The unusual meeting between Francis Donovan and Roberto Legrá Sotolongo addressed “operational security” around the perimeter of the U.S. naval base
Image shared by the U.S. Southern Command on its Twitter account to report on the meeting. / @Southcom
14ymedio/Agencies, Havana, May 29, 2026 — The head of the U.S. Southern Command, Francis L. Donovan, met this Friday with Cuba’s Chief of the General Staff, Roberto Legrá Sotolongo, at the perimeter of the Guantánamo Bay Naval Station, in an unusual meeting between senior military officials from the two countries.
According to EFE, the meeting was confirmed by the Southern Command itself in a brief statement, which noted that the generals held “a brief exchange on operational security matters.” The discussion also addressed issues related to the safety of military personnel and their families, as well as the operational readiness of the base, together with officers stationed in Guantánamo.
“The Guantánamo Bay Naval Station constitutes a vital operational and logistical hub that supports United States military efforts to counter threats that undermine security, stability, and democracy in our hemisphere,” the Southern Command said in its statement.
Donovan also conducted an assessment of the “perimeter security of the naval base.”
The discussion also addressed issues related to the safety of military personnel and their families
In a brief statement published on social media, Cuba’s Ministry of the Revolutionary Armed Forces confirmed continue reading
that the meeting took place “by agreement of both parties.”
It also stated that the two “delegations considered the meeting positive, where issues related to security around the perimeter dividing the military enclave were discussed,” referring to the naval base. It further added that there was agreement “to maintain communication between both military commands.”
Reuters, which first reported the meeting citing a U.S. official speaking on condition of anonymity, noted that Donovan’s visit to Cuba is the first remembered in recent years involving a Southern Command chief and senior Cuban military leaders. The agency placed the contact in the context of growing concern in Havana about the possibility of U.S. military action against the Isand.
The meeting comes after the unusual visit to Havana on May 14 by the Director of the CIA, John Ratcliffe, amid increasing pressure from Washington on the Cuban regime.
Guantánamo, where the meeting took place, is one of the most sensitive points in relations between the two countries
The military contact comes at a particularly tense moment in bilateral relations. The administration of Donald Trump has hardened its policy toward Havana and placed Cuba among its foreign policy priorities in the hemisphere.
On May 20, Washington formally charged former president Raúl Castro with four counts of murder for the 1996 shootdown of civilian aircraft operated by Miami exiles. The charges were presented as a new step in the United States’ judicial and political offensive against figures within the Cuban leadership.
Guantánamo, where the meeting took place, is one of the most sensitive issues in relations between the two countries. The United States has maintained a naval base there since the beginning of the twentieth century.
In March, Donovan told U.S. lawmakers that the Southern Command was not preparing an invasion, although he stated that its forces were ready to defend the Guantánamo base, protect the U.S. Embassy in Havana, and support a potential response to a large-scale migration crisis.
Translated by Regina Anavy
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Official data show that the deterioration of the system is not due to the embargo
The UNESCO warning does not reveal a new problem but rather validates, through an international institution, what thousands of Cuban families have been experiencing for years. / 14ymedio
14ymedio, Havana, May 29, 2026 — “Education in Cuba is at risk because of the current energy crisis.” The phrase, spoken by Anne Lemaistre, director of UNESCO’s Regional Office in Havana and the organization’s representative on the Island, describes the impact of blackouts, fuel shortages, and the deterioration of basic services in Cuban schools.
In a statement circulated on social media, the diplomat warned that the situation “makes it difficult for teachers and students to attend classes, learn effectively, and enjoy a normal social life with their friends.” The problem, she added, “jeopardizes the future of an entire generation, with long-term consequences.”
The official newspaper Granma, however, reacted immediately with its customary reflex. In its headline, the Communist Party’s newspaper added a phrase to Lemaistre’s quote that was not part of her main statement: “resulting from the blockade.” In this way, the paper transformed a warning about the daily collapse of classrooms into another piece of the official narrative, according to which every Cuban crisis has an external cause and a single culprit: Washington.
Before protecting classrooms, the State has protected tourism, hotel investments, political events, propaganda, and mechanisms of control
UNESCO itself, in February, had called for international cooperation to ensure that Cuban children could continue learning and that educational institutions remained safe spaces. In that appeal, Lemaistre said that “every day without fuel compromises school meals, transportation for teachers and students, and the electricity necessary to sustain continue reading
educational programs.” She also concluded with a statement that should make the Cuban Government uncomfortable: “For us, a functioning society begins with the school; it is the first thing that must be restored.”
But in Cuba, schools do not appear to be a government priority. Before classrooms, the State has protected tourism, hotel investments, political events, propaganda, and mechanisms of control. In April 2025, amid the economic crisis, education had already become a secondary issue. Investment in the sector was reduced by about 400 million pesos compared to the previous year. Health and Education combined accounted for barely 3% of the state budget, compared with 37.4% allocated to tourism.
That figure undermines any attempt to portray the educational catastrophe as an unavoidable accident. A country that invests far more in hotels, surveillance and repression than in classrooms has made a political decision. It can blame the embargo, hurricanes, or fuel shortages, but its priorities are reflected in its budget.
“We promote children to the next grade without providing them with sufficient knowledge”
The signs of collapse continue to accumulate. By March 2025, education in Cuba had become “optional” in several schools, which were forced to reduce schedules and hold classes only in the mornings or from Monday through Thursday. A mother in Placetas, Villa Clara, reported that her third-grade daughter was barely receiving instruction and that the school itself had established a Monday-to-Thursday week, forcing the family to find someone to care for the child while the adults worked.
Blackouts affect more than classroom lighting. In Cienfuegos, parents and teachers were already speaking in 2024 about children arriving tired and sleepy, without breakfast, after nights of ten to sixteen hours without electricity. A teacher admitted at the time that schools had been forced to adjust lesson plans because of power outages and low attendance. “We promote children to the next grade without providing them with sufficient knowledge,” she lamented.
The energy crisis has been compounded by the exodus of teachers, which had already raised alarms before the current school year began. In Sancti Spíritus, one of the hardest-hit provinces, teacher staffing reached only 68.2%. In Camagüey, with 716 schools and 98,000 students, there was a shortage of 2,468 teachers, and 19 schools were closed to “optimize resources.” The official formula for plugging the gap has been to hire part-time teachers, merge schools, and overcrowd classrooms.
Education is at risk because the State abandoned schools while continuing to inaugurate hotels, organize political rallies, and harass students who have participated in protests
Authorities also admitted that there was a shortage of 1.3 million uniform items and that only 20% of students would receive new clothing. In classrooms, parents found few materials, poorly photocopied notebooks, and outdated textbooks. For families, the “creativity” demanded by the Government means patching uniforms, improvising backpacks, and obtaining supplies on their own. For teachers, it means reusing notebooks, dictating notes, and paying for photocopies out of their own pockets.
The UNESCO warning does not reveal a new problem but rather validates through an international institution what thousands of Cuban families have been experiencing for years. Education in Cuba is at risk, but not only because of the energy crisis or solely because of the embargo. It is at risk because the State abandoned schools while continuing to inaugurate hotels, organize political rallies, and harass students who have participated in protests.
In Cuba, the future of a generation is not being lost for lack of speeches. It is being lost because the Government decided that education is not a priority.
Translated by Regina Anavy
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The UNE forecasts a 2,072 MW shortfall during Saturday’s peak hours after a full day of blackouts
The “lack of raw water” now joins the peculiar catalog of explanations that the National Electric System (UNE) has used to justify the repeated shutdowns of the Guiteras plant. / Periódico Girón / Archive
14ymedio, Havana, May 30, 2026 — The Antonio Guiteras thermoelectric plant, the largest single generating unit in Cuba, has once again gone offline from the National Electric System (SEN) for a reason that encapsulates the deterioration of the country’s basic infrastructure: a “lack of raw water.” The shutdown occurred shortly after the plant had been reconnected to the grid, forcing the Electric Union (UNE) to acknowledge that Friday’s power deficit exceeded projections “due to the emergency shutdown” of the Matanzas facility.
The “lack of raw water” now joins the peculiar catalog of explanations that the UNE has offered for the Guiteras plant’s repeated outages, a list that increasingly seems written for Cuba’s brand of dark humor. Added to “unavoidable maintenance” are such causes as “control valve malfunction,” a “false superheated steam signal,” and the famous “boiler puncture”: expressions that have transformed technical jargon into popular satire.
The latest shutdown came at a particularly delicate moment. The Guiteras had synchronized with the grid on Thursday at 7:48 a.m., after spending several days out of service due to a “small hole in the economizer,” a failure that forced the unit offline on May 24. Its return provided only a few hours of relief before the plant continue reading
once again went out of operation.
