Translating Cuba – Translating Cuba

Oil Has Been Castroism’s Hard-Currency Scam

The CubanAmerican Voice, Julio M. Shiling / On October 2, 2026, the U.S. Coast Guard announced the interdiction of the M/V Grace, a vessel caught in an international enforcement operation for illicit fuel trafficking bound for Cuba. Authorities noted its use of “dark fleet” tactics—deceptive navigation, concealed cargo, and practices designed to evade scrutiny. Fuel was found stowed unsafely in ballast tanks and containers. Months earlier, on June 28, the Coast Guard stopped the M/V Jaira Provider, a substandard offshore supply vessel registered in St. Kitts and Nevis, carrying more than 200,000 gallons of fuel toward the island. These are not random seizures. They form part of a deliberate, targeted effort to interrupt a decades-old pattern: the Cuban communist dictatorship’s systematic conversion of preferential or illicit oil into hard currency, while the Cuban people endure chronic shortages.

This is not a humanitarian blockade. It is a filter. Washington seeks to control ownership, sale, and ultimate beneficiaries of petroleum entering Cuba so that oil is consumed on the island rather than arbitraged abroad for dollars and euros. This helps sustain the regime’s repressive machinery, intelligence apparatus, and export of subversion. The alternative—unrestricted flows—has long allowed Havana to claim domestic scarcity while monetizing surplus or diverted product. The policy’s restraint is deliberate: some fuel continues to reach entities, including MIPYMES linked to the dictatorial state, precisely to avert social collapse. Total denial would risk calamity; controlled entry prevents the regime from remaining the principal oil hustler. continue reading

The practice is historical, not hypothetical. During the Soviet era, Cuba received oil under highly preferential terms through CMEA arrangements and barter deals that overvalued Cuban sugar. Domestic consumption left a surplus that was re-exported—or never even landed—into Western markets for convertible currency. Studies of the period, drawing on Banco Nacional de Cuba data, show that in 1983–1985 petroleum reexports accounted for more than 40 percent of Cuba’s hard-currency earnings, outstripping sugar. The mechanism was pure arbitrage: acquire cheap or soft-currency oil, sell the excess at world prices. Preferential resources in, hard currency out. Cargo splitting and reexport became a core revenue model.

The pattern repeated with Chavista Venezuela. Preferential or politically motivated shipments arrived; portions were diverted or structured for resale. Satellite tracking and shipping data documented the practice. In one clear case involving the M/T Skipper in December 2025, the tanker loaded Venezuelan crude, transferred a portion near Curaçao to a vessel bound for Cuba, and continued toward China with the bulk. Supertankers loading in Venezuela would make brief Caribbean stops, offload shares destined for Havana, and proceed eastward. The Cuban government could simultaneously assert fuel shortages at home while converting the differential into foreign exchange. That differential has funded state conglomerates such as GAESA, the security services, and external political operations far more reliably than sugar or tourism ever could.

Critics who attribute today’s hardships solely to the U.S. embargo, Trump Executive Orders 14380 through 14404, or related sanctions erase both chronology and agency. Cuba’s economic deterioration began in 1959 with the imposition of central planning, expropriation, and the rejection of market incentives. It deepened through successive decades of inefficiency, isolation from productive capital, and prioritization of regime survival over citizen welfare. The mass emigration since 2021—roughly 20 percent of the population, heavily weighted toward the young—reflects cumulative failure, not a sudden external shock. Blaming Washington for the consequences of Castro-Communist economics is the regime’s preferred propaganda line; it is also factually inverted. The United States is not the author of Cuba’s misery. It is responding to a durable revenue strategy that has prolonged that misery by financing the apparatus that enforces it.

The current approach recognizes reality without surrendering principle. Fuel is sold under controlled conditions, even when the recipient is regime-linked, because uncontrolled scarcity risks humanitarian disaster. Yet the same policy blocks the cargo-splitting and dark-fleet channels that turn oil into unrestricted hard currency for the elite and the security state. The interdictions of the Grace and the Jaira Provider illustrate the distinction: they target illicit, deceptive movements rather than legitimate commercial supply. Washington is not attempting to starve the island of energy; it is attempting to starve the dictatorship of an easy arbitrage racket that has subsidized repression for generations.

