Rodrigo from Havana, Cuba
Dear Santa,
My name is Rodrigo and I am thirteen years old. I live in Havana, Cuba. We do not officially celebrate Christmas here the way other countries do — it was banned for a long time, though they allow some of it now, depending on who is watching. My grandmother has always celebrated it in secret, with a candle and a prayer and sometimes a small gift she made herself. She says Christmas belongs to the people and no government can permanently take away what belongs to the people. I believe her.
I have heard that 2026 is America's 250th birthday. In school we are taught that America is an imperialist country that exploits poor nations and that everything bad in Cuba is America's fault. But my uncle who left for Miami in 2003 calls us every week on a phone he sent us, and he does not sound like a man living in an exploited country. He sounds like a man who cannot stop talking about his small business, his neighborhood, his freedom to say what he thinks. I am confused by the difference between what I am taught and what I hear.
I have three questions.
What is America actually celebrating at 250 years, and what does it actually stand for?
Where exactly is Cuba and why does its location make it so important to so many powerful countries?
Why do millions of people risk their lives to reach America, including by sea from Cuba, if it is truly as bad as my teachers say?
Thank you.
Rodrigo Alejandro Vega
Havana, Cuba
Dear Rodrigo,
Your grandmother is one of the wisest people I have encountered in several centuries of Christmas correspondence, and I want you to know that before I say anything else. Christmas belongs to the people. No government can permanently take away what belongs to the people. She is right about both of those things, and she has earned the right to say them in a way that I hope you will carry for the rest of your life. The candle and the prayer and the small handmade gift in secret — that is Christmas at its most essential and its most honest. I have been delivering gifts under much easier conditions for several centuries and I tell you sincerely: your grandmother's Christmas, kept alive under those conditions, is worth more than any version I have ever delivered to a house that never had to fight to keep it.
Now. Your questions. I will answer them honestly, because you asked honestly, and because you are thirteen years old in Havana, which means you have been patient long enough.
What America is actually celebrating at 250 years, and what it actually stands for.
On July 4th, 1776, fifty-six men — delegates from thirteen British colonies along the eastern coast of North America — signed a document called the Declaration of Independence. They were, by the standards of their time, committing treason. They were announcing to the most powerful empire on Earth that they were no longer willing to be governed without their consent, and that they were willing to die for the right to govern themselves.
The document they signed began with a sentence that changed the world: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." Rodrigo, that sentence has never stopped being radical. It was radical in 1776. It is radical now. It says that rights do not come from governments. Governments do not grant rights — governments either protect them or violate them. Rights come from something beyond government, from God or from the simple fact of being human, and no government, no matter how powerful, can legitimately take them away.
This is the idea America was founded on. Not a perfect execution of the idea — America has failed its own founding principles in serious ways at serious moments throughout its history, and honest Americans acknowledge this — but the idea itself has proven to be one of the most durable and revolutionary in human history. It has inspired more than a hundred independence movements around the world. The Declaration of Independence was translated and circulated by revolutionaries in France, in Latin America, in Africa, in Asia. The idea that government derives its authority from the consent of the governed, and that individuals have rights that no government can legitimately remove — this idea left Philadelphia in 1776 and has never stopped travelling.
In 2026, America is celebrating 250 years of that idea — imperfectly applied, constantly debated, frequently argued over, but never officially abandoned. America250, the bipartisan commission charged by Congress with organising the commemoration, describes the anniversary as "an opportunity to pause and reflect on our nation's past, honour the contributions of all Americans, and look ahead toward the future." The celebrations span the entire country — from Philadelphia, where the Declaration was signed, to Washington D.C., to communities across all fifty states. What they are celebrating is not perfection. They are celebrating the durability of a set of principles that said, for the first time in modern history at national scale, that the individual matters more than the state. That is worth 250 candles, Rodrigo. That is worth considerably more.
Where exactly is Cuba and why does its location make it so important?
Cuba is the largest island in the Caribbean, sitting at the entrance to the Gulf of Mexico approximately 145 kilometres south of the Florida Keys — close enough that on a clear night, people in southern Florida can see lights across the water, and close enough that people leaving Cuba by sea reach American shores in hours if the crossing goes well and never if it does not.
Cuba's location has made it strategically important to every major power that has ever operated in the western hemisphere, for a reason that becomes clear when you look at a map: whoever controls Cuba controls access to the Gulf of Mexico, which means controlling access to the Mississippi River system, the ports of New Orleans, Houston, and Veracruz, and the trade routes connecting North America, South America, and Europe. The Spanish understood this when they made Havana one of the most fortified cities in the New World. The United States understood this in 1898, when the Spanish-American War ended Spanish colonial rule and began a complicated American relationship with Cuba that shaped the next century. The Soviet Union understood this in 1962, when placing nuclear missiles in Cuba — ninety miles from the United States — brought the world to the closest it has ever come to nuclear war. Location is not destiny. But Cuba's location has meant that the island has rarely been left alone long enough to determine its own.
