Reflections on Rolando Gallardo’s proposal for the republican refoundation of Cuba
14ymedio, Málaga, José A. Adrián Torres, May 15, 2026 — I read with great interest Rolando Gallardo’s article on the need for a republican refoundation in Cuba. I agree with much of the diagnosis: speaking of a conventional transition may be insufficient for a country where the regime has degraded not only institutions, but also social trust, personal initiative, public responsibility, and collective hope. Cuba is not facing merely the problem of replacing one government with another; it is facing the much more arduous challenge of rebuilding a political community after decades of fear, dependence, simulation, and moral impoverishment.
Precisely for that reason, the author’s proposal seems lucid in its starting point but overly confident in its development. The idea of a civil council made up of jurists, intellectuals, and figures of proven integrity may be desirable as a goal, but it risks resting on an excessively idealistic premise: that a group of morally qualified individuals, without immediate political ambitions and motivated by patriotism, will be capable of managing a transition of enormous complexity without becoming trapped by interests, factions, external pressures, or internal power struggles.
That assumption recalls, despite all differences, another form of anthropological faith: the belief that a political process can produce new men, selfless, virtuous, and devoted to the common good. Castroism turned that fantasy into revolutionary dogma, and reality ultimately showed something far older and less epic: human beings do not cease to have interests, vanities, fears, loyalties, and appetites simply because they are assigned a historic mission.
The Cuban transition will certainly need valuable people. But it cannot rest on the presumed moral purity of its protagonists
The Cuban transition will certainly need valuable people. But it cannot rest on the presumed moral purity of its protagonists, but rather on rules, limits, oversight, counterweights, and verifiable procedures. The problem is not finding heroes; the problem is building institutions that function even when the heroes grow tired, make mistakes, or begin behaving like any ordinary person with a bit of power in their hands.
It is also important not to underestimate the degree of discouragement in Cuban society today. The Cuban people are not incapable, nor do they lack dignity, nor have they completely lost their instinct for freedom. But they are exhausted, impoverished, monitored, fragmented, and for too long accustomed to surviving rather than organizing. To think that a massive, spontaneous, and sustained internal mobilization alone will be enough to bring about change may be as naïve as thinking that a transitional administration led by an enlightened elite will solve the problem from above.
Here emerges a decisive issue that the article does not sufficiently develop: the relationship between internal repression, popular mobilization, and the legitimacy of any external assistance. In other communist regimes with strong police control, such as East Germany or Ceaușescu’s Romania, the fall of the system was preceded by visible, extensive, and difficult-to-hide popular pressure. It was not merely a problem of economic exhaustion or ideological decay: there came a moment when fear stopped functioning as the regime’s cement. The streets, with all their risks, produced an unequivocal image: society had publicly broken the pact of obedience.
The regime no longer convinces, but it still manages fear, fatigue, and social fragmentation. That is no small thing.
In Cuba, by contrast, that rupture has yet to consolidate. There have been significant outbreaks, and the Island-wide protests of 11 July 2021 showed that there was a real reserve of protest and exhaustion. But it also demonstrated the repressive effectiveness of the state apparatus and the extremely high personal cost of challenging it. Since then, protest has appeared fragmented, intermittent, and often absorbed by the daily struggle to survive: obtaining food, electricity, medicine, transportation, or simply escaping. The regime no longer persuades, but it still administers fear, fatigue, and social fragmentation. That is no small thing. The Cuban dictatorship may no longer possess epic appeal, but it still retains police, archives, prisons, informants, and considerable experience in crushing wills.
This absence of massive and sustained internal mobilization greatly complicates any hypothesis of decisive external assistance. A U.S. intervention—military, coercive, humanitarian, or presented as a stabilization operation—would require some kind of internal political legitimization: a widespread uprising, a visible fracture within the Armed Forces, an explicit request from recognizable transitional authorities, or a humanitarian crisis impossible to contain. Without such a trigger, assistance would risk appearing not as aid to an uprising nation, but as an external imposition. And there the regime, even moribund, would find its final propaganda fuel: presenting itself as the defender of national sovereignty against the old imperial enemy.
