Madrid/A good part of the world looks towards Cuba without fully understanding what is happening on the Island or the moral tensions that its citizens are going through. Some are scandalized that there are Cubans who come to desire foreign intervention to get out of the regime. Others do not understand how there are still people willing to defend, even with their lives, a system that has ruined the country and that can only offer misery, surveillance and combat orders. There are also those who observe Cuba as an abstract symbol, a scenario of sacrifice useful to feed other people’s ideological nostalgia.
In Abdalawritten when he was barely 15 years old, José Martí defined love for the country as a bifurcation of rages: “the invincible hatred of those who oppress it” and “the eternal resentment of those who attack it.” More than a century and a half later, Cuban drama remains prisoner of that same affective logic, although deformed by history.
A part of Cubans who long for a free Cuba concentrates their moral energy on the invincible hatred towards the dictatorship, that is, towards the apparatus of control, fear and servitude that Castroism turned into a system. Another part, made up of those who continue with the regime or those who remain trapped in its imagination, clings to eternal resentment towards the United States, its threats, its real or imagined grievances, and the always invoked hypothesis of an intervention. Between hatred and resentment, Cuba runs the risk of never becoming a true project of freedom, but merely an eternal battlefield of resentments.
In countries where there are free elections, alternation and institutional channels, it would be absurd to want a foreign army to come in and overthrow the Government.
It is best to say it bluntly: I do not want bombs to fall on the land where I was born. But I also do not want a regime that has destroyed the nation and repressed its inhabitants to remain in power, condemning us to slow extinction. That’s my moral dilemma.
From consolidated democracies it may be difficult to understand this. In countries where there are free elections, alternation and institutional channels, it would be absurd to wish for a foreign army to come in to overthrow the Government. But we Cubans have been deprived of precisely that elementary possibility.
In Cuba, the electoral system is hijacked by the Candidacy Commissions and State Security. There is not a single deputy who represents the opposition, although its weight within society is now undeniable. The ballot used by the National Assembly in 2023 to “elect” president contained only one name, that of Miguel Díaz-Canel. Calling such a procedure elections is a mockery. If we Cubans cannot organize ourselves politically, nor compete at the polls, nor demonstrate in the streets, nor express ourselves without risk on social networks, then the question becomes inevitable: what real options do we have left to remove the tyrants from power?
Cuban civil society has even tried the most peaceful and civic paths imaginable within a dictatorship. Opponents like Oswaldo Payá died in circumstances that have never been clarified. Others were banished. Many are imprisoned or subjected to constant harassment. So it should not be surprising that previously marginal ideas, such as foreign intervention or annexationism, have gained ground. Those of us who oppose these solutions must recognize, at least, that they are a direct consequence of the failure of the Revolution as a national project. When a regime closes all internal avenues for change, incubating the temptation of an external exit stops seeming like an extravagance and becomes a symptom of disaster.
Almost no one can seriously defend “the achievements of the Revolution” anymore, because there is hardly any rubble left of them.
And meanwhile, a part of the international left celebrates our misery as if it were a medal of dignity. From comfortable stands, scarcity, repression and immobility are exalted as tests of resistance against the Empire. We are required to keep the authoritarian system intact to satisfy the nostalgia or ideological morbidity of those who would not have to suffer its consequences.
Many of these admirers only know Cuba from the hotels, the ruins converted into scenery or the screen of their phones. Almost no one can seriously defend “the achievements of the Revolution” anymore, because there is hardly any rubble left of them. However, the embargo continues to be appealed to as a universal alibi. It is forgotten that when Cuba received almost unlimited resources from the USSR, it did not use them to modernize the country, but rather for military and ideological adventures abroad. It is also forgotten that the Venezuelan subsidy did not serve to correct the structural defects of the model either. The problem was never just a lack of resources. The problem has been, above all, the system.
That is why the metaphor of Cuba as “new Numancia”, used to praise its supposed resistance, is so perverse. Numancia does not symbolize an abstract dignity, but rather siege, hunger, degradation and extermination. Presenting Cuba as Numancia is equivalent to suggesting that its greatness consists in enduring suffering indefinitely.
In Cuba, power seems more willing to negotiate with external actors capable of putting pressure on it than with its own citizens, whom it treats as subjects.
Talking about solutions requires abandoning both naive epic and providential superstition. It is unlikely that Cuban civil society, alone and without fractures in the power apparatus, will be able to defeat the regime through open rebellion. Asking an unarmed, impoverished and surveilled citizenry to defeat by itself a police state willing to shoot its people seems too much like an invitation to sacrifice. That does not make civil society irrelevant. Without active citizenship there is no true transition. But almost no recent transition from authoritarianism occurred without a combination of internal resistance, elite fractures, and external pressure.
History shows that authoritarian regimes do not usually concede through moral suasion alone. They do it when the cost of supporting themselves becomes unbearable. In Cuba, furthermore, the power seems more willing to negotiate with external actors capable of putting pressure on it than with its own citizens, whom it treats as subjects. Recognizing the possible role of external factors is not equivalent to calling for an occupation or renouncing sovereignty. It means accepting that, when all internal channels have been closed, international pressure can open margins for a transition.
But this transition should not repeat the worst vices of our history. Cuba carries a traumatic legacy of coups d’état, armed uprisings and redeeming leaderships. We have already paid too dearly for the temptation to replace politics with epic, the law with exception, and citizenship with obedience to the savior in power. The goal cannot be to change one command for another, nor to go from one guardianship to another. The goal must be to rebuild the republic on civil, pluralistic and legal bases.
Cuba does not need the miserable immortality of a symbol. It needs the concrete life of a country. She doesn’t want to be admired for holding on. He wants to stop holding on. He does not want to continue being an emblem of other people’s sacrifice. It wants, like any adult nation, the basic right to live in freedom.