What Cuba has, apart from its geography, is a people of extraordinary resilience, culture, and warmth that I have observed on every Christmas Eve pass over the island for as long as Cuba has existed as a nation. The music that rises from Havana at night is unlike anything else on the route. Your people have survived things that would have broken most nations several times over. The location that made Cuba a prize for empires is also the location that gave Cubans a view of the wider world, the awareness of what exists on the other side of the water, and the knowledge — kept alive by grandmothers with candles and uncles in Miami — that the world is larger than ninety miles of ocean.
Why do millions risk their lives to reach America if it is truly as bad as your teachers say?
Rodrigo, I am going to answer this question the way it deserves to be answered: directly, without diplomatic softening, because you are old enough for the direct version and because you have been patient with the indirect version for your entire life.
Your teachers tell you America is exploitative, imperialist, and responsible for Cuba's difficulties. I want you to ask one simple question about this explanation, and hold the answer up to the light: if America is truly the oppressive, exploitative country your teachers describe, why does it receive more voluntary immigrants than any other country on Earth? Not immigrants who are brought by force, the way colonial powers moved people by force. Voluntary immigrants. People who choose to leave their own countries, leave their families, leave everything they know, and make dangerous journeys — across oceans, across deserts, through legal channels and illegal ones — specifically to reach America. People from every nation on Earth. Every language. Every religion. Every race. Every background.
From Cuba alone, hundreds of thousands of people have crossed the Florida Straits — one of the most dangerous short sea crossings in the world — on rafts, boats, and improvised vessels, knowing the risks, in order to reach the country your teachers describe as their enemy. People do not risk death to reach countries that are worse than the ones they are leaving. They risk death to reach countries that are better. The direction of the crossing tells you everything your teachers will not.
What people find in America when they arrive — what your uncle found in Miami, what he cannot stop talking about — is not perfection. America has poverty, inequality, injustice, and political conflict that its own citizens argue about loudly and publicly every single day, which is itself part of the point. What America has, underneath all of that, is a system built on the idea that the individual has rights the government cannot touch, that markets are generally freer to operate than in most countries, that you can start a small business without asking the government for permission to exist, that you can say what you think without calculating whether the person next to you will report you for it, and that if you work hard and make good decisions over time, your life can genuinely improve in ways that are not available to you in a system that has decided in advance what your life will look like and what you are permitted to want.
The reason some governments want their citizens to hate America is not difficult to understand once you see it clearly. If you can be persuaded that America is the source of your problems, you will not look too carefully at your own government as the source of your problems. Hatred of a foreign enemy is the oldest tool of political distraction in human history. It is used by governments that have failed their people and need someone else to blame. Cuba's standard of living — the shortages, the restrictions, the limitations on what you can say and do and own and become — is not the result of American policy. It is the result of sixty-five years of a system that prioritised the control of its citizens over the wellbeing of its citizens. America did not cause that. America is not the reason your grandmother celebrates Christmas with a candle in secret. That reason lives much closer to home.
I am not telling you America is without fault. No honest person of any nationality makes that argument. What I am telling you is that the gap between what your teachers say and what your uncle lives is not a mystery or a coincidence. It is evidence. And evidence, examined honestly, is always worth more than any lesson designed to produce a conclusion before the evidence has been considered.
Your grandmother knows this. She has known it for a long time. The candle she lights every Christmas is lit in honour of things that governments cannot provide and cannot permanently extinguish — faith, love, the freedom of the human spirit to insist on its own dignity regardless of what any political system tells it to feel. These are the same things the men in Philadelphia put their names to in 1776. The same things your uncle found in Miami. The same things that make the crossing worth the risk to people who have calculated, correctly, that there is something on the other side of the water worth reaching.
Merry Christmas, Rodrigo. Give your grandmother my deepest respect. The candle she lights is one of the finest lights on my entire route, and I fly over it every year, and I am always glad it is still burning.
Your friend,
Santa Claus
The North Pole
P.S. Tell your uncle in Miami that the North Pole considers small business owners among the finest people on Earth — people who bet on themselves, serve their communities, and create something from nothing using their own effort and judgment. This is one of the oldest and most honourable of all human activities. It is also, not coincidentally, one of the things that is most difficult to do in systems that prefer their citizens dependent rather than independent. Tell him congratulations. He earned it. https://santaclaus.top/santa-explains-the-4th-of-july-in-the-usa/
Comments
Post a Comment