Oil under Cuban communism has never been primarily about powering hospitals, factories, or households. It has been a dirty business—a scam searching for funds. From Soviet reexports that once supplied over 40 percent of convertible earnings to Venezuelan cargo-splitting documented by satellite imagery, the model has been consistent: preferential inflow, selective domestic allocation, external monetization. The heist of Venezuelan oil, before January 3, witnessed anywhere from 60-80% of oil shipments being resold by communist Cuba to Asia or other friendly regime markets. The U.S. decision to police entry while still permitting measured flows is both strategically coherent and morally defensible. It denies the regime the unfettered ability to convert petroleum into the hard currency that sustains its power, without imposing the total cutoff that would collapse civilian life. Those who ignore this history and this evidence in favor of reflexive blame on the United States are not defending the Cuban people. They are, whether intentionally or not, recycling the official narrative of a dictatorship that has always preferred currency for control over fuel for its citizens.

U.S. Recruits Seven Workers Again Through Palco for Its Embassy in Cuba

Applicants have until October 8 through October 15 to apply, depending on the position sought.

The State Department pays Palco for the local employees it has at the U.S. embassy in Cuba, an amount that according to official data ranges between 100 and 200. / EFE

14ymedio, Madrid, October 05, 2026 – The U.S. State Department is looking in Cuba for seven professionals for its embassy who must submit their applications in the coming days. The employees of this diplomatic mission are, paradoxically, hired by the state-owned Palco, which belongs to the sanctioned Gaesa conglomerate. Despite the fact that the regime has just published new regulations exempting foreign companies from the obligation to use a state employment agency, embassies and official organizations remain subject to intermediation, as indicated in Article 2 of the law.

For this purpose, the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) provides specific exemptions from the sanctions that prevent commercial and economic relations with Cuban state entities. The State Department pays Palco for the local employees it has at the U.S. embassy in Cuba, an amount that according to official data ranges between 100 and 200.

Most of the positions offered correspond to lower levels of public employment, although there is one higher-level position: Strategic Content Coordinator in the Public Diplomacy section, for which the application deadline is Wednesday.

This position, for which a university education or at least two years completed in Communications, Business, Marketing or any other equivalent field is required, will have the highest salary because of its level, although the information does not specify how much is being offered. The employee must be able to design, manage and execute content and engagement strategies on social networks and websites to promote U.S. foreign policy priorities and connect with audiences on the Island. continue reading

This position, for which a university education or at least two years completed in Communications, Business, Marketing or any other equivalent field is required, will have the highest salary associated with it

At a slightly lower level are two other positions: Institutional Relations Assistant, and Information Technology Infrastructure and Systems Specialist Technician, with deadlines of October 12 and 15, respectively.

The former is responsible for designing, planning and coordinating activities aimed at entrepreneurs and young people to promote U.S. values through workshops and interactive programs.

Duties for the latter consist of installing, maintaining and repairing network infrastructure (UTP cabling, fiber optics and wireless systems) and communications devices (telephones, radios, satellite equipment and IoT) at U.S. Government facilities, vehicles and official residences. In addition, the employee must provide user support and manage the necessary connections and permissions.

The remaining four positions are for operational staff. There are two openings for security guards, with access-control and order-maintenance responsibilities, for which applications can be submitted until this Thursday the 8th, and which require nothing more than a rudimentary knowledge of English, quite the opposite of the driver position, which requires a good command of the language. The duties of the latter are to safely and efficiently drive light vehicles (not armored) owned or leased by the U.S. Government to transport personnel, official visitors or cargo, while also performing messenger duties when required. This position can be applied for until the 12th.

Finally, there is another position for driving trucks, which also requires the employee to be responsible for the transported cargo, its storage and the maintenance of the vehicles. Candidates can apply for this position until Thursday the 8th.

The recruitment announcement through social media has received a multitude of comments, some of them criticisms from people calling for the end of the “blockade,” but most not only express interest in joining the team, but also spontaneously offer themselves for any other need that may arise, such as artists, cooks, teachers or carpenters.