For peak demand hours, when solar energy no longer contributes to the SEN, the state utility is forecasting a deficit of 2,072 MW, one of the most severe figures of recent days
Although authorities typically present each outage as an isolated incident, the pattern of recent weeks shows that Cuba’s main thermoelectric plant is operating at its limits, with partial repairs, brief restarts, and recurring shutdowns. Every disconnection has an immediate impact on blackouts, because the Matanzas facility can contribute more than 200 megawatts (MW) when operating steadily, although that is still far below its original installed capacity of 330 MW.
The national situation on Saturday confirms the continuing deterioration. At 6:00 a.m., SEN availability was only 1,113 MW against demand of 2,720 MW. At that time, 1,562 MW were already affected, and the UNE estimated a 1,600 MW deficit by midday.
The nighttime outlook is even worse. During peak demand hours, when solar generation contributes nothing to the grid, the state company forecasts a shortfall of 2,072 MW, one of the highest figures recorded in recent days. The only generation expected to come online for the evening peak is Unit 3 of the Renté thermoelectric plant, contributing 45 MW, far too little to alter the overall situation.
The list of breakdowns leaves little room for optimism. In addition to the Guiteras, Unit 2 of the Lidio Ramón Pérez thermoelectric plant in Felton and Units 3 and 5 of the Antonio Maceo plant in Renté remain out of service due to failures. Unit 5 in Mariel, Unit 6 in Renté, and Unit 5 in Nuevitas are under maintenance. Added to this are 318 MW unavailable due to limitations in thermal generation.
Solar generation drops as night approaches, precisely when residential demand rises and blackouts intensify
Fuel shortages continue to worsen the situation. The UNE reported that 106 distributed-generation plants are out of service for lack of fuel, removing 890 MW from the system. Also idle are the Regla floating power plant, the Mariel fuel-oil plant, and the engine facilities in Moa. In total, the company acknowledges that 1,203 MW are unavailable due to fuel shortages.
Not even solar power can offset the collapse in thermal generation. The country’s 54 new photovoltaic parks produced 3,643 MWh on Friday, reaching a maximum output of 526 MW around midday. The UNE presented the figure as a source of relief, but solar generation falls sharply as evening approaches, exactly when residential demand increases and blackouts become most severe.
For ordinary Cubans, however, the technical explanations matter less than the outcome. This will be another Saturday of prolonged power outages, with entire provinces subjected to increasingly difficult rotating blackout schedules. The government continues to manage the crisis through daily reports, but each new bulletin confirms that the system has no real reserve capacity. When one unit comes online, another goes offline; when demand falls, a boiler breaks down; when fuel becomes available, there is a shortage of “raw water.”
Translated by Regina Anavy
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The Island faces in 2026 the same structural crises that the US military occupation found in 1899. A thorough review of what that administration did reveals a historical parallel so precise that it is difficult to ignore
Nations are sustained by educated citizens, not by ignorant subjects. / Archive
14ymedio, Rolando Gallardo, Alicante (Spain), May 30, 2026/ The image is the same, even though the century has changed. In the Havana of 1899, US sanitary brigades moved through neighbourhoods devastated by war, destroying breeding grounds of the Aedes aegypti mosquito and fumigating homes to combat the yellow fever that was decimating an exhausted population. In the Havana of 2026, those same neighbourhoods accumulate tonnes of refuse on every corner, while dengue, chikungunya and the Oropouche virus spread unchecked under the same vector that Cuban physician Carlos J. Finlay identified more than a century ago. The mosquito has not changed. Nor has the neglect.
This parallel is not a metaphor: it is a diagnosis. Cuba today faces the same structural urgencies that the US military occupation found when it landed in January 1899, when General John R. Brooke inherited a territory in absolute ruins. The war of independence and the scorched-earth tactic had displaced hundreds of thousands of peasants towards the cities and shattered the Island’s economic foundations. Infrastructure was destroyed, public finances were non-existent, and institutional order was an aspiration more than a reality. What that administration had to build from scratch, incredibly in 2026, a third US intervention in Cuba would have to do exactly the same thing.
Brooke’s successor, General Leonard Wood, was a physician by training. He understood from the first day that no political order is sustainable over a sick population. Drawing on Finlay’s theory – who had spent decades trying to convince the scientific world that yellow fever was transmitted by mosquito bite – the Army organised an unprecedented environmental sanitation campaign: drainage of pools, destruction of Aedes aegypti breeding grounds, fumigation of homes, closure of insanitary cemeteries, construction of sewerage systems in Havana. The result was historic: in September 1901, the city recorded its last indigenous case of a disease that Spanish colonial rule had been unable to eradicate in four hundred years.
Drawing on Finlay’s theory, the US Army organised an unprecedented environmental sanitation campaign on the Island. / Archive
Today, the water and sewerage networks modernised in the early years of the revolution and left to their fate since the 1990s have collapsed in most provinces. The unofficial rubbish dumps that the State lacks the operational capacity to clear are feeding arbovirus outbreaks that spread without restraint. Any external stabilisation would have to launch, from day one, exactly the same all-out offensive that Wood and Dr Walter Reed carried out with the tools of 1900: elimination of breeding grounds, mass public hygiene, reconstruction of sanitary infrastructure. The difference is that in 1899 there was a three-year war to account for the destruction. In 2026, there are six decades of socialism and mismanagement.
The war had destroyed bridges, ripped up rails and left the roads in a state that made it impossible to move agricultural produce to the ports. The Wood administration undertook the repair and expansion of the rail network, restoring the continue reading
connections between the sugar-growing zones and the export ports. The logic was impeccable: without logistics there is no economy, and without economy there is no republic.
Cuba’s roads in 2026 are, across wide stretches of the interior, obstacle courses where metre-deep potholes coexist with stretches that are simply non-existent. The railway, which at the beginning of the twentieth century was one of the most modern in Latin America, today operates with Soviet rolling stock from the 1960s and 1970s on routes that take double or triple the reasonable journey time when they manage to function at all. A new administration could not repair this infrastructure: it would have to rebuild it. The accumulated deterioration far exceeds what a three-year war caused; it would demand an effort proportional to what Wood carried out, but incomparably more complex in technological and budgetary scale.
One of the least celebrated – but perhaps most decisive – chapters of that occupation was the dissolution of the Cuban Liberation Army
The Cuban sugar industry – the most sophisticated in the world in its day – had been dismantled by the conflict. The occupation administration actively fostered foreign investment to rebuild the sugar mills and modernise the machinery. Sugar began to flow again, and with it the fiscal revenues that would finance the rest of the reforms. In parallel, Wood reorganised the banking system and laid the groundwork for a currency that would be, in the following decades, on a par with the dollar: a reflection of an economy that, when operating under predictable market rules, was capable of generating real prosperity.
Cuba’s sugar output today does not reach 150,000 tonnes, compared to the ten million that the great epic harvest of 1970 attempted without success. The financial system operates with a schizophrenic monetary duality that has destroyed any external investor confidence. A hypothetical stabilisation would have to open to private capital – both domestic and international – the only sector with a proven track record of performance, while unifying and restoring credibility to a currency whose worth is not decreed: it is built with institutions that function.
One of the least celebrated – but perhaps most decisive – chapters of that occupation was the dissolution of the Cuban Liberation Army. Heroic in war, dysfunctional in peace, it was discharged in an orderly fashion, with compensation payments that allowed soldiers to reintegrate into civilian life. In its place, professional armed forces were built, sized to meet the real needs of the republic rather than the political appetites of strongmen. A nation cannot build democracy when it has an army that surpasses it in actual power.
More than a thousand Cuban teachers travelled to Harvard in the summer of 1900 to be trained in modern pedagogical methods. / Archive
The current Armed Forces, together with the Ministry of the Interior and the constellation of repressive entities that sustain the regime, are oversized relative to any real defensive need. They constitute, in practice, an apparatus of political control rather than an instrument of national defence, and a budgetary burden that the economy simply cannot bear.
A new administration would have to undertake, as Wood did with the Liberation Army, an orderly discharge process with the civilian reintegration of personnel. This chapter also has a geopolitical dimension that deserves to be named: Cuba is a North Atlantic nation, was an ally of the United States in the Second World War, and its position at the entrance to the Gulf of Mexico makes it a strategic actor of the first order. A professional, modern Cuban army aligned with democratic standards could, in the medium term, present solid arguments for integration into the security architecture of the Western Hemisphere.
