.png)
Cuba is on fire as protesters torch alpine heaps of garbage whilepots and pans rattle in Havana, Santiago de Cuba, Matanzas and smaller municipalities from the east coast to the western tip of the island. It almost sounds like Carnaval — the ragged beat, the tinny metallic accent of the clave punctuating the chanting, shouting and yelping.
But last week in Morón, where many residents work at foreigner-only resorts in nearby Cayo Coco and Cayo Guillermo, a band of locals did the unthinkable: They attacked the provincial Communist Party headquarters.
Of course, there have been mass protests in Cuba before, but nothing quite like what we’ve seen in recent days. In Morón, the protesters burned the symbols of the Revolution: portraits of leaders, plaques, declarations… The next day, the government scrambled up supporters to publicly praise the Revolution, and by the following night, the feared paramilitary Red Berets came marching into Morón. Meanwhile, as Cubans struggled to put food on the table in the midst of a crippling oil blockade — and President Donald Trump huffed and puffed about “taking Cuba” — the federal police were let loose all over the island to beat the hell out of people. Still, the demonstrators keep coming, night after night, shouting “Libertad!"
The protesters may be emboldened now, and government supporters might well be anxious about the turmoil. But with the electrical grid collapsed — leaving the island in complete darkness — and the revolutionary government announcing “the doors are open” for Cuban exiles to invest in the island, both sides are asking the same question: Now what?
As Trump tries to cram Cuba into his problematic Venezuela framework, will the situation dissolve into chaos? Will Cuba be forced into some kind of protectorate status with the U.S.? And if so, will the economic initiative hinted at by Secretary of State Marco Rubio lead to a democratic opening?
Despite what Trump may think, forcing regime change in Cuba will be a lot more complicated than taking out Nicolás Maduro.
Political and economic experts have declared the Cuban Revolution dead countless times over its 67-year reign but the comandantes —with and without Fidel Castro — have shown an uncanny knack for survival.
As Trump continues to squeeze Cuba, my thoughts go to my father. It was my father who planned my family’s escape from Cuba on a crammed 28-foot boat in February 1963, less than two years after the United States' botched Bay of Pigs invasion and just three and a half months after the Cuban missile crisis.
I try to take some comfort in the fact that Trump’s crassness would have been too much for my dad. But the “liberation” of Cuba? I fear my father, like millions of other Cubans, would accept anything in exchange for a chance to see his beloved homeland free.
My father never went back to Cuba (though he dreamt about it, briefly considered it as Alzheimer’s began to stalk him). But I did, returning for the first time in 1995. Cuba was just starting to breathe after the disappearance of the Soviet Union, and I was starry-eyed. I remember seeing the scaffolding around the buildings in Old Havana and thinking, “Oh, they’re rebuilding, how wonderful.”
But as my visits — and a nearly year-long stay in 1999 — added up over the years, the scaffolding became a permanent fixture, vines curling around the platforms, now sutured by rust to the granulating walls. The metaphor was almost too much to bear.
When a visibly discomfited Miguel Díaz-Canel, the current Cuban president, went on TV March 13 and acknowledged that the rumors — which the Cuban government had been vociferously denying for weeks — were true, that they were deep in talks with the Trump administration, Fidel Castro was probably spinning in his grave like a nuclear centrifuge. The Revolution, it seems, will be going out with a whimpering surrender to the very same interests that brought it about.
“It feels very much like the end of an era,” said Luz Escobar, an independent Cuban journalist who sought exile in Madrid three years ago.
It may also be the beginning of a new era, the so-called “Don-roe Doctrine,” of which Venezuela appears to be the example.
“As we achieve ahistoric transformation in Venezuela, we’re also looking to the great change that will soon be coming to Cuba,” Trump said last week.
But Trump’s twining of Venezuela and Cuba ignores an obvious fact: Though both nations may describe their governments as socialist, they are very, very different.
For starters, Cuba’s revolution has been in power since 1959. There are very few people alive on the island who know any other reality. By contrast, Venezuela’s socialist experiment began in 1998, and most Venezuelans have visceral memories of easy living in the 70s, 80s and early aughts. Venezuelans want a return to the glory days of its 20th-century oil boom; Cubans want a new beginning.
Moreover, Venezuela was never “owned” by the U.S. in the same way as Cuba. The U.S. had a strong interest and investment in Venezuela — in 1998, the year Hugo Chávez was elected, the U.S. bought more than51 percent of Venezuela’s exports and85 percent of its oil. But, in Venezuela’s case, U.S. dominance was less direct ownership and more structural. By contrast, before Cuba’s revolution, U.S. interests were taking about half of its sugar atreduced prices, ownedabout a third of all sugar mills, one third of public utilities,90 percent of all electrical production and almost a quarter of the island’s land.
Perhaps most importantly, Cuba runs a single-party system with a National Assembly that votes as a block. When Mariela Castro, Raúl Castro’s daughter, cast a “no” vote in 1995, it was the first time in decades, anddrew headlines in Latin America.
