Thirty years ago, during a series of reporting trips to Cuba, I was struck not just by the country’s faded colonial beauty or its crumbling architecture, but by the youthfulness of its people. Nearly seventy percent of Cubans had been born after the revolution. They had never known another life or system. To them, the idea of freedom of speech, or freedom at all, wasn’t suppressed so much as it was unimagined. You can’t miss what you’ve never known. Fidel Castro’s regime endured partly because most Cubans couldn’t even conceive of the liberties we take for granted.
What startled me most, though, was the silence. No one ever mentioned Castro’s name. If asked why, they would quietly smile and make a small gesture—pulling a hand down from the face as if stroking a beard. Everyone understood the meaning. Words could be dangerous; gestures were safer.
In Havana, there were no monuments to Castro, only to Che Guevara. Billboards did the talking: Uncle Sam as villain, capitalism as contagion. Every problem, then, scarcity, isolation, and decay, was blamed on the United States. Yet amid that control and propaganda, Cubans still had their humor. I visited the homes of relatives of friends and coworkers from Miami. In some, I saw portraits on the walls that made me laugh: Lennon and Marx, not Vladimir Lenin or Karl Marx, but John Lennon and Groucho Marx. It was with quiet defiance, a reminder that irony can survive even when free speech cannot. Humor was their oxygen.
That generation of Cubans had adapted to their environment. They had grown up with ration books, state television, and whispered jokes. They didn’t mourn lost liberties because they had never experienced them. Their “normal” was built inside invisible boundaries.
I often think about that when I talk with today’s Gen-Z Americans, the first generation to come of age entirely within a landscape of deep polarization, digital outrage, and civic exhaustion. They, too, are products of their environment.
Most were children during 9/11 and the wars that followed. They entered adolescence amid the Great Recession and social-media tribalism. And they reached political awareness during the Trump years, when the vocabulary of public life shifted from persuasion to punishment and propaganda.
For many, there’s no living memory of a time when facts were broadly shared, when disagreement didn’t require moral exile, canceling, or doxing, or when politics wasn’t a 24-hour street fight. Like those Cubans who had never seen a free press, Gen-Z has never seen a functioning one that commanded widespread trust.
When division becomes the water you swim in, you stop noticing you’re drowning.
Adding to that erosion is a strange new moral argument circulating in certain religious and ideological circles: that empathy itself is a sin.
The idea, popularized by a handful of conservative theologians and influencers, claims that feeling the pain of others too deeply can lead us to condone their sins or cloud our moral judgment. In this worldview, empathy is weakness, an emotional contagion that undermines truth.
But stripped of its theology, the message echoes something familiar from authoritarian societies: don’t feel too much for the wrong people. In Cuba, empathy for dissidents was treasonous. In our time, empathy for immigrants, journalists, or political opponents can be branded as naïveté or betrayal.
Whether it comes from the left or right, the goal is to police emotion. To tell us whose suffering deserves our concern and whose pain should be ignored. It’s an efficient way to sustain division: suppress compassion, and you can justify almost anything.
That’s why empathy properly understood is not a sin but a civic necessity. It’s also journalism’s lifeblood.
Empathy doesn’t mean sentimentality or advocacy; it means understanding before judging. The best reporters I’ve known could sit in a stranger’s kitchen, absorb the rhythm of their life, and translate it truthfully for readers without surrendering to propaganda or pity.
Disciplined empathy allows journalists to humanize without idealizing, to feel without being fooled. It’s the antidote to the cynicism that corrodes democracies from within.
If authoritarian systems endure by dulling empathy, by teaching citizens not to feel, then journalism exists to keep the public feeling, wisely. It’s the practice of emotional intelligence in pursuit of factual truth.
Both the Cubans I met and the Gen-Z Americans I now teach remind me how easily societies adapt to their environments. One normalized control, while the other normalizes contempt.
Yet even in Havana’s silence, humor survived. And even in America’s noise, there remains hope, because young people are also creating spaces for civic renewal, fact-checking, storytelling, and purpose-driven work that rejects the cruelty of our politics.
The difference is that unlike Cubans under Castro, Americans can still speak, still publish, still dissent. The tragedy would be if we stop using those freedoms—or stop feeling why they matter.
When people have never known freedom, they can’t imagine its loss. When they’ve grown numb to division, they can’t imagine its cure.
Whether in Havana or Washington, the death of liberty doesn’t begin with censorship. It starts with indifference, when silence replaces speech, when propaganda replaces curiosity, and when empathy is declared a sin instead of a virtue.
Journalism’s task, and perhaps democracy’s last defense, is to keep us imagining and feeling, even when it’s uncomfortable. Because once we stop, we may never know what we’ve lost until it’s gone.