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A few weeks ago, Michael Bustamante received some curious AI-generated images circulating on social media in Cuban American and Cuban circles.
These images depict Cuba as an imprisoned woman with Donald Trump poised to free her, Cuba as a child handing Donald Trump its flag, or Cuba labeled the 51st state on a map. The message is clear – U.S. military intervention will rescue Cuba from its troubles.
Bustamante, an associate professor of history and Cuban and Cuban-American Studies, immediately saw echoes of the 1890s, when American political cartoonists used the same tropes to urge U.S. intervention in the Spanish-American War. The resemblance between the images is uncanny. And it makes sense – after all, it’s likely that artificial intelligence was trained on these very cartoons, sweeping up their style along with all the assumptions and prejudices of their era.
But the concern here, Bustamante explains, isn’t digital plagiarism so much as the suggestion that the U.S., rather than Cuba, should determine the island nation’s future.
Right now, Cubans are living with daily blackouts and deprivations brought on by decades of their own government’s intransigence and an ongoing U.S. oil embargo. Just yesterday, the Cuban energy minister reported that the country is out of oil. It’s no wonder, then, that many Cubans are tempted to trade the work – and benefits – of self-governance for the relative ease of U.S. intervention, Bustamante writes.
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