Wood imported the US educational model with an ambition unprecedented in the region. Cuba went from having barely a few hundred operational schools to more than two thousand in three years. More than a thousand Cuban teachers travelled to Harvard in the summer of 1900 to be trained in modern pedagogical methods. It was the most lucid wager of the entire occupation: nations are sustained by educated citizens, not by ignorant subjects.
A nation that in the twenty-first century faces the same structural urgencies as in the nineteenth century has paid an extraordinary historical price for its political experiments
The paradox of 2026 is that the revolution achieved high literacy rates only to then produce decades of single-party thinking, intellectual hollowing-out and a brain drain that has left the Island without its best-trained generations. More than two million people have left Cuba between 2020 and 2024, a proportion of the population without precedent in peacetime. The reconstruction of a free, pluralist education system connected to international standards would be, as in 1900, the most worthwhile investment of any process of national reconstruction.
To name this scenario is not to desire it. It is to measure honestly the depth of the accumulated failure. A nation that in the twenty-first century faces the same structural urgencies as in the nineteenth century – the same diseases transmitted by the same mosquito, the same broken infrastructure, the same dependence on an external order to provide what the State cannot – has paid an extraordinary historical price for its political experiments.
The Cuban republic was born under the tutelage of a power that knew how to act as the adult when the Island could not yet be one. It grew up denouncing that tutelage as an affront, without ever building the institutional consensuses that make guardians unnecessary. And it reached old age – more than six decades of revolution – with the same shortcomings of its infancy, magnified by the pride of one who has not learned from its mistakes.
The true emancipation of Cuba will not come from any occupation or any tutelage, however well-intentioned. It will arrive on the day when its society, with its own institutions and its own democratic consensus, is capable of providing its citizens with the clean water, electricity, healthcare and freedom they have been waiting for across generations. Until then, history will continue doing what it does best: repeating itself, with a faithfulness that no longer surprises, but that still hurts.
Translated by GH.
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Prosecutor Yara Klukas did not rule out further action against other regime officials. / EFE
14ymedio, Havana, 30 May 2026 / The Federal Prosecutor’s Office for the Southern District of Florida maintains that the indictment against Raul Castro for the shootdown, 30 years ago, of the Brothers to the Rescue light aircraft is not symbolic and that it is seeking to bring him before a Miami court. “We are waiting for Raul Castro. This was not a show,” said prosecutor Yara Klukas, second in command of that office, in an interview with Telemundo 51.
The official went further, stating that the former Cuban leader, aged 94, is considered a “fugitive” by the US justice system. The reason, she explained, is that he has not appeared before the court after an arrest warrant was issued against him and the other defendants in the proceedings. Klukas maintained that Washington has several avenues open to secure his appearance before a South Florida jury, though she did not specify what concrete mechanisms have been activated.
The indictment, declassified on 20 May by the United States Department of Justice, revisits one of the most serious episodes in recent history between Havana and Washington: the shootdown, on 24 February 1996, of two civilian light aircraft belonging to Brothers to the Rescue by MiG fighter jets of the Cuban Air Force. Four people were killed in the attack – three US citizens and one Florida resident, all of Cuban origin: Carlos Costa, Armando Alejandre Jr., Mario de la Pena and Pablo Morales.
The charges include conspiracy to kill US citizens, destruction of aircraft, and murder
The planes, the Prosecutor’s Office contends, were flying over international waters and were unarmed. Havana, by contrast, has maintained for three decades that it acted in response to violations of its airspace. That has been the crux of the diplomatic and legal dispute ever since, but the new indictment seeks to move the case beyond the political debate and place it on criminal grounds. continue reading
Raul Castro is not the only defendant. The case file also names the MiG crew members Lorenzo Alberto Perez-Perez, Emilio Jose Palacio Blanco, Jose Fidel Gual Barzaga, Raul Simanca Cardenas, and Luis Raul Gonzalez-Pardo Rodriguez. The charges include conspiracy to kill US citizens, destruction of aircraft, and murder. If convicted, some of the defendants could face life imprisonment or even the death penalty.
The Prosecutor’s Office places Raul Castro at the centre of the military chain of command that, according to Washington, made the attack possible. In 1996, Castro was Minister of the Revolutionary Armed Forces and had authority over the Cuban military apparatus, including the Revolutionary Air Defence and Air Force. For the prosecutors, that position directly links him to the operation that resulted in the shootdown of the aircraft.
Klukas stressed that the indictment was presented before a federal grand jury and that an active arrest warrant exists
The court document also maintains that the Cuban regime infiltrated Brothers to the Rescue through agents of the Wasp Network, who sent information about the organisation’s flights to Havana’s intelligence apparatus. According to the Prosecutor’s Office, that data was used by the Cuban authorities to prepare the military response against the light aircraft.
One of the elements that has reactivated the case is the presence in the United States of Luis Raul Gonzalez-Pardo Rodriguez, a former Cuban military pilot who was convicted in Florida for immigration fraud. Klukas avoided confirming whether he is cooperating with the Prosecutor’s Office, but acknowledged that having “a pilot on this side” in custody opened up new lines of investigation. Once his immigration case is concluded, he will be transferred to Miami to face proceedings for the shootdown.
The case carries a strong symbolic weight for the Cuban exile community, but the Prosecutor’s Office insists it is not merely a political gesture. Klukas stressed that the indictment was presented before a federal grand jury and that an active arrest warrant exists. She also confirmed that her office is working on investigations related to Cuba and did not rule out further action against other regime officials.
The case comes at a time of toughening US policy towards Havana and of growing pressure on figures within the Cuban regime. For Miami, the case represents the possibility of reopening a wound that never healed. For Havana, it poses the threat that one of its most prominent historical figures may suffer the same fate as Nicolas Maduro.
Translated by GH.
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COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORK: The 14ymedio team is committed to practicing serious journalism that reflects Cuba’s reality in all its depth. Thank you for joining us on this long journey. We invite you to continue supporting us by becoming a member of 14ymedio now. Together we can continue transforming journalism in Cuba.
Leaving us out in the sun rather than allowing us into the air-conditioned room feeds the custodian’s authority and might even give him a dopamine rush.
The first thing is to make it clear to her that the country she remembers no longer exists. / 14ymedio
14ymedio, Yoani Sánchez, Havana, May 28, 2026 / After more than two decades in Stockholm, a childhood friend has recently returned to Havana. The death of her grandmother brought her back to an island where she had only spent a few days on vacation since emigrating. Acting as a guide for a Cuban living abroad is a bitter task. The first thing is to make it clear that the country she remembers no longer exists, that the nation she cherishes in her memory disappeared long ago.
For the first few days, my friend enjoyed everything. She told me she felt relieved to barely be able to communicate on the internet and hardly at all by phone, after years of overexposure to social media in Sweden. She savored a mamey and felt like she was in heaven. She tasted a cherimoya and fell into a trance. But that naive joy soon ended. Reality seeped like corrosive acid through the cracks of her illusion.
Empowered with a foreign bank card, my friend decided to go shopping for groceries to prepare a family dinner. I reluctantly accompanied her, knowing that frustration is the most common commodity found in those stores that operate in dollars. We walked up the hill on Tulipán Street and then down to La Mariposa. Inside, all the refrigerators were empty. There was no meat, no butter, no sausages, and certainly no fish. My friend pouted like a Swede in distress.
Across from the building that was once Raúl Castro’s home, a bright blue facade marks the dollar market in that neighborhood. / 14ymedio
Then, with that indefatigable energy that comes from eating well for the last quarter of a century, she told me we should go to a market on 26th Street. “I read online that it has Spanish products and is well-stocked,” she explained to me. My face responded with a skeptical expression. We passed the Acapulco movie theater, and then she told me that’s where she had her first kiss with her high school sweetheart. The dark lobby, the marquee without advertisements, and a faint whiff of urine wafting from under the door brought her back to the present.
Near the Chinese cemetery, a man under 30, dressed in rags, caught up with us and gave each of us an azalea flower. “Something to eat,” he said immediately after handing us the fragile, purple petals. My friend didn’t have any cash, but she gave him a bag containing a can of soda and a ham and cheese sandwich. The young man started crying like a child, and she couldn’t tell if it was from emotion or because she had offended him by giving away her snack. “Those are the tears of hunger,” I had to explain continue reading
to her.
Across from the building that was once Raúl Castro’s home, an intense blue facade marks the dollar market in that neighborhood. A dozen people crowded around the small doorway. There wasn’t room for another soul in the shade, so we waited outside. No one was going in, no one was going out. “They’re inputting yesterday’s sales into the cash register because they didn’t have electricity and had to process them by hand,” an elderly woman who was also waiting explained to me.