Translated by Regina Anavy

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The Bakery That Never Goes Dark: Nighttime Lines in Guanabacoa for One or Two Pounds of Bread

Residents cross areas at high risk of muggings, such as La Cotorra, to reach the establishment

Numerous people wait at night in front of the bakery, one of the few lit spots in the area during the blackouts. / 14ymedio

14ymedio, Havana, September 28, 2026 / At eight or nine at night, when much of the Havana municipality of Guanabacoa is in darkness, the only state bakery that keeps working during the blackouts stays lit and surrounded by people thanks to a generator. The establishment is next to the well-known “Guanabacoa traffic light,” at the intersection of Vía Blanca and the Corral Falso road.

The scene repeats itself every day, and it is at sundown that the line takes on its true dimensions. Dozens of people crowd in front of the bakery, some by the door, others sitting wherever they can find a spot, while motorcycles pile up on the sidewalk. In the images taken by 14ymedio, the light from the establishment falls on those waiting and leaves the rest of the street plunged in darkness.

Many come to buy just one or two pounds of bread. For some of those in line, that will be their entire meal that night or their breakfast the next morning.

Residents from different parts of Guanabacoa, and from Regla as well, make their way to the bakery. For some, the route means crossing La Cotorra at night, at the entrance to the municipality, an area that took its name from the old water bottling plant that once operated there and that the blackouts and poor lighting have made especially unsafe. continue reading

The fear is not unfounded. 14ymedio recently documented, in that same area, the assault on a couple whose electric moped was snatched at knifepoint by two hooded men. The attack happened at night, on a poorly lit avenue at the entrance to Guanabacoa.

Even so, the lack of alternatives drives many to make the trip. The chance of finding bread in the middle of a blackout outweighs the risk of crossing dark, isolated streets. And if the bread runs out before they reach the counter, there is not much leeway: come back the next day, look in another municipality or wait for the power to come back.

Residents say that “fights” are common and that on occasion the Police have had to intervene

Nor is the wait at the bakery by any means peaceful. Residents say that “fights” are common and that on occasion the Police have had to intervene. In a line where it is unclear whether there will be enough bread for everyone, any dispute over a place in line can end in shouting or shoving.

Scenes like this are repeated in other parts of the island. In the municipality of Regla, after more than 26 hours without electricity, numerous people were already standing in line at daybreak in front of a bakery, a bank and other basic services. In Matanzas, another line formed in front of a bakery in the Versalles neighborhood where only ten trays of long loaves had been baked: there, seeing people waiting was itself the sign that there was still something left to buy.

Translated by GH.

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The Unfinished Jihad: 9/11 Twenty-Five Years On

The CubanAmerican Voice, Julio M. Shiling, September 10, 2026 / This September 11 marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of a barbaric attack on the United States and the broader West. Nearly three thousand innocents were murdered in a meticulously planned spectacle of mass death. Airliners became missiles. Office towers became tombs. The images remain seared into collective memory: the fireballs, the collapsing steel, the desperate leaps into empty air. It was not merely a crime. It was a declaration.

That declaration was not issued by a random collection of criminal fanatics operating in a vacuum. The men who steered those planes were enacting, at a more spectacular and public level, the long-standing dictums of an ideology called Islam. Employing the Koran-sanctioned ideological war known as jihad—a continuous campaign of conquest that has persisted, in one form or another, since the seventh century—Islamists have sought to reorder the world according to their “sacred” texts. The Al-Qaeda brigades that executed the 2001 attacks, like Hamas, the Taliban, ISIS, various Shiite caliphate aspirants, and a host of other Muslim fundamentalist organizations, share a common denominator that summons them to war against the West: the Judeo-Christian civilization that still, however imperfectly, upholds individual conscience, limited government, and the separation of the sacred from the coercive power of the state. That threat has not expired. It is ever present.

History supplies the necessary context. Within a century of Muhammad’s death in 632, the Islamic conquests had violently transformed the political and religious geography of the Christian world. Through successive military campaigns, Muslim armies swept across predominantly Christian territories in Syria, Palestine, Egypt, North Africa, and much of the Iberian Peninsula. They brought under Islamic rule lands that had been Christian for centuries and that contained some of Christianity’s oldest churches, patriarchates, theological centers, and communities. By the early eighth century, an enormous portion—arguably approaching two- thirds—of the principal Christian territories surrounding the Mediterranean and extending into the Near East had been conquered and occupied by Islamic powers. The speed and scale of this expansion were unprecedented: in little more than a century, the sword continue reading

of Islam had severed vast regions from the Christian world and placed them under Muslim political domination.

