Reinaldo Arenas He died in New York in 1990, a decade after leaving Cuba. A year later, as revenge, his posthumous novel, ‘The Color of Summer’, was published. The story is this: during a fictitious summer, the 50 years in power of an elderly and crazed ruler named Fifo are celebrated. In the middle of a carnival delirium the island breaks away from its platform. Gigantic fissures begin to separate neighborhoods and provinces. Men and women, many dressed in costumes, dance and shout as the water swallows them. The earth tilts, thousands slip into the ocean. What remains of the island drifts aimlessly. Shipwreck is inevitable. Thirty-six years later, in the middle of the Caribbean winter, cold as never before, Cuba looks at itself in the paroxysmal mirror of that Arenas. The storm was “almost perfect,” and it was not Fidel who arrived, as an old festive song by Carlos Puebla says that proclaimed the end of the “fun,” but Donald Trump. The omen of an early “fall” of Havana after the United States military intervention in Venezuela has accentuated Cubans’ feeling of imminence. Something would happen in 2026. But what?
The beheading of Nicolás Maduro had a clear motivation: oilwhich Cuba does not possess, but needs like air, and has no money to supply itself. Since the “kidnapping” of the “worker president” by North American special forces on January 3, the Republican magnate allowed himself a string of intimidating definitions: Cuba, he said, is a “failed state” that belongs to the “third world in the worst sense,” so its authorities should reach an agreement with Washington “before it’s too late.” More than an agreement, it seems to be a call for capitulation.
Turning point?
Although there is a decades-long enmity between the island and the United States, never before have the material and political conditions so that the old dream of regime change could take place. And that seems to be a major interest in Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State and son of Cuban immigrants who until the last moment of their lives longed for a reckoning with the past, even though that past has completely disappeared. Historical Castroism has not existed for a long time: It is just a theme park and a family and military business unit. That is irrelevant for the purposes of the expectations of a Trump who even indulged in a macabre joke and in his Truth Social network celebrated the occurrence of a follower who foreshadowed a future Cuban presidency of Rubio himself. Trump wants to be the prophet of a collapse or a negotiation as humiliating as it is irreversible. The billionaire is encouraged by his Secretary of State and the White House special envoy for Latin America, Claver Carone, another son of an immigrant. Not coincidentally, both are known as “the cubanitos”.
The post-Castro regime, led by a gray Miguel Díaz-Canel, faces these dangers in the midst of a GDP that has fallen three years in a row, the worst moment of agriculture, the shortages and blackouts that sharpen the desire to flee as more than a million Cubans have done. Economist Pedro Monreal warns that in the absence of a diplomatic solution for now, the forced interruption by the US of fuel imports from Cuba would considerably worsen the availability of energy. The island would have less electricity than during the “special period,” as the years following the collapse of the USSR were known in 1991. The United States Embassy in Havana issued a security alert because the national electrical grid “is increasingly unstable.” The Secretary General of the United Nations Organization, Antonio Guterres warned about the risk of a humanitarian “collapse” if Cuba stops receiving crude oil.
numantine cuba
“Without sugar there is no country,” says an old danzón, “The Knight of Paris.” The thing is that Cuba never stopped being a dependent country. Before the revolution it depended on those sales to the United States. It then depended on Soviet oil and then on Venezuelan oil. The weight of North American economic sanctions was felt more strongly each time these flows were interrupted. The lack of fuel not only affects homes and businesses: it hits the recently started sugar harvest. State passenger transport fell by 93% between January and September 2025.
When in 1991, coinciding with the publication of Arenas’s novel, the island began its drift, its situation was compared to that of Numancia. Suddenly the analogy emerged with that Celtiberian city near Soria that decided not to surrender to the Roman Republic in the second century of the present era. The challenge spanned 20 years. General Scipio Aemilianus besieged the city with thousands of men. He built walls and moats to isolate it. After 15 months of siege and extreme hunger, the Numantines preferred collective suicide rather than surrender. Cubans do not want to be Numantinos and at this point the call from the authorities not to bow down has ceased to have the weight of other epic times. “If having a homeland is an international crime, then here we are. In the world of victims of the United States, Cuba is a victim, yes, but not passive, but rather a victim in resistance. When we say resistance, one does not only refer to withstanding whatever attack is received, but to dare to propose dignities, “very much despite so much loneliness and cowardice,” said ‘Granma’, the official organ of the Communist Party, days ago.