In addition, the Cuban Penal Code has a unique provision that authorizes arrest for “dangerousness,” something very much like the 2002 film “Minority Report”concept of “precrime.” I experienced “precrime” fear more than a few times in Cuba but never like the day when plainclothes security showed up looking for my then partner, a Cuban artist who still lived and worked on the island. It was 2003, in the middle of the “Black Spring,” when Cuban police had arrested hundreds in very public and theatrical raids. The government had alsoexecuted three young men for hijacking a ferry. The global reaction was so intensely negative, even from traditional allies of the Revolution, that Cuban authorities were stunned.
Now the government wanted artists and intellectuals to sign a declaration supporting its action. My partner opposed capital punishment in all its forms and had already said so. But the security apparatus was trying to wear her down: phone calls to persuade and subtly threaten her, trailing her, sending over “friends” to convince her. She decided to avoid the phone, to not answer the knocking. So it was me — an exile who’d left the country as a child — who stood at the door as the security guys shifted focus from her to me: Who was I? Could I show an ID? What was I doing in Cuba?
Even knowing that, unlike other Cubans, if trouble found me I could appeal to the U.S. Interests Section (the then-embassy), it was unnerving to respond knowing the men didn’t need a warrant or even an excuse to take either, or both of us, away. It’s in this way opposition figures are routinely marginalized, jailed or exiled: menaced by opaque laws employed by the authorities on whatever whim.
By comparison, dissidents have it easy in Venezuela, where the opposition participates in civic life. Even after Nobel Peace laureate María Corina Machado was fraudulently banned from running for elected office, she was able to openly put up a substitute candidate and campaign within the system (though she lost in an election that international election watchers have said was rigged). In Venezuela, dissidents participate in Congress, appear in the media and hold public debates. They’re harassed, and sometimes jailed, but mere opposition is not a crime.
In spite of Trump’s current pressure tactics, it would be a mistake to place exclusive blame on the U.S. for Cuba’s current troubles. The fall of the Soviet Union was catastrophic, and Venezuela’s declining oil fortunes almost sank the island, which had developed a profound dependency on its socialist neighbor.
“One of the biggest problems is that the Cuban government is inefficient, corrupt and nepotistic,” said Mónica Baró Sanchez, an independent journalist in the U.S. since 2022, now based in Miami. “Since 1959, the Cuban government has received millions of dollars, whether from the Soviet Union or Venezuela. Where did that money go? The government has never prioritized the people, it has never invested in what it needed to invest in. Instead of fixing the thermo-electric plants or developing renewable energy, for example, they just built more hotels.”
In fact, there was ahotel boom in the midst of the post-Soviet crisis: More than $3.5 billion, or about one-fifth of Cuba’s investments in the 1990s, went to tourism. This was money that didn’t go to relieving the antiquated electrical grid, rehabbing cultural institutions, paving impassable streets or maybe reopening the208 rural schools Raúl Castro closed when he became president.
Though Cuban Americans are among the biggest visitors alongside vacationers from Russia, Germany, Spain, it was always clear the biggest tourist target was the U.S. A friend once snuck me into a resort in Varadero and my blood boiled when I realized all the signage was in English. Even worse, a worker who’d learned English in London told me she’d been instructed to get rid of her British accent and sound more American.
Of course, the millions of Americans never showed up. When the pandemic hit, Cuba lost more thanhalf its visitors. Incredibly, the government kept building hotels.
So what’s the deal? What is Trump negotiating? Whereas Venezuela (and Iran) both have oil, Cuba barely spurts out enough to cover half its own energy needs. It has nickel and natural gas deposits, but both industries require an overhaul and massive investment.
“Right now it’s not clear what’s being negotiated,” said Jorge Duany, a theorist on Caribbean migration and nationalism and the former director of the Cuban Research Institute at Florida International University. “There’s no information about Cuban government concessions. All we hear is that there’s a movement to replace Díaz-Canel, the possibility of a few economic reforms and loosening travel restrictions. It looks like the Castros will stay. In Miami, there’s great disillusionment about this, certainly among the historic exile community.”
Keeping the Castros in place while discarding Díaz-Canel — whichTrump demanded last week — seems to follow the Venezuela playbook, but there doesn’t appear to be anyone in Cuba like Delcys Rodríguez, the vice president who replaced Nicolás Maduro. Though Óscar Pérez Oliva-Fraga (Fidel and Raúl Castro’s great-nephew), a deputy prime minister and the minister of foreign investment, has frequently been mentioned as a successor, Duany insisted “there is no single figure in Cuba who can lead a transition.” (This week, Pérez Oliva-Fraga went on Cuban TV and, for the first time since 1959, invited Cubans in the diaspora to return and invest. Perhaps not surprisingly, he made no mention whatsoever of Cubans on the island also investing. And he made his announcement during a blackout, when most locals could not hear his pitch.)