The pattern did not end in the eighth century. It merely changed tactics when direct military supremacy became unavailable. Today not every methodology of conquest is openly violent. Some rely on softer instruments: demographic weight, legal activism, and the systematic refusal to assimilate. Large-scale Muslim immigration into Western countries has too often functioned less as an invitation to join an existing liberal order than as a deliberate project to transform that order—its laws, its traditions, its political models, and its cultural self-understanding. Parallel societies form. Demands for sharia accommodations multiply. Free speech is progressively constrained by the fear of offense or violence. The long historical project continues by other means.

Compounding the danger is the contemporary marriage between Islamism and Western Marxism. Both reject liberal democracy, pluralism, and basic civil liberties as bourgeois illusions or as obstacles to the final victory of the “righteous.” One supplies the eschatological energy of pseudo-religious absolutism; the other supplies the language of systemic oppression and the tactics of institutional capture. Together they form a united front against the open society. Universities, media organizations, and portions of the political class have proven remarkably susceptible to this alliance, treating any frank discussion of Islamic doctrine or jihadist continuity as evidence of bigotry rather than as an elementary exercise in self-preservation.

Twenty-five years after the towers fell, the West still struggles to name the threat accurately. Official commemorations prefer the anodyne language of “extremism” or “hate,” as if the problem were a free-floating psychological disorder rather than a coherent ideological system with “sacred” texts, historical precedents, and living institutions. The result is strategic confusion. Policy oscillates between military campaigns that degrade specific networks and domestic arrangements that expand the demographic and cultural space in which those networks recruit and operate. The enemy is simultaneously bombed abroad and accommodated at home.

The 2001 attacks were not an aberration. They were a particularly successful raid in a longer war. The ideology that animated the nineteen hijackers continues to inspire successive generations of militants, from the killers of Charlie Hebdo to the perpetrators of the October 7 massacre to the countless plots disrupted or successful across Europe and North America. The soft-power variant of the same project advances through migration patterns, birth rates, and the quiet rewriting of social norms under the banner of diversity. Both fronts matter. Both are expressions of the same underlying claim: that the political and moral order of the West is illegitimate and must ultimately yield.

An honest accounting on this anniversary requires more than ritual mourning. It requires the recovery of historical memory and the willingness to speak plainly about the doctrinal sources of the conflict. Jihad is not a metaphor. It is a program. The territories lost in the seventh and eighth centuries were not recovered by wishful thinking or by appeals to shared humanity. They were lost by the sword and held by the sword. The modern West retains advantages the Byzantine and Visigothic worlds did not possess—technological superiority, institutional resilience, and a still- functioning tradition of critical inquiry. Those advantages are useless if the will to defend them is eroded by sentimentality or by the fear of being called names or of offending.

September 11 should therefore be remembered not as a closed chapter of tragedy but as a permanent reminder. The jihad waged by those perpetrators twenty-five years ago is still ongoing. The methods evolve. The ultimate objective does not. A civilization that refuses to recognize an existential challenge will eventually cease to be a civilization at all. Clarity is the first requirement of survival. On this anniversary, that clarity remains overdue.

Author Julio M. Shiling

“We Still Don’t Have a Date”: Isle of Youth Remains Cut Off Two Days Later Due to Damage to Its Maritime Links

The special municipality remains an island within another island, without mobile service and with landlines limited to local calls.

The Isle of Youth once again discovers the literal dimension of its double insularity. / Facebook/ Isla de la Juventud

14ymedio, Havana, September 10, 2026 – Two days after the two main telecommunications routes connecting the Isle of Youth with the rest of Cuba were damaged, the special municipality remains practically cut off. Mobile phones remain without service, and functioning landlines only allow local calls, while the state telecommunications monopoly, Etecsa, has still not explained what happened or when it expects to fully restore the connection.

The uncertainty even reaches those who call the company directly seeking information. This newspaper contacted Etecsa’s customer service this Thursday to ask when communications with the Isle of Youth would be restored. “We still don’t have a date; stay informed through the official channels,” an operator responded.