Reality seeped like corrosive acid through the cracks of her illusion
After about half an hour, several people waiting to enter decided to leave. My friend’s face was bright red; I don’t know if it was from the blazing sun or from the frustration caused by all the nonsense. Then the power went out. Everything inside went dark. An employee came out to explain that they couldn’t process card payments anymore because “when there’s no power, the reader doesn’t work.” The Cuban-Swedish woman next to me looked like she was fuming.
In most of the dollar stores that the Cuban military has opened across the country, sales made with debit cards are canceled when the electricity goes out. The explanation, after inquiring with employees and managers, boils down to the fact that the POS (point-of-sale) terminal loses power and cannot communicate with the bank to process the transaction. The cash registers also shut down, and each purchase must be recorded by hand on endless forms with an original and a copy.
I do a quick calculation. A battery to power the POS and the cash register for several hours would cost, at most, a few hundred dollars. In other words, Gaesa loses tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars every day by not investing in small backup power plants. This mix of rapacity and stinginess has characterized the military conglomerate for decades. Quick to squeeze foreign currency out of people’s pockets, it’s also profoundly inefficient at improving its services. Greed and negligence; predation and incompetence, all together and packaged in an olive-green uniform from which the businessman’s tie awkwardly peeks out.
In El Laguito, they must be having nightmares about a mob storming through the gates of the dollar markets, the ministerial offices, and the government palaces.
Then my friend and I walked to another store, the same kind, in El Vedado. A security guard closed the door right in front of our faces. Inside the store there wasn’t a single customer, but we had to wait outside for more than ten minutes. Everyone with any power in Cuba tries to squeeze every last drop of that power out of others. Leaving us out in the sun rather than letting us into the air-conditioned store feeds their authority and maybe even gives them a dopamine rush. Prohibiting, blocking access, and scolding reinforce the small sphere of control held by the security guards, doormen, and the CVP (Surveillance and Protection Corps).
I sit on the curb to wait. I notice that of all the wide glass doors this market used to have, only one small one is open. The rest have been boarded up, and some are covered with metal plates to protect them from stones. Castro’s regime has always been afraid of the people. In El Laguito, they must have nightmares about a mob storming through the gates of the dollar markets, the government offices, and the presidential palaces. Blocking the flow of the masses means walling off every space through which a crowd could enter.
My friend lets out a roar of desperation. I look at her; her eyes are narrowed, she’s biting her lower lip, and she’s about to swear—no one knows if in Swedish or in the Spanish of La Timba, where she was born and raised. “Let’s go, I can’t take it anymore,” she begs me. I haven’t had to explain much. Reality itself has made it clear that the country she remembers no longer exists.
COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORK: The 14ymedio team is committed to practicing serious journalism that reflects Cuba’s reality in all its depth. Thank you for joining us on this long journey. We invite you to continue supporting us by becoming a member of 14ymedio now. Together we can continue transforming journalism in Cuba.
Economic changes will not be possible in Cuba without international humanitarian intervention
Between 2020 and 2024, 24% of the Cuban population has left the country and they are not coming back In 2025, the number of births fell to 68,000 – below what can be estimated for the year 1899
Interview with Juan Carlos Albizu-Campos
14ymedio, Rosa Pascual, Madrid, 29 May 2026 – Juan Carlos Albizu-Campos (1963) describes himself as a child of the Cuban baby boom – that generation now facing a serious short-term threat that nobody knows how to resolve: retirement. That is one of his greatest concerns, alongside concepts such as what he calls “demographic hollowing-out” and the Malthusianism of poverty.
A graduate in Industrial Economics from the University of Havana, he is one of the foremost experts in demography – which he also studied in Costa Rica and Paris – to the point that his is now considered the most reliable count, putting the Cuban population at 8,025,624, far from the official figure of 9,748,532. He argues, however, with full conviction that Cuba does not have a population problem, but rather a population with problems.
He believes that change in Cuba is “inexorable” and is optimistic that recovery could be faster than expected, though when pressed on timescales he warns it could take no less than four years. Even so, he returns to the same point more than once during the conversation: “Remember, I could always be wrong.” And laughs.
Question. Talking to a demography expert, it’s inevitable to start by asking your opinion on the new Migration Law, which has finally just been published.
Answer. It’s still very early, but I can see things I don’t like. First of all, this invention of “effective residence.” That smells just as bad as the changes made in 2013. Cuba started showing positive net migration balances, as if more people were coming in than leaving. But that was because they had changed the method of tracking. Now, since they’ve spent so long denying the migration figures and so long trying to mask the exodus, what it seems to me is that this “effective residence” concept is going to help mask the figures. Imagine that if you happen to spend 180 days in Cuba for whatever reason, you’re already an effective resident. If a population count or census is carried out at that moment, the person would show up as a permanent resident.
There’s something here that strikes me as incoherent with respect to the Constitution, because the Constitution is clear that Cuban nationality is unique. Multiple nationality is not provided for at a constitutional level. How can a decree be issued that accepts multiple nationality when the Constitution explicitly prohibits it? That is completely unconstitutional.
How can a decree be issued that accepts multiple nationality when the Constitution explicitly prohibits it? That is completely unconstitutional.
Q. I wanted you to talk to me in historical terms. Cuba went from a strong immigration movement in the first half of the twentieth century to having…
A. First third, first third.
Q. Yes, and then to having nothing.
A. Well, Cuba is quite a singular case. The thing is, it emerges from a process of “demographic depression” linked to the last war of independence, in which it loses around 300,000 inhabitants. In that war, a tactic of the Cubans was to destroy Spain’s economic base – the sugar industry – and the Spanish side responded by concentrating the rural population in the cities, in very poor living conditions, to deprive the liberation army of its social base. That ended up driving mortality rates to completely unprecedented levels. What has been estimated is that infant mortality in 1895 – the opening year of the war – reached 380 per thousand live births.
Cuba enters the twentieth century with a population of between 1.6 and 1.8 million, but then, when this new period of pacification arrives – American administration, organisation, restoration, sanitary clean-up and all that – the Cuban population has a sort of mini baby boom between 1899 and 1910. From there, Cuba’s birth rate begins a sustained decline, until reaching 1957, when the real Cuban baby boom begins, lasting until 1963.
In those years there were very strong emigration flows in many European countries, most notably Spain and Italy. In Cuba’s case, the majority of arrivals were Spanish. Bear in mind that all those who came between 1900 and 1930 or thereabouts – because the 1931 census already shows this phenomenon – essentially doubled the population through migration alone. And it’s interesting, because the metropolis that had opposed independence ended up repopulating the country. Eighty per cent of those migrants were of Spanish origin – young single men who married native women and passed on a pattern of fertility reduction, because you don’t migrate to have children, but to settle down and build a decent life.
Eighty per cent of those migrants were of Spanish origin – young single men who married native women and passed on a pattern of fertility reduction, because you don’t migrate to have children, but to settle down and build a decent life.
Families with fewer children found it easier to cope with the economic crisis of 1929-1933, because looking after ten children is not the same as looking after five. And that is an effect that has finally been described in more recent literature as the Malthusianism of poverty. That is to say: if you have few resources, the only option left is to reduce the size of your offspring, because every child born means an investment cost for their survival. And that’s happening now too – the latest measurement puts it at 1.29 children per woman.
Q. Yes, well, it’s similar here in Spain.
A. Of course, but in developed countries the fertility transition was driven by families with higher income levels and greater economic means – the same ones who most readily adopt new behaviours when it comes to family planning. But in Cuba’s case – and this contradicts the official line – what’s happening is a consolidation or a hardening of the fertility pattern of Malthusianism of poverty. And that explains the brutal falls in the number of births: since 2024 the figure stood at 71,300-odd, and last year it dropped to 68,000-odd – a birth figure that is below what can be estimated for the year 1899. Did you hear that right? 1899. People sometimes say “no, you’ve got the wrong date.” No – it’s 1899.
From around 1933-1934, Cuba’s migration balance reverses and it starts to become a country of emigration, not only to the United States but also within the region: Venezuela with the oil boom of the 1950s, Mexico, Puerto Rico…
Q. You argue that by 2030 the entire Cuban baby boom generation will be retiring. What can be done? Because this calls for an urgent solution and the outlook isn’t very encouraging.
A. And nobody mentions it! I’ve been battling with that issue for years. First of all, because since 2010 the economically active population has stopped replacing itself – more people are leaving than entering. And that’s before the latest wave of emigration. Moreover, Cuba was historically a country with very low utilisation of its workforce. People think the Special Period began in the 1990s, but the first time Cuba’s GDP actually falls is in 1985 – that’s when it starts, and it’s been going ever since. There has been a sustained decline in fertility since 2012 and also in life expectancy, and the process of demographic ageing has become entrenched – demographic ageing as a population structure concept, not just “getting old” – because of the 24% of the population I’ve calculated to have left, 80% of those people are aged between 15 and 59.
Q. Right, but so what would the solution be?
A. The solution has to be a change of model. In the second half of the 1980s, Vietnam was confronted with a famine, which led it to carry out the reforms it has been implementing since 1989. Within three years it had become the world’s biggest rice exporter. The Chinese did something similar – Deng Xiaoping began his reforms around 1980, and we all know how the Chinese economic story turned out. Whatever we may think or say about the political model, that is the reality. What happened to the Chinese and Vietnamese pension systems is that they are economically sustainable. Cuba’s is not.
If what needs to change hasn’t changed, we’re going to have a very hard time, because the State – which is already broken socio-economically – would have no option but to abandon people to their fate. In fact, it’s already happening in terms of healthcare collapse, food crisis… which gives the measure of a population being abandoned to its fate.
Q. Given all the expectations right now, do you think anything is actually going to change?
A. Look, the change is going to be inexorable. It will change because the system is heading towards a point of implosion. And that is unstoppable. It’s going to happen. And the ruling class is going to be smart enough to realise that if the situation implodes, they too will disappear. There’ll be no way out for anyone, and you could get a social explosion like July 11th, when the regime already made clear what its attitude would be.
The ruling class is going to be smart enough to realise that if the situation implodes, they too will disappear.
On top of that, this could happen in a context of migration closure – which is the other issue. Cuban emigration has been slowing down not because there are fewer people who want to leave, but because there are fewer opportunities, for example with a migration market as large as the American one. Though routes still exist: there are currently 135,000 Cubans with work permits in Guyana alone, and there are other corridors – Central American, South American, North African… I have a list of around 20 migration routes where a Cuban presence has been detected. The population drain will continue in this process I’ve called hollowing-out – an accelerated depopulation that moreover happens over a very short period of time.
Up to 31 December 2024, I have calculated the departure of around 24% of the population relative to 2020, in the absence of war – because this sort of thing is recorded in countries in full armed conflict, particularly in Africa. It’s a genuine displacement crisis.
Q. We’ve recently seen the US President say he knew many Cubans who were happy in the United States, but that now that Cuba was going to change they would return. Do you think that’s true?
A. So has Trump put the cherry on the cake of demographic theory? [laughs] Those return flows have never happened, and there might be people who want to go back to see where they used to live. What there could be is people interested in investing – that’s true – because some people say that even the investment process that’s needed is not all that complex or costly: that Cuba is very small (which was actually a factor in the demographic transition and modernisation in the first half of the twentieth century), that it’s a long narrow country where distances are very short, and where what’s needed is a level of resources that could be substantial initially, but will gradually reduce, just as they will be recovered as an investment.
The problem is whether the necessary legal framework exists to make that possible. Because what can’t happen is that you expect lots of people to come and invest in Cuba and then have their money taken away from them.
But emigration is now “the canary in the mine.” In the nineteenth century, miners took a canary down with them. If there was a gas leak, the canary would stop singing, or pass out, or die – and everyone would run. That’s what demography is doing: sounding the alarm, denouncing the action, the effect, the impact of factors that are not demographic in nature, but that affect it enormously. The question is: who wants to invest in fixing all that? That’s why the role of international organisations will be so important, because no private businessman is going to solve this on his own.
People will keep leaving, because if things change today that doesn’t mean there’ll automatically be jobs for everyone tomorrow, or that all the healthcare infrastructure will be completely renewed with brand-new equipment…
Q. How long do you think a degree of recovery might take?
A. I think there needs to be a stabilisation process of at least four years, in which many things are sorted out that necessarily have to contribute to development – restoration of transport, communications, social, economic and energy-production infrastructure. Because when the electricity goes, it doesn’t just go for me – it goes for the factory too.
I think there needs to be a stabilisation process of at least four years, in which many things are sorted out that necessarily have to contribute to development.
But one of the things that has to change is the legal framework of the system, because if you want to protect private investment, state investment, whatever kind of investment – you have to build a legal structure that makes that protection possible. And when you change the legal basis of the system, you are changing the system politically. Laws, the legal order… these are nothing other than the will of the ruling class. You have to change it politically. There’s no other way, because it’s a system – all the dimensions are connected.
Q. Do you think that change will come under the tutelage of the United States?
A. I’ve always said, since 2021 – since COVID – that Cuba needs an international humanitarian intervention. A humanitarian intervention like those in Syria, Kosovo, Haiti… There are intervention forces that have also brought with them what’s called an interposition force [like the Blue Helmets], which protects the population from violence. In fact, economic changes won’t be possible without that. Look at Haiti…
Haiti hasn’t managed it. And that could be… Well, there’s a great Cuban economist, Mauricio de Miranda, who talks about the “Haitianisation” of Cuba as a real, already-occurring process. And indeed, when you look at productivity indicators in the economy, Cuba ends up in last place… and if you’re in last place for labour productivity in the Americas, you’re in last place in the Western Hemisphere. Immediately below whom?
Q. Haiti.
A. Exactly. And if you take, for example, Hanke’s annual misery index, in 2021 Cuba was already in first place. Its position on the human development index has fallen to level 95. When the Tarea Ordenamiento* [the monetary reordering exercise] was implemented, I estimated inflation at 1,850%, Pérez-Castellanos at 1,840%, Hanke at 1,220%… We’re talking about four-digit inflation.
I remember once an American professor who came in the 1990s, when the boom in American university groups started – they would come for academic semesters. And this one brought his doctoral group along, saying: “In Cuba, students can see what happens when things are done badly. And no school of economics in the world teaches that.”
*English sources generally refer to it as “The Ordering Task”
This text was produced in collaboration with Cuba Siglo 21 as part of the project “Cuba: Stabilize and Develop”.
Translated by GH
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The academic says the authorities are keeping her legal case “filed away” to avoid the political cost of sending her to prison
Dr. Alina Bárbara López Hernández during her virtual intervention at the LASA congress. / Facebook/Alina Bárbara López Hernández
14ymedio, Madrid, May 29, 2026 — Dr. Alina Bárbara López Hernández, co-director of the Cuba Section of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA), denounced that the Cuban regime prevented her from attending the organization’s annual congress being held this week in Paris.
In a post on her Facebook profile, she explained that despite her important position within LASA’s Cuba Section, “the Cuban Government did not allow me to attend because of the (i)legal process in which I am charged together with Jenny Pantoja, although my travel restriction dates from long before that judicial process.”
López Hernández has been under a travel ban imposed by Cuban authorities since June 2023, despite the intellectual having denounced the arbitrariness of this State decision, which contradicts the Constitution of the Republic itself.
The academic noted in her Thursday post that the prohibition makes her the first co-president of a LASA section in Cuba who is an intellectual under repression and that “this says a great deal about changing times… and about the repressive nature of the Cuban State. Even more than any continue reading
declaration could say.”
“This says a great deal about changing times… and about the repressive nature of the Cuban State. Even more than any declaration could say.”
López and Pantoja are accused of the crime of assault stemming from events that occurred on June 18, 2024, when they were repressed by agents trying to prevent the peaceful protest they carry out on the 18th day of every month. In May 2025, the Prosecutor’s Office requested four years of deprivation of liberty for the intellectual, to be replaced by correctional labor without imprisonment, while for the anthropologist it requested three years, also with the option of substitution by correctional labor.
Interviewed this Friday by Martí Noticias, the academic declared that Cuban authorities are not only preventing her from leaving the country, but are also keeping her legal case and Pantoja’s shelved in order to avoid the political cost of a trial that could send the academic to prison. López Hernández stressed: “Because I am not going to accept correctional labor without imprisonment. I am going to prison, and they know it, that I will not yield on that because of ethics, conviction, and conscience.”
According to the doctor, other Cuban academics from different institutions were able to attend the event, some of them already retired. López Hernández could only share a message with the LASA congress virtually. In the post, the academic thanked colleagues in the session for the debate generated, “where it became clear that studies on Cuba will not respond to political agendas nor can they be conditioned by particular interests.”
“I am not going to accept correctional labor without imprisonment. I am going to prison, and they know it, that I will not yield on that because of ethics, conviction, and conscience.”
14ymedio had already reported this month on the leak of an internal discussion within LASA’s Cuba Section, revealing disagreements over critical positions within the association. The debate originated from a declaration proposed by lawyer and academic Raudiel Peña Barrios, urging the Cuban Government to accept dialogue with citizens who dissent from official economic, political, and social agendas. Figures such as sociologist Aurelio Alonso rejected the proposal, calling it “unacceptable” because they considered it a condemnatory statement. Alina Bárbara López was one of the voices defending the proposal, arguing from her own position as an intellectual suffering repression from State Security.
