Washington Examiner Op Ed 02Jul2026 Note this is behind a paywall, following is the full text
Reflecting on the Reflection Pool
What Stains a Nation More Than Algae?
Author’s Note
The following Reflection was originally published as an op-ed in THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER on July 2, 2026. I am grateful for the opportunity to reach that audience and pleased to share it here.
The Reflection Pool in Washington has suddenly become the object of national attention. News reports focus on the appearance of green algae spreading across its waters, turning one of America’s most recognizable landmarks into a subject of concern and debate.
For many Americans, this is the first time they have given the pool any thought at all.
My own reflections go back fifty years.
Imagine the spectacle during our Bicentennial celebrations half a century ago. Marijuana smoke drifted across portions of the National Mall. Protesters and counterculture activists gathered in large numbers. Some openly used drugs. Others jumped naked into the Reflection Pool itself. What was intended to be a place of quiet contemplation became a stage for rebellion against the institutions and traditions represented by the surrounding monuments.
The Reflection Pool was designed to mirror the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. Instead, during those years it often reflected a nation in cultural turmoil.
Today, attention has returned to the pool because of algae. The irony is difficult to ignore.
Algae is visible. It discolors the water. It offends the eye. It can be measured, treated, and removed. A few applications of chemicals and proper maintenance can restore clarity in a relatively short period of time.
Cultural toxins are far more difficult to eliminate.
The ideas that emerged from the counterculture movement did not remain confined to college campuses or protest gatherings. They challenged authority, dismissed tradition, eroded respect for institutions, and promoted a philosophy that prioritized personal liberation over responsibility and obligation. Many of the assumptions born during that period continue to influence American culture today.
One may debate whether those changes represented progress or decline, but it is impossible to deny their durability.
The green algae covering the Reflection Pool will eventually disappear. Maintenance crews will clean the water. The surface will once again mirror the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument as its designers intended.
The deeper question is whether America has been equally successful in cleaning the cultural waters that became clouded decades ago.
Some of the young protesters who once gathered around the pool are now among the nation’s leaders, educators, journalists, and cultural influencers. Their ideas have passed from one generation to another. Their effects are not measured in water quality reports but in attitudes toward family, faith, patriotism, authority, and civic responsibility.
The Reflection Pool was designed to invite contemplation. It asks visitors not merely to look at monuments, but to look at themselves and at the nation they have inherited.
Perhaps the current concern over algae offers an opportunity for a different kind of reflection.
What is truly toxic? What merely floats upon the surface, and what penetrates deeply into the culture itself? Which problems can be solved with chemicals and maintenance, and which require the more difficult work of restoring values, rebuilding institutions, and renewing civic virtue?
Algae can cloud water. Ideas can cloud a civilization.
The water in the Reflection Pool will become clear again. Whether the same can be said about the reflections of our national culture remains a far more important question.
Washington Times Letter to the Editor 28Jan2026
Finally, Cuba treated as a dictatorship
OPINION:
From South Florida, Cuba is only 90 miles away. I have lived most of my life in the land of the free, yet I’ve never escaped the sound of my homeland struggling to breathe. That narrow stretch of water between us has become one of the cruelest distances on earth — not because it is wide but because it separates freedom from submission, possibility from stagnation.
I left Cuba as a child. Like many other exiles, I grew up building a life in America while watching the island remain frozen in time. Sixty-seven years have passed since the revolution promised dignity and justice. Instead, it delivered repression, economic decay and a slow erosion of the human spirit. Generations have been raised knowing scarcity as normal, obedience as survival and silence as protection.
What pains me most is not just Cuba’s suffering but also how familiar the world has become with it. The island’s hardship is no longer shocking; it is managed, rationalized and periodically excused. Well-intentioned policies of engagement and accommodation have treated the regime as something to be moderated rather than confronted. In doing so, they have prolonged the life of a system that survives not through reform but through endurance.
The suffering is real and daily. It is found in empty pharmacies, unreliable electricity, wages that cannot sustain a family, and young people whose dreams consist only of escape. It is visible in artists who self-censor, in professionals who abandon their fields, and in families divided by exile and fear. These are not temporary conditions. They are structural features of a system that has never been held accountable.
From exile, watching this slow suffocation creates a moral dilemma. No one wants to see their people suffer. No one wishes hardship upon relatives, neighbors or strangers who share a common history. Yet after nearly seven decades, it becomes impossible to ignore a painful truth: Keeping Cuba alive in its current form may be the cruelty. Every economic lifeline sent without conditions sustains the same political machinery that caused the crisis in the first place.
Systems that cannot reform eventually break.
For most of my life, U.S. policy toward Cuba sought to soften the regime in hopes that gradual change would follow. It never did. Concessions were absorbed, not reciprocated. Resources were redirected upward, not outward. The promise that engagement would empower civil society proved illusory in a state designed to suppress it.
This is why the approach taken by the Trump administration marks a sharp and necessary departure. For the first time in decades, the Cuban regime is treated not as a misunderstood partner but as a dictatorship responsible for its own failures. The premise is simple: Subsidizing repression is not compassion. Pressure, not indulgence, exposes the fragility of authoritarian systems that rely on external support to survive.
This is not about punishment for its own sake. It is about refusing to perpetuate a lie: that Cuba’s misery is inevitable or, worse, defensible. When the flow of resources slows, the regime’s narrative weakens. When illusions fade, accountability becomes unavoidable.
The metaphor that comes to mind is suffocation. Anyone who has held their breath underwater knows that there comes a moment when endurance ends and truth asserts itself. The struggle is frightening, but the alternative — remaining submerged indefinitely — is worse. Cuba today feels suspended in that moment, hovering between collapse and continuation, forced to confront the consequences of a system that has exhausted all excuses.
Allowing that system to finally fail does not mean abandoning the Cuban people. On the contrary, it means believing they are capable of more than permanent dependency. Collapse is not the end of a nation; it is the end of a structure. History shows that societies often discover their courage and creativity only when the old order loses its grip.
Cuba’s culture, humor, music and resilience have survived despite decades of repression. The Cuban spirit has endured prisons, exile and scarcity. It deserves the chance to breathe freely, without intermediaries or ideological guardians.
As someone who left the island as a child and has spent a lifetime watching its decline from exile, I do not write these words lightly. They come from grief, frustration and an enduring love for a country that deserves better than managed decay. Perhaps only when the current system finally exhales its last breath will Cuba be able to draw its first honest breath of freedom.
• Carlos L. Valdes is a retired businessman, former state legislator (1988-2000) and Cuban American who believes in confronting tyranny with clarity and conscience.
Washington Times Letter to the Editor 29Dec2025
Letter to the editor: Cuba. not Venezuela, is the threat
OPINION:
The prevailing narrative linking Venezuela, drugs and U.S. military posture does not withstand scrutiny.
This is not about ideology; it’s not even primarily about drugs. It’s about geography.
We are told that Venezuela poses a growing national security threat because of narcotics trafficking, but the facts point elsewhere. The drug devastating American communities today is fentanyl, and it enters overwhelmingly through Mexico, using precursor chemicals sourced largely from China.
Cocaine reaching the United States is produced mainly in Colombia and trafficked north through Central America and Mexico. Venezuela is not the primary route, nor even a significant one.
The real narcotics corridors run through Mexico, Colombia, Guatemala and Honduras. Those countries, not Venezuela, form the dominant pipeline feeding America’s drug crisis.
So an obvious question follows: Would the United States deploy one of the largest concentrations of naval and air power in nearly 30 years to interdict a handful of drug-running boats?
Consider the scale involved: a carrier strike group led by the USS Gerald R. Ford, multiple destroyers, an amphibious ready group with Marines, a nuclear-powered attack submarine, special operations platforms, reactivated bases in Puerto Rico, advanced aircraft, drones and nearly 15,000 personnel.
That is not a counter-narcotics mission. It’s a strategic military posture.
The explanation that fits lies elsewhere. In March, Russia finalized a military cooperation agreement with Cuba, establishing joint training, arms transfers and the potential revival of Russian military facilities, including signals intelligence sites. Russian analysts described the move as retaliation for U.S. weapons supplied to Ukraine.
Then, in June, Russian naval vessels, including a Yasen-M class nuclear submarine, entered Cuban waters, operating roughly 90 miles from Key West.
This is where ideology fades and geography becomes decisive.
Cuba sits at the mouth of the Gulf of America. Every major shipping lane feeding U.S. ports, energy exports, refineries and naval installations passes through that space. Proximity compresses reaction time and magnifies vulnerability.
That is why Cuba has never been treated like just another aligned regime. Geography elevates it into a strategic category of its own, just as it did in 1962.
Ideology may shape rhetoric, but geography shapes outcomes. Ignoring that distinction is a luxury the United States can no longer afford.
Pembroke Pines, Florida