The outage turns the territory into an island within another island, this time digitally as well. Its residents can communicate with one another through the landlines that remain operational, but cannot call the rest of the country. They also have no mobile telephone service, and internet access has been interrupted.

The disconnection came, moreover, after local authorities had boasted about a modest expansion of internet access. The Citizen’s Portal of the Isle of Youth celebrated the installation of a new Wi-Fi zone in Nueva Gerona, in a park next to the roundabout on 41st Street, as a way to “increase internet connectivity options for the islanders.” Shortly afterward, the breakdown left the entire territory without mobile service.

The company limited itself to specifying that they are “maritime links” and that its specialists are working together with Geocuba employees to repair them under “complex conditions”

Etecsa reported this Tuesday that “the two main connection routes” linking the special municipality to the national network had suffered damage. The company limited itself to specifying that they are “maritime links” and that its specialists are working together with Geocuba employees to repair them under “complex conditions.” The state monopoly said it had enabled alternative connections to keep local authorities in communication, but announced no similar solution for the population.

The situation has also prompted criticism on social media. “If there is an outage and the problem is even greater, what alternatives are there for this type of problem? There aren’t any, it’s that simple, because they base telecommunications on only one type of infrastructure,” wrote Arian Cáceres on Facebook, calling for the population to be authorized to use other forms of access to communications. “That would be an alternative,” he added.

Many of the complaints multiplying on social media come from Cubans living abroad or outside the Isle of Youth who suddenly lost communication with their relatives. They are the ones asking most insistently when calls and internet access will return, faced with the impossibility of even knowing how their relatives are doing.

The isolation is even more paradoxical because the rest of Cuba does not exactly enjoy good communications either. Power outages have now become internet and telephone outages in numerous territories. Etecsa has acknowledged that electrical failures and difficulties with the backup generators supporting its facilities are causing increasingly serious disruptions to the mobile network.

In 2008, Etecsa connected the Isle of Youth to the national network through a submarine fiber-optic cable

The current disconnection also contrasts with what happened exactly 18 years ago. In 2008, Etecsa connected the Isle of Youth to the national network through a submarine fiber-optic cable. The infrastructure went into operation practically on the eve of Hurricane Gustav, which struck the territory on August 30 of that year as a Category 4 storm, with winds exceeding 200 kilometers per hour.

Gustav devastated the island. It knocked down utility poles, communications towers, homes, and electrical networks, leaving devastation that the authorities themselves compared at the time to a nuclear explosion. However, the new fiber connection made it possible to maintain the link with the rest of the country amid the disaster. The official press celebrated the success with an unequivocal headline: “Communication Never Failed.”

Now a Gustav was not necessary. With no cyclone over the Gulf of Batabanó and no comparable weather event, the two main maritime routes have been damaged. The company has not explained how it happened, whether both failures have the same cause, or what kind of redundancy exists between the connections.

Both episodes present a disturbing picture of the vulnerability of infrastructure that should be considered strategic

The fragility of communications adds to another recent blow against an essential infrastructure facility in the special municipality. Last week it became known that unknown individuals had stolen all the equipment from the Isle of Youth’s seismological station, inaugurated in 2024 and linked to Cuba and the Caribbean’s earthquake and tsunami monitoring system.

The thieves took the solar panels, batteries, seismometer, digitizer, and the rest of the equipment. “They left nothing,” lamented Enrique Arango Arias, head of the National Seismological Service, who went so far as to ask that the incident not be considered a simple theft but rather sabotage because of the consequences for an alert system of national importance.

There is so far no evidence linking that looting to the current telecommunications failure. Both incidents, however, present a disturbing picture of the vulnerability of infrastructure that should be considered strategic.

Eighteen years after the official press celebrated that not even Gustav had managed to cut communications, the Isle of Youth once again discovers the literal dimension of its double insularity.