Since its founding, LASA had been a space close to the Cuban regime’s narrative within the international academic sphere, but after the July 11 protests, the State’s repressive response and the organization’s silence generated discontent among Cuban researchers and led to resignations by members both inside and outside the Island.
In July 2024, more than fifty LASA members requested that the Executive Committee explicitly condemn the “political repression” in Cuba following reports of police violence against Dr. López Hernández and Jenny Pantoja.
Translated by Regina Anavy
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Salvador Valdés Mesa met in Astana with the presidents of Kazakhstan and Belarus during the Eurasian Economic Union summit
In his meeting with Valdés Mesa, Lukashenko assured that Minsk “is aware” of what is happening in the “friendly country.” / X / Salvador Valdés Mesa
EFE / 14ymedio, Astana, May 29, 2026 — Cuban Vice President Salvador Valdés Mesa met this Friday in Astana with the presidents of Kazakhstan, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, and Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, on the sidelines of the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) summit, a bloc in which Havana participates as an observer country.
During the meeting with Tokayev, the parties discussed the development of bilateral relations, especially in the field of artificial intelligence, according to a statement from the Kazakh presidency. The president explained to Valdés Mesa the steps being taken by the largest country in Central Asia to introduce new technological solutions and expressed his willingness to share that experience with Cuba.
In addition, both leaders highlighted the potential for expanding cooperation in “promising” sectors such as medicine and the pharmaceutical industry. They also examined opportunities to deepen trade, cultural, and humanitarian ties.
The closeness between Cuba and Belarus is not limited to the commercial sphere
In his meeting with Valdés Mesa, Lukashenko assured that Minsk “is aware” of what is happening in the “friendly country.” “We are willing to do everything possible for Cuba and everything the continue reading
situation allows,” said the Belarusian leader, one of Moscow’s closest allies.
Lukashenko added that his country would strictly comply with the agreements reached within the framework of the EAEU and invited Havana to present “additional proposals” to improve bilateral cooperation, which would be considered by Minsk.
The closeness between Cuba and Belarus is not limited to the commercial sphere. In recent years, both countries have strengthened military contacts, with visits by high-ranking Cuban Armed Forces officials to Minsk and Belarusian military chiefs to Havana. In 2023, the defense ministers of both countries discussed military and technical-military cooperation; afterward, the Belarusian press reported Cuban interest in systems such as the Polonez-M missiles, while new “negotiations” and visits linked to air equipment, combat drones, and air defense systems have been documented.
Valdés Mesa invited business leaders from the regional bloc nations to participate in the Havana International Fair scheduled for November
Cuba and the EAEU, made up of Russia, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, and Armenia, agreed this Thursday on a roadmap to strengthen cooperation in the economic, commercial, and scientific sectors.
Among the areas with business opportunities on the Island, Valdés Mesa pointed to the Mariel Special Development Zone, biotechnology, tourism, the sugar industry, and agriculture.
The Cuban vice president also described to his hosts the complex situation the country is going through, which he attributed to the “tightening of the U.S. economic and oil embargo” and to “Washington’s threats of military aggression against the Island.”
In addition, he invited business leaders from the nations of the regional bloc to participate in the Havana International Fair scheduled for November, where new business deals could be finalized.
Translated by Regina Anavy
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The lawmaker also warns about the electoral impact of wars promoted from the White House
Rubén Gallego, U.S. senator for the state of Arizona and member of the Democratic Party. / EFE/María León
14ymedio/Europa Press, Madrid, May 29, 2026 — Democratic Senator for the state of Arizona, Rubén Gallego, warned this Friday that the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump “will try to change the Government of Cuba, one way or another,” a prospect he said he opposes.
“I believe there will be an attempt to change the Government of Cuba, whether through the military or by some other means. Cubans living outside the island have a great deal of influence in circles close to the president,” he asserted during a meeting with journalists at the headquarters of the Real Instituto Elcano, taking advantage of his visit to Madrid.
He thus referred to U.S. foreign policy and the actions of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whom he accused of “having an obsession with this issue.” Rubio himself stated last week that Havana is “a threat to U.S. national security” and accused the island of being “one of the sponsors of terrorism throughout the region.”
“I believe that 99% of elected Democrats will be against this war and are seeking to pass a law to stop an attempt to invade Cuba”
Gallego, addressing these remarks — which Cuba claims amount to the United States “instigating military aggression” — argued in turn that the Caribbean nation “is not a threat to the United States.” “It is a very poor island with 9 million people,” he said, while emphasizing that “the United States should not start any war.”
“I believe that 99% of elected Democrats will be against this war and are seeking to pass a law to stop an attempt to invade Cuba. I hope we succeed and can stop this, but I believe this president and the Cubans who are in the United States will try to bring down the Government,” he maintained.
The senator clarified that he himself introduced the bill together with Democratic Senator Tim Kaine, former vice-presidential candidate, with the goal of requiring Congress to authorize Trump to carry out military operations similar to those that took place on Iranian and Venezuelan soil. “Hopefully we will have the opportunity to pass this law,” he added.
Regarding the operation carried out in January on Venezuelan soil — which resulted in the capture and transfer to the United States of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores — Gallego stressed that it represented a “tactical success” but a “failure” in political terms because it had “used the military to bring down a foreign government.” continue reading
“Maduro was deeply corrupt, but that does not give us a license to bring down the Government”
“Maduro was deeply corrupt, but that does not give us a license to bring down the Government because we open the door for what we say — that someone is a criminal or delinquent — to be used by other countries, for example China, against others such as Taiwan,” he explained.
“Strategically and militarily it was a success, but we have replaced one dictator with another, so geopolitically speaking I think it has been a failure,” he added.
When asked about the possible results of the midterm elections scheduled for November, the Democratic politician expressed optimism about a possible victory for his party in the elections, amid Trump’s declining popularity and rising tensions following the offensive against Iran.
“I believe the Democrats are going to take the House of Representatives and probably also the Senate. This is because the war is a problem for voters, not only because the majority of Americans, around 60%, reject this war but also because it distracts the Government from the things that truly matter to citizens,” he declared, though he declined for now to comment on a possible presidential run in 2028. “First we will focus on 2026,” he insisted.
“I believe the Democrats are going to take the House of Representatives and probably also the Senate. This is because the war is a problem for voters”
Among these issues, he listed the high cost of living: “Everything costs a lot in the United States. The price of housing, rent, vehicles, energy…” he said, before indicating that the president “has done nothing to solve this.”
Regarding the importance of the Latino vote, he stressed that “historically, this is a group of voters that keeps changing. There used to be a solid Democratic base, but that has changed over time, and many of them voted for Trump in 2024,” he complained.
“In Arizona we won because we gained the support of the Latino community and the reason we achieved that support was because we talked about the issues that concerned them, which are the economy and immigration,” he explained, although he admitted that, on many occasions, “Democrats have not known how to address the frustration” of the population.
Translated by Regina Anavy
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In Cuba, the anti-anxiety pill is now sold retail, like a cigarette or a candy
To the shortness of “peanuts” and the cadence of “coconut candy” there has now arrived a harsher music: “alprazolam, alprazolam.” / 14ymedio
14ymedio, Havana, Natalia López Moya, May 28, 2026 — In the cardboard box, placed on the floor of a doorway as if it were an improvised counter, the blister packs of pills form an unsettling geometry. There are white, pink, green, and yellow tablets, lined up with pharmacy-like neatness, but without lab coats, prescriptions, or questions. Off to one side, a woman smokes while sitting on a low stool, her body slumped forward and her eyes fixed on the movement of passersby. She does not seem to be hiding. Nor does she need to. In today’s Cuba, even controlled medications have learned to sell themselves in broad daylight.
Alprazolam, internationally known as Xanax, a powerful short-acting benzodiazepine used to treat anxiety and panic attacks, has become part of the black-market landscape. It no longer appears only in discreet WhatsApp messages or whispered offers between acquaintances. Now it is hawked on the street alongside loose cigarettes, candy, lighters, and packages of adulterated coffee. What is also new is the retail sale: there is no need to buy the whole blister pack. For 50, 60, or 80 pesos, depending on the place and the buyer’s urgency, anyone can take a pill for the road.
“Take your little pill for the road, don’t leave without this, this helps you live”
The phenomenon is repeating itself in increasingly visible places. On Tulipán Street in Nuevo Vedado; beneath the arcades of Carlos III and Reina in Central Havana; or at the Tejas intersection in Cerro, where everything seems to converge — electric tricycles, street cries, exhaustion, and survival — drug sellers have found continue reading
their clientele. There are no signs or display cases, but neither is there much concealment. One only has to approach, look at the merchandise spread out over cardboard or inside an open shopping bag, and ask. Sometimes not even that: the sales pitch comes to meet you.
Chanting the name of a four-syllable product is not easy. To the brevity of “peanuts” and the cadence of “coconut candy” there has now arrived a rougher music: “alprazolam, alprazolam.” Or, with more salesmanship: “Take your alprazolam, one or two, however many you want.” Near Boyeros, a woman added an even more brutally honest hook: “Take your little pill for the road, don’t leave without this, this helps you live.” The phrase, spoken as casually as someone offering cold water or a croquette sandwich, sums up the country’s emotional state better than any statistic could.
Self-medication, which was always a risk, has become a refuge
There are no published official studies measuring how widespread the consumption of alprazolam bought through clandestine networks has become. Nor are many figures needed to notice that the drug has settled into the routine of a population worn down by blackouts, inflation, uncertainty, and the lack of specialized mental health care. Self-medication, which was always a risk, has become a refuge. A chemical sanctuary, cheap per dose but costly in its consequences.
Cuba has reached a point where, on the way to work or school, someone can buy a cigarette or a pill to endure the day with equal ease. And the gravest thing is not that alprazolam is being sold on the street, but that hearing the street cry advertising it no longer surprises anyone.
Translated by Regina Anavy
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Throughout the month of May, residents of Ávila have had bread on only two days
Bakeries are having to adapt to the new conditions, but can barely manage to produce decent-quality bread. / Tribuna de La Habana
14ymedio, Madrid, 29 May 2026 / This May, the people of Ciego de Ávila had bread for two days. That is how extreme the situation is, acknowledged Rafael Pina Joba, Director General of the Food Industry in the province, who described the amount of flour reaching the territory as “negligible.” In an interview with the local outlet Invasor, the official stated that in recent days the quantity of raw material received amounts to just 32 tonnes for the more than 430,000 inhabitants of Ciego de Ávila.
“In the current month, we had planned to deliver between four and five days’ worth of bread for the population,” said Pina, but the allocation received forced a much steeper downward recalculation than expected – and expectations were already more than modest. Public discontent is plain to see, above all because the pastry shops do have baked goods available.
“Very good question,” said Pina, when challenged on this point. “Following the directives that the country has in place, we are obliged as a company to steer ourselves toward new lines of production and to engage with the economic actors that allow us to increase production levels,” he explained. These agreements have enabled a type of flour known as “differentiated” – used for pastry-making – to reach the state industry.
These agreements have enabled a type of flour known as “differentiated” – used for pastry-making – to reach the state industry.
“The core mission of our company is to provide food to the people of Ávila and to be able to compete in the informal market with our products – to ensure that ours have a greater level of acceptance among the public,” the director argued. However, he acknowledged that quantities are scarce and are used almost exclusively, on the instructions of the Ministry of Commerce, for quinceañera cakes. The remainder is distributed in a controlled manner to vulnerable continue reading
communities, he maintained.
The official spoke about bread obtained through the ration book, a situation that is far from new. Until recently, the theoretical daily allowance was 60 grams – 20 grams below the previous weight, though the reduction came with a price adjustment that was poorly compensated by the complete absence of quality – but now even that is a utopia. The shortage of raw materials is compounded by the shortage of electricity.
“Because of the energy” – he said, without elaborating – “we have had to use more than 25 electric ovens in order to carry out the production that prevents the bread from going off, from turning sour, from our output being ruined. And we have tried to recover this production to provide a better service to the population, within our means,” he said. Pina also addressed the question of why dough is prepared in one location and baked in another – a process that likewise has a negative impact on bread quality.
“We would rather not do it that way, because it needs to be a continuous process,” he lamented, but there is no better alternative. “We have had to bring back our wood-fired ovens. And in some locations, during the few hours that production allows, the machines cannot work the dough because of the level of raw materials needed, and at certain moments we have had to move that dough to a unit that has electricity at that particular time in order to prepare it, and then bring it back to the original unit to bake it in the wood-fired ovens,” he explained. Things could be worse – there would otherwise be a risk of having to discard it altogether.
“At this moment we have no freely available bread. We are acquiring a small level of flour through economic actors and through the companies that can supply it to us.”
As for bread sold freely off the ration, that is out of the question. “At this moment we have no freely available bread. We are acquiring a small level of flour through economic actors and through the companies that can supply it to us,” he said. The expectation, nevertheless, is that if production is ever resumed, sales will be managed on a controlled basis.
The director also spoke about how the industry has had to reinvent itself – producing everything from croquettes with cassava, pumpkin and sweet potato extenders, to fried plantain chips and noodle soups. The situation is so outlandish that diversification has extended into areas with no connection whatsoever to the company’s core activity. “We are planning to open a shop selling vehicle parts and components, which will allow us to guarantee the wages of our workers. My company – it may not seem like it – has more than 1,300 employees across the province, and we have a responsibility to them and their families. To give them, at the very least, their minimum wage so that they can keep their households going,” he said.
The industry has a repair and maintenance workshop and is currently negotiating with various companies to lease out its machinery or the services of its workers – an arrangement similar to what it intends to do with the nine vehicles it has standing idle and plans to rent out to private operators.
What the official described illustrates the dramatic situation facing the bread industry, which was already coming from appallingly bad figures. In 2021, 446,500 tonnes of bread were produced across the island, compared with 176,400 tonnes in 2025. The figures show a 60% fall over four years – but everything points to the numbers for 2026 having no parallel whatsoever.
Translated by GH
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Cuban pilot Luis Raúl González-Pardo Rodríguez was sentenced to seven months in prison after admitting he lied on immigration forms
Luis Raúl González-Pardo, left, in an image included in the prosecution files that led to his conviction for fraud. / American Museum of the Cuban Diaspora
EFE/14ymedio, Miami, May 28, 2026 — Luis Raúl González-Pardo Rodríguez, a Cuban pilot who was indicted last week alongside former president Raúl Castro for the shootdown of two planes belonging to the organization Brothers to the Rescue, was sentenced this Thursday to seven months in prison in the United States for lying on immigration forms. The sentence comes one week after the defendant, who entered U.S. territory under humanitarian parole, admitted guilt to fraud in obtaining a visa.
The man was already being held in a state prison, so he is expected to be released before that term is completed.
González-Pardo Rodríguez is one of the five military officers whom the U.S. Department of Justice indicted last week, together with Castro, for the deaths of four people — three U.S. citizens and one legal resident, all of Cuban origin — in the 1996 shootdown of the Brothers to the Rescue aircraft. The other military officers are Emilio José Palacio Blanco, José Fidel Gual Barzaga, Raúl Simanca Cárdenas, and Lorenzo Alberto Pérez-Pérez. The indictment includes four counts of murder, conspiracy to kill Americans, and destruction of aircraft.
The U.S. government has not detailed what the next steps might be in the prosecution of Raúl Castro
Unlike González-Pardo Rodríguez, who was already in the United States at the time of the indictment, Castro, 94, remains in Cuba, and the U.S. government has not detailed what the next steps in his prosecution might be.
During the announcement of the indictment last week, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche stated that the former Cuban president would appear before justice “of his own will or by some other means,” though he avoided answering whether Washington was planning an operation in Cuba similar to the one carried out in Venezuela on January 3 to capture then-ruler Nicolás Maduro.
According to Cuba, the attack under scrutiny in this case took place in Cuba’s territorial waters, in legitimate defense and after more than a dozen warnings, and therefore did not violate international law. However, reports from continue reading
the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, an autonomous body of the Organization of American States, established that the aircraft were shot down in international airspace.
More recent image of González-Pardo, included in his profile as a repressor by the Foundation for Human Rights in Cuba. / FHRC
Brothers to the Rescue was a nonprofit organization founded in Miami by José Basulto in the early 1990s. Its members patrolled international waters searching for Cuban rafters attempting to flee the Island, while Havana accused them of violating Cuban airspace and carrying out political provocations.
Subsequent investigations revealed that at least two Cuban agents infiltrated into Brothers to the Rescue provided detailed information about flight routes and schedules to the Cuban government, facilitating the regime’s military operation. In 2003, a U.S. federal court charged a Cuban general and two fighter pilots over the shootdown, but no formal charges were brought at that time against the Castro brothers.
In June 1996, El Nuevo Herald published an audio recording in which Raúl Castro can be heard saying: “I said they should try to shoot them down over the territory, but they entered Havana and left again… Of course, with one of those air-to-air missiles, what comes down is a fireball, and it’s going to fall on the city. Well, shoot them down at sea when they show up.” In the same audio document, the then-head of the Armed Forces speaks of giving “authority” to “five generals.”