Firm hand
The harangues of the State collide with a wall of reality that exceeds Trumpist aggressiveness. It has to do with the increase in inequalities and poverty, the resurgence of eradicated diseases and a collective fatigue that expands through the digital ecosystem. Official speeches have lost their relevance brutally. The outbreak of July 2021 not only made this fatigue visible. The historic “Castroism/anti-Castroism” polarization belongs to the analog days. The dissidence is multiple and circulates especially through the more than seven million smartphones. The virtual channel is indifferent to the dilemmas of the past that were summarized in the slogan “Homeland or death.” The University of the Arts (ISA) has just expelled professor Roberto Viña Martínez for maintaining in a post on Facebook that the concept of “sovereignty” has been emptied of its content.
The challenges in forums, messages, audios and social networks do not yet have the capacity to make themselves felt on the streets and corner political power. Repression has intensified after 9/11. Cuba had a population of 11.33 million in 2020. Currently it is 9.3 million due to the huge exodus. According to Prisoners Defenders, the prison population rate is 923 prisoners per 100,000 inhabitants (7.6 times that of Spain or 1.7 times that of the United States).
If “the Cubanitos” Rubio and Carone know anything, it is the situation of objective weakness of the current Cuban leadership. Rafael Hernández is a renowned historian of the links between the island and the United States and, in addition, an intellectual reference to approach the possible scenarios of a confrontation that in 2014, when Barack Obama set foot in Havana and the Rolling Stones performed outdoors as a sign of a new normal, it seemed difficult to resume. According to Hernández, assigning the relationship with Washington the key role “in solving our problems” assumes as a premise “that Cuba is collapsing and would have to grasp at straws“. In this sense, he stressed: continuing to associate the reforms and their implementation with the “pragmatic” management of relations with the great neighbor “not only ignores the causes of the deterioration” of these relations, “but also confuses the terms of our problems.” In other words: the North American blockade is far from explaining the economic ruin. It is also the result of internal decisions, and in many crazy cases, such as the construction of luxury hotels in the midst of the pandemic. The so-called “economic ordering” had results disastrous. The ministers fall like houses of cards in the sand. Alejandro Gil Fernández, who managed the economy at will, was convicted last December of “treason to the country.” Not even his friend Díaz-Canel realized that the figure of the “traitor” always appears with the chaotic background. “limited measures” to confront Trump and that another “reorganization process” of the economy is approaching that is not “simple”, since it is “something very difficult for the management and the population” in general. “It’s going to cost us a lot of work”.
What is said and done
The distance between the written letter and the facts has been a constant in the largest of the Antilles. The 2019 Constitution explicitly abandoned the horizon of communism and defined the country as a ““Socialist rule of law”. It incorporated demanded rights, without giving up the monopoly of the single party and the control mechanisms of civil society. The then octogenarian Raul Castro was the main driver of the “updating of the economic model” in 2011. Little progress was made, and poorly. There was resistance, obstacles and countermoves. They continue to bet on tourism. The sector has had a drop of 25% in 2025. The domestic market is not energized through production but rather through remittances, which, despite Trump’s restrictions, amounted to around 1.8 billion euros last year. 37% of households receive help from relatives abroad.
“Does economic reform fit into the concept of ‘changing everything that must be changed’?” asked economist Daniel Torralbas. At the time Trump warned that he was going for everything, the debates about the future were still unresolved. Is an opening like China’s viable? And the Vietnamese renewal, known as Doi Moi, that transformed a war-torn country into a global exporter of rice, coffee and manufactured goods? The debates on the role of the State, macroeconomic stability, productive transformation and the promotion of a national private sector that, sooner rather than later, could claim political representation, did not reach any other port than that of frustration. A reform requires, on the other hand, time. Does the island have it? Is the clock ticking in favor of a new attempt to change so that nothing changes? The streets are not busy protesting, but they spread rumors: Colonel Alejandro Castro Espínson of Raúl and nephew of Fidel, is negotiating with the US a decent solution that avoids complete collapse. “Socialism is democratic or it is not socialism”said the portal ‘La Joven Cuba’. Sovereignty, on the other hand, “is a concrete political condition that is exercised or lost. There is no possible compatibility between a sovereign country project and any form of annexation or submission to external interests.” Any formula that transfers control of central areas of the nation to foreign actors “seriously compromises the possibility of building one’s own project.”
Cubans wait in the dark to find out what news comes from abroad. For now they have news from North Korea and China. They have donated thousands of tons of rice to alleviate food insecurity.
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