Translated by Regina Anavy

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Democratic Socialism Is an Oxymoron

The CubanAmerican Voice. Julio M. Shiling, August 28, 2026 / “Democratic socialism” is a rhetorical convenience, not a coherent political category. It is an oxymoron because the ends of socialism—collective ownership or decisive state control of the means of production, the subordination of private property, culture, and market signals to a comprehensive plan for social justice, and the remaking of human relations according to an egalitarian moral template—cannot be achieved or sustained by democratic means. Enforcement requires coercion. Coercion on that scale corrodes the very institutions that make democracy possible. The historical pattern is consistent: what begins as a promise of popular empowerment hardens into authoritarian administration and, frequently, totalitarian control.

Socialism is not primarily an economic arrangement. Economics is the instrument. The deeper project is political and anthropological: the redesign of society so that private interest, traditional authority, and spontaneous association yield to a master conception of the good. Property rights, contracts, family forms, cultural production, and even moral language must be brought into alignment with that conception. Once the goal is comprehensive restructuring rather than incremental redistribution, the tools of democratic deliberation become obstacles. Voters may reject higher taxes, nationalizations, speech codes, or curriculum mandates. Markets may generate inequalities the plan cannot tolerate. Civil society may shelter dissenting associations. At that point the socialist project must either retreat or override the obstacles. Override is the more common choice.

The twentieth century supplies the evidence. Bolsheviks, after seizing power in the name of the workers, quickly suppressed rival socialist parties, independent trade unions, and the free press. Vladimir Lenin’s party had entered the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party as a faction; it exited as the monopoly of power. Mao’s China, Castro’s Cuba, the Eastern Bloc after 1945—all began with the language of popular liberation and ended with one-party rule, secret police, and the criminalization of private initiative. Even milder experiments that retained formal multiparty competition—Allende’s Chile, for a time—relied on extralegal pressure, expropriation without reliable compensation, and the polarization of institutions until constitutional order collapsed. The pattern is not accidental. When the state claims the authority to reallocate capital, labor, and cultural capital according to a single plan, it must also claim the authority to silence continue reading

, re-educate, or liquidate resistance. Democracy, which presupposes contested elections, independent judiciary, and protected private spheres, cannot survive that claim indefinitely.

Contemporary Western Marxists understood the difficulty and shifted the battlefield. György Lukács, Antonio Gramsci, and the Frankfurt School recognized that economic determinism alone was insufficient in advanced societies. Cultural hegemony—control of the universities, media, churches, the family, and the language of everyday life—became the necessary precondition for political power. Once the cultural means of production are captured, socialist moralism can be presented as common sense and dissent as pathology. The project remains totalizing; only the sequence has changed. Democratic forms are retained as long as they advance the hegemony and discard it when they impede it.

This is why the Democratic Socialists of America should be read carefully. Their program is not a Nordic-style welfare state. It is the gradual dismantling of the liberal-democratic and republican architecture that makes markets and limited government possible. The analogy to Lenin’s entryism is not hyperbolic. A disciplined minority seeks to capture a major party, redefine its vocabulary, and use electoral success as a platform for deeper institutional transformation. The rhetoric of “democracy” functions as camouflage. The United States is currently undergoing the threat of this Trojan horse offensive.

Confusion with social democracy or Christian Democracy is therefore a category error. Both of those traditions operate inside a market economy and a constitutional order that protect private property and political pluralism. They tax, regulate, and redistribute to varying degrees—sometimes heavily—but they do not aim to abolish the price system or to re-engineer the human person. Otto von Bismarck introduced the first modern welfare provisions precisely to undercut socialist agitation while preserving the existing order. The Nordic countries remain capitalist economies with high labor-market flexibility, private ownership of most capital, and robust democratic competition. Their success is evidence that markets plus transfer payments can coexist with democracy. It is not evidence that socialism can.

The distinction is acutely significant for any society contemplating a democratic transition, including Cuba. A post-communist Cuba that adopts a welfare-state model within a market framework and genuine multiparty competition would not be socialist. A Cuba that retains the party’s monopoly on the commanding heights of economy and culture, merely rebranding itself democratic socialist, would remain dictatorial under a new label. The former preserves the possibility of course correction; the latter does not.

Socialism’s moral appeal is real. Many of its advocates are sincere in their desire to reduce suffering. Sincerity, however, does not alter the institutional logic. To enforce a comprehensive redesign of political, social, cultural, and moral life requires instruments of power that democratic societies rightly constrain. Those instruments, once normalized, do not remain limited. “Democratic socialism,” therefore, names a temporary and unstable hybrid. The democracy is the packaging; the socialism is the product. History shows which element prevails.