Translated by Regina Anavy
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What remains for the regime is to renounce the hegemonic role of the only permitted party and attempt a real opening, even if it appears to be a fraudulent change
The most dynamic parts of the contradiction are, in my view, the governments of Cuba and the United States, despite the fact that the fundamental contradiction lies between the population and the dictatorship. / EFE
14ymedio, Havana, Reinaldo Escobar, May 28, 2026 — Three actors are currently leading the Cuban drama: the dictatorship in power, the population, and external factors.
Although the regime wants to give the impression that it is a monolithic structure, it is enough to cite its different names, or perhaps masks, to perceive the subtle differences: the Party, the military, the family clan, the State, Parliament, the State Security organs. Suspicion falls on each of them as to who is truly governing the country.
Where it says “the population,” one could say “the citizens,” but that designation should be reserved for those human groups whose members are empowered to challenge authority, organize according to their preferences, and periodically go to the polls to reward or punish politicians. One could also say “the people,” but that is the subject that storms government palaces. For now, we are reduced to being merely the inhabitants of this Island. Here, no one asks how the unions will react or what the students will do.
Where it says “the population,” one could say “the citizens,” but that designation should be reserved for those human groups whose members are empowered to challenge authority
Only intuitively, and with an enormous effort to strip away one’s beliefs, can one define the sectors of the population to place supporters of the process on one side and the dissatisfied on the other.
A more detailed study would divide the supporters into different strata: the Marxist-Leninists convinced that socialism is the correct path; those who for some reason feel benefited; the perennial opportunists; and those who, out of inertia, obey and march wherever they are ordered.
The dissatisfied camp is equally varied: the anti-communists continue reading
convinced that socialism as a doctrine ruins nations; those harmed by some law or measure taken over the last 67 years; and those suffering the immediate consequences (scarcity, blackouts, disconnection) but who still do not have the “political consciousness” to participate in a clearly opposition-oriented initiative, where an undeniable minority is active.
External factors are also divided into two camps: on one side, the Government of the United States exercising its enormous economic, diplomatic, and military power to demand the dictatorship’s capitulation. It is timidly accompanied by some democratic countries in Latin America and by the indecisiveness of the European Union, where the belief still prevails that signed agreements and accords can open a path toward democratization.
On the other side, with a less explicit commitment, are Russia, China, and Iran, with their declarations of unrestricted support for the Havana regime, and among neighboring countries, the supportive hand of Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil, joined by a breeding ground of organizations dressed in progressive rhetoric mainly dedicated to confronting, often violently, demonstrations by Cuban exiles abroad. From this chapter of external factors come shipments of food and medicine, cash donations, solar energy installations, and above all applause. They are the deniers of the need for political change. Some for strategic needs, others because they do not want to realize how illusory their illusion about Cuba is.
From the northern neighbor, which struggles with the limits of how far its interference should go, political common sense and trust in the population are expected — a population tired of its condition as mere inhabitants and eager to become citizens peacefully
From this parallelogram of forces, where each side pulls and pushes in different directions, a result must eventually emerge.
The most dynamic parts of the contradiction are, in my view, the governments of Cuba and the United States, despite the fact that the fundamental contradiction lies between the population and the dictatorship.
What remains for the regime is to renounce the hegemonic role of the only permitted party and attempt a real opening, even if it appears to be a fraudulent change.
From the northern neighbor, which struggles with the limits of how far its interference should go, political common sense and trust in the population are expected — a population tired of its condition as mere inhabitants and eager to become citizens peacefully, but on the verge of reacting angrily as a people.
Translated by Regina Anavy
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The digital outlet Axios cites a State Department source: with the heat, irritation will grow and people will take to the streets
“The president does not want troops on the ground for more than 48 hours”
“It’s going to be hot. People won’t have electricity. Food will spoil without refrigeration. People will be more irritated. They may take to the streets. And then what will happen?” / 14ymedio
14ymedio, Madrid, May 28, 2026 — The leaks from the U.S. State Department to Axios that so irritate Havana continue unabated. The latest installment, published this Thursday, again speaks of an open-ended scenario in which all options are being considered. Apparently, President Donald Trump trusts that the regime will slowly stew in its own juices, a fairly literal metaphor considering negotiators are talking about a summer in which heat itself will become another suffocating factor that could push the population to explode.
“We do not want to end the regime just yet. There is a method to this, in stages,” one of the sources said. The Administration expects a collapse in the coming months through a strategy the official describes as “accelerationist,” although that definition weakens when he explains that the pressure will be applied “in slow motion.” “Trump wants to exhaust every tool at his disposal. But at this moment, he does not have as many as before,” the source added, maintaining that the president is in no hurry and is focused on Iran, an issue that becomes more complicated the closer it seems to a resolution.
“We have a broad range of resources, especially regarding sanctions and their enforcement. And more measures are coming,” the source said, without clarifying which additional sectors might be affected.
“We have a broad range of resources, especially regarding sanctions and their enforcement. And more measures are coming”
One of the most enigmatic statements the sources gave Axios was the suggestion that there could indeed be someone within the regime capable of steering a transition, although the operation has not yet been approved. “The problem is not that there is no Delcy in Cuba. There could be people continue reading
with a similar profile. But Trump has not yet given the green light to formally get involved,” one official maintained.
According to these sources, there are two other issues that distinguish Cuba from Venezuela. Washington believes that an operation to capture Raúl Castro — criminally charged in the U.S. a week ago for the shootdown of the Brothers to the Rescue planes — similar to the one carried out against Nicolás Maduro would be useless because Raúl Castro already carried out a transition 30 years ago “toward a less authoritarian regime,” and nothing would change. From the official’s remarks, it is understood that the U.S. problem with Cuba is the current system’s economic “incompetence,” without mentioning political aspects.
The other issue is that the embargo is subject to legislative control, meaning the presidency has more limited room to maneuver. “This prevents Trump from normalizing relations with a new government through executive order, as he did in Venezuela, where sanctions were imposed by the U.S. executive branch,” the sources reflected, adding that the interests of Cuban-American representatives play a role here. “They hold hardline positions on Cuba that reflect the conservative exile community in South Florida.”
Removing Venezuelan support has been key to the U.S. strategy, they added. The rest has continued through additional sanctions, and summer, they hope, will do its part. “It’s going to be hot. People won’t have electricity. Food will spoil without refrigeration. People will be more irritated. They may take to the streets. And then what will happen? I do not see the president doing nothing if there is repression,” one source said.
But another of those consulted disagrees. “The president does not want troops on the ground for more than 48 hours. It is a brewing quagmire. This could get complicated.”
Be that as it may, all plans are on the table, as Politico insisted this Wednesday in an article stating that “strategically positioned assets are laying the groundwork for military action, from capturing Havana’s leadership, similar to what was done with Nicolás Maduro, to a series of precision strikes.” “Everything is on the table, but there is no planned or imminent invasion,” they confirmed to Axios. “When the president gives the order, we will be ready for anything.”
“We will talk with them, work on it; we want something good for the Cuban people and, hopefully, there will be a good outcome for them. There has to be”
Amid this situation, the carrot-and-stick strategy remains alive. The U.S. secretary said this Wednesday that he trusts negotiations will succeed. “We will talk with them, work on it; we want something good for the Cuban people and, hopefully, there will be a good outcome for them. There has to be,” Rubio said during a Cabinet meeting at the White House chaired by Trump.
That strategy can also be seen in the offer of $100 million in humanitarian aid that Rubio offered Havana last week and which it accepted. Like the aid sent after Hurricane Melissa, it will be channeled through the Catholic Church. “If we had wanted to accelerate the collapse, we would not have sent any aid,” a senior government official told Axios. This is, he said, a “campaign to show people that they can have a better life if the regime gets out of their way.”
“The political situation is complex on both sides [of the Florida Straits],” another official concluded. “But we have time. They do not.”
Translated by Regina Anavy
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COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORK: The 14ymedio team is committed to practicing serious journalism that reflects Cuba’s reality in all its depth. Thank you for joining us on this long journey. We invite you to continue supporting us by becoming a member of 14ymedio now. Together we can continue transforming journalism in Cuba.
14ymedio/Agencies, Havana, May 29, 2026 — The head of the U.S. Southern Command, Francis L. Donovan, met this Friday with Cuba’s Chief of the General Staff, Roberto Legrá Sotolongo, at the perimeter of the Guantánamo Bay Naval Station, in an unusual meeting between senior military officials from the two countries.