This point is especially delicate when considering current U.S. policy toward Cuba. Certain sectors, with figures such as Marco Rubio and Donald Trump himself, seem positioned within a logic of maximum pressure and strategic waiting: tightening the siege, hardening the rhetoric, and awaiting an internal situation that would make a more direct intervention politically viable. But that expectation requires a fuse inside the Island. Without a clear sign of popular rebellion, without an organized internal demand, and without a fracture within the power apparatus, any external action would be morally and politically exposed. It would not be enough to claim that Cuba is being helped; it would have to be demonstrable that assistance is being provided to a Cuba that has risen up.
Any intervention raises questions that cannot be solved with anti-Castro enthusiasm: who governs the next day? With what legitimacy? Under what international mandate?
From there arises the most uncomfortable question: the role of the United States and the Cuban diaspora. It is reasonable to admit that any real transition in Cuba will require external backing, economic assistance, security guarantees, technical support, and intense participation from the exile community. To deny this would be to repeat the old nationalist reflex that the regime itself has used for decades to shield itself. But something very different is turning that support into opaque political tutelage or, worse, into a military intervention born from a provoked or instrumentalized crisis.
An intervention by force might appear, in the abstract, to be the quickest solution. But every intervention opens questions that cannot be resolved through anti-Castro enthusiasm: who governs the next day? With what legitimacy? Under what international mandate? For how long? What is done with the Armed Forces? How are looting, revenge, mass flight, or the emergence of new mafia powers prevented? How can wounded nationalism be prevented from turning former oppressors into supposed defenders of sovereignty?
Cuba is not Iraq or Libya, certainly. It has a history, a diaspora, a cultural and family proximity to the United States, and a unique relationship with Miami that make the scenario different. Nor does there seem to exist in Cuba a deep and majority identification with the regime comparable to what other authoritarian systems managed to preserve for longer. There is exhaustion, disillusionment, anger, and a desire to leave. But the desire for change does not automatically equal the capacity for insurrection. Between wanting something to fall and assuming the risk of pushing it lies an enormous distance, especially when the person pushing knows they may end up in prison, in exile, or with their family ruined.
It will not be enough to expel Castroism from power; it will be necessary to prevent it from surviving in practices, fears, corruption, dependence, and the culture of simulation.
For that reason, the solution cannot be conceived solely as the overthrow of the regime. It must be conceived as the reconstruction of legitimate authority. And legitimacy is not imported wrapped in humanitarian aid, nor does it disembark intact at a port under military protection. It is built, negotiated, recognized, and subjected to limits. The exile community can contribute resources, vision, international pressure, and economic experience; the United States can offer guarantees, assistance, and deterrent capacity; but the ultimate legitimacy of Cuba’s refoundation will have to arise, in some way, from Cubans on the Island themselves. Without that anchor, the transition risks appearing as a replacement of tutelage: from Castroist tutelage to external tutelage, even if the latter comes wrapped in flags of freedom.
Therefore, rather than an administration of notables or a military takeover, Cuba would need a transition architecture with international backing, decisive participation by Cubans both inside and outside the Island, security guarantees, institutional purging, transitional justice, orderly economic opening, and a realistic political timetable. It will not be enough to expel Castroism from power; it will be necessary to prevent it from surviving in practices, fears, corruption, dependence, and the culture of simulation.
The Cuban problem, therefore, does not consist solely in designing a transition architecture for the day after. The prior problem is how to reach that day. The author seems to trust that the collapse of the regime will naturally open a space for a supervised civil administration. But that collapse may not occur in a clean or heroic way. It may take the form of prolonged degradation, dispersed social protests, mass migration, energy collapse, internal fractures within the apparatus itself, or a chaotic combination of all these things. In that scenario, the question is not only who will rebuild Cuba, but what type of event will grant legitimacy to the beginning of that reconstruction.
The great difficulty will not only be toppling an exhausted structure. The great difficulty will also be preventing the vacuum from being occupied by the same reflexes that made it possible: caudillismo, clientelism, external dependence, redemptive epic narratives, and contempt for institutions. In this, the article is entirely correct: Cuba needs architecture, not romanticism. But that architecture will have to be designed for real human beings, not administrative heroes or republican saints. And it will have to begin from an uncomfortable truth: without a sufficiently strong, visible, and sustained internal signal, any external assistance risks becoming, in the eyes of many, an intervention. And any intervention without internal legitimacy may end up giving Castroism its final disguise: that of the patriotic victim of foreign aggression.
Translated by Regina Anavy
______________________
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.