The Insufficiency of Sanctions

The CubanAmerican Voice, Julio M. Shiling, August 21, 2026 /The United States has correctly identified Castro-Communism as a persistent threat to its national security. The State Department’s July 20, 2026, report, Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism, documents the regime’s decades-long campaign of subversion, ideological warfare, espionage, and support for radical movements both abroad and inside American territory. This assessment aligns with the broader strategic objectives set out in the November 2025 National Security Strategy, which prioritizes reclaiming influence in the Western Hemisphere and denying hostile external powers a foothold near U.S. shores. Overthrowing the Cuban communist system is therefore essential to those long-term goals. Cuban communism must end, and its comprehensive removal is both a moral good and a strategic necessity.

In service of that objective, the Trump administration has pursued a steady campaign of targeted sanctions. These measures have hit regime-owned state enterprises, Cuban Communist Party front organizations involved in domestic and international agitation, and individual members of the dictatorial elite and their families. The latest package, announced August 20 under the title “Imposing Sanctions on Cuban Regime Actors Associated with Marxist Subversive Networks and Corrupt Economic Dealings,” continues this calibrated pressure. Such sanctions are morally sustainable, ethically commendable, and tactically necessary. They deprive the regime of resources used to repress its own population, maintain an extensive surveillance apparatus, and project influence outward. They signal that the United States will no longer tolerate a hostile Marxist dictatorship ninety miles from its coast.

Yet sanctions alone will not cause the Castro-Communist dictatorship to fall. The regime has spent more than three decades refining methods to bypass American restrictions and the broader embargo. Through GAESA and lesser-known commercial entities, it has laundered proceeds from continue reading

its operations via banks and intermediaries in Panama and other jurisdictions. Loyal Cuban communist émigrés have established ostensibly legitimate businesses abroad that maintain a symbiotic relationship with the dictatorship, enjoying privileges in exchange for services rendered. These soft-power assets, valued in the billions, form an external ecosystem that allows the regime to weather financial pressure. Targeting GAESA’s holdings in Panamanian banks and similar offshore networks would be a logical next step, but even expanded economic measures will not be decisive by themselves.

The regime’s indifference to the suffering of ordinary Cubans further limits the coercive power of sanctions. The dictatorship has never treated the welfare of the Cuban people as a constraint on its survival. A society pushed to the brink of famine would not compel the leadership to relinquish power. The dictatorial elite has repeatedly demonstrated that it prioritizes its privileges and ideological projects over the basic needs of the population it rules. Economic hardship is always absorbed by the people, never by the decision-makers in Havana.

Political timing also appears to shape the current approach. With midterm elections approaching, the Trump administration may be exercising caution. The American communist movement, operating today primarily under the banner of the Democratic Socialists of America, is engaged in a determined effort to capture the Democratic Party. This effort represents a contemporary expression of the “march through the institutions” long advocated by Gramscian Marxists. Given the documented historical and ongoing ties between Cuban communism and elements of the U.S. radical left, the continued existence of a Marxist regime in Cuba is not merely a foreign-policy problem. This is an American domestic issue as well. Restraint before the midterms may reflect an effort to avoid providing political ammunition to these forces.

After the midterm elections, however, the United States must adopt a more resolute posture. Economic warfare, however rigorously applied, is insufficient. The Castro regime retains external assets and networks capable of sustaining it through a single presidential term. If the objective is genuine freedom for the Cuban people and the elimination of a hostile danger to the American republic, policymakers must recognize that nothing short of concrete military action will achieve the necessary systemic change. A palace revolution that merely rearranges personnel while leaving the communist structures intact would be cosmetic. Any authentic transition to a democratic order would have to criminalize Castro-Communism from the outset and dismantle its institutional foundations.

Sanctions remain a justified and useful instrument. They are morally defensible and can weaken the regime’s capacity to repress and project power. But they cannot, by themselves, produce the decisive outcome required. The external ecosystem of front businesses, offshore finance, and ideological allies provides the dictatorship with resilience that pure economic pressure cannot overcome. Once the domestic political calendar permits, the United States should move beyond calibrated financial measures and prepