breadth, and rapid spread. Seldom, if ever, since Castro took the country hostage in the late 1950s, has there been a rebellion against the regime of such magnitude, or audacity.

They were protesting against… well, just about everything that defines socialist Cuba – entrenched poverty, brutal oppression, lack of everything from food to electricity – with a new one added in, the virtual absence of a COVID vaccine. The scenes out of Havana call to mind those that rocked Eastern European cities in 1989 as the people behind the Iron Curtain finally shook off their fetters, in what many heralded as the “end of history,” a happy convulsion which managed to elude the slums and torture chambers of Cuba.

The scenes also evoke those witnessed last year in Hong Kong. There are significant differences, of course; the protesters in Hong Kong were rising in opposition to what amounted to an invasion by proxy, or by political attrition if you will, by the mainland communist government – in other words, they were fighting to protect what they had. No Cuban much under the age of 70 has any recollection of what freedom may have looked like. The people on the streets of Havana and elsewhere were pushing back not against an encroaching boot, but against the one under which they have been suffocating for all or most of their lives.

But there were similarities as well; the conspicuous display of the American flag, for one. Another is how the risings appear to have caught much of the American left off guard. For decades, Cuba has been rhapsodized by liberals as the Worker’s Paradise it pretends to be, rather than the tropical gulag it is. Recall, for instance, the gushing eulogies for the island’s founding butcher, Fidel Castro, upon his belated death, and Michael Moore’s nauseatingly tendentious documentary extolling Cuba’s health care system.

Another, decidedly unhappy similarity with Hong Kong, is the dissidents’ dismal chance of success. Cuba’s communist government, of course, blames – you guessed it – the United States for the upheavals, not its own brutal failures. This comes as no surprise; there is no retreat from history in the Marxist world. Once the revolutionary line is crossed, it is crossed. In the Marxist world view, when a society embraces the ideology, it does so as a permanent condition, rather the political equivalent of losing virginity; it cannot be undone. Status quo ante is ideologically inconceivable.

Couple that with a regime that has perfected the art and science of brutal repression over the last six decades and things do not bode well for the brave souls who took to the streets last weekend.

And sure enough, the regime responded as they always have, as governments like theirs always will. The Cuban government – police, military, para-military – cracked down with a level of violence and viciousness that exceeds even the elastic imaginations of American anti-police protesters. “Police brutality” takes on an altogether different form in Cuba than it does in Denver or New York.

The U.S. must not ignore this moment, though history does not reassure us that the current administration will do much substantively. It was heartening that President Biden released a statement calling out the Cuban regime and characterizing the protests as “a clarion call for freedom and relief… from the decades of repression and economic suffering” inflicted on the Cuban people by their masters. That realization comes better late than never I suppose. But the moment calls for more than a nice speech. Obama’s appeasement strategy failed utterly, another in a chain of U.S. missteps, starting with messing up the Bay of Pigs and mishandling the Cuban Missile Crisis. It can be argued that the Cuban regime’s endurance owes as much to defective U.S. statesmanship over the years as to Soviet husbandry and Venezuelan oil since then.

It is time for fresh thinking on Cuba – thinking that is unlikely to emerge from this administration, but which is critical for those in Cuba not yet imprisoned, not yet tortured, not yet murdered.