The reason for Cuba’s leadership deficit is simple: Of the dissidents left not imprisoned, no one has any experience in government or administering a substantial enterprise. And those in power who might have the potential to lead must keep their heads down and pledge loyalty to the Castro clan in order to keep their privileges.
It’s also important to remember Cuba and the U.S. had a fraught relationship long before the Revolution. Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders took over the Cuban War of Independence in the final moments of the 30-year struggle, stealing the Cubans’ moment of glory. More than a century later, Cubans still resent that their sovereignty was established by a treaty they didn’t sign: Spain and the U.S. made the deal. That was followed by the Monroe Doctrine and the Platt Amendment, which gave the U.S. the right to interfere in Cuba’s domestic issues, resulting in three military interventions, many threats of invasion and a long list of puppet presidents.
“No one should be chosen, named to lead, by powers outside Cuba,” said Ramón Saúl Sánchez (no relation to Baró Sánchez), the leader of Movimiento Democracia, an exile group in Miami that has run “freedom flotillas” to the island. He is also a former member of Alpha 66, an anti-Castro paramilitary group. “That would be like going back to the colonial period. I don’t want my country governed by foreigners, I want us to have our own voice. We don’t want the Castros fronting for American corporations, stealing Cuba’s riches, to the detriment of the Cuban people.”
There are others, though, hungry to see Cuba welcome those very corporations. Yotuel, one of composers of the emblematic “Patria y vida,” the anthem of the massive protests in 2021, recently releaseda new song alongside two other Cuban rappers, Jacob Forever and El Chacal, with these lyrics: “Imagine a bridge, a bridge between Miami and Havana … And a McDonald’s along the waterfront/a Walmart on 23rd Street/a Sedano’s Market in Marianao/and CVSs everywhere …”
“Is that satire?” asked César Toledo, a dockworker from Manzanillo on the southeastern coast, when he first heard the song. “How is a McDonald’s on the waterfront freedom? Does a McDonald’s mean we can express our own opinions? Will a McDonald’s mean elections?”
So far, neither the U.S. or Cuba has mentioned a path of any kind to democracy. In fact, Rubio has gone out of his way to emphasize economic, rather than political, reform.
“Put aside for a moment the fact that [Cuba] has no freedom of expression, no democracy, no respect for human rights,” Rubio said at the Munich Security Conference in February. “The fundamental problem [is that] Cuba has no economy, and the people who are in charge of that country, in control of that country, they don’t know how to improve the everyday life of their people without giving up power.”
But for some Cubans — Cubans who are not part of the governing clan or the nomenclature, working class Cubans who struggle with everything from finding something to put on the table to a candle stub to pierce the darkness — Rubio’s focus on economics might be enough for now.
“I’m not happy the transition may be coming via Trump and the U.S., but I don’t want to put myself in a position of rejecting an opportunity because it’s not perfect,” said Baró Sanchez. “It’s a terrible choice, totalitarianism under the Castros or neocolonialism under Trump — but I feel there’s a better chance at democracy under neocolonialism.”
“Donald Trump is a necessary evil — he’s not an apostle or any kind of role model but we need a radical change, whether it’s political or civic or economic,” said Marlón Fresneda Suárez, who lives in San Miguel del Padrón, in southeastern Havana (where tourists only wander if they’re lost). “If Trump comes to Cuba and takes over Varadero, so long as I can provide for my family and take care of my son, I’ll deal with it. Some of us aren’t going as far as to even ask for freedom, we just want life to be less difficult. It may sound defeatist, but we’ve been roughing it for so long, anything would be a relief.”
In the meantime, Fresneda Suárez relieves the heat in his family’s apartment by running a cable from his motorbike to a power inverter that connects to a humble fan. But to make sure the bike isn’t stolen while it’s running, Fresneda has to sit outside in the heat and keep an eye on it.
These days, in Cuban communities in Madrid, Mexico City, Miami and all over the diaspora, exiles like me wake up to new developments in Cuba, regarding Cuba, about Cuba — it’s Cuba Cuba Cuba 24/7. We doomscroll for news or gossip, post and share long screeds about what’s happening and what we think is happening, spend countless hours on WhatsApp texting with family and friends on the island, feeling hopeful one minute, despair the next, impotent all the time.
What do Cubans want? There’s no consensus on or off the island. At one extreme, some want to be outright annexed by the U.S. (there are several longtime Facebook groups promoting this view), at the other, some would prefer to stay on the revolutionary path, whatever shape it takes. In between are some who want a military confrontation to humiliate the Communists. Still others want assurance Cuba will be truly independent in the future.
What do I want? I pray the transition, wherever it takes us, will be peaceful, but I dread it won’t be. And here’s the worst part: I can’t imagine what happens after the transition. I press my eyes shut and strain to see it in my mind’s eye, but there’s only darkness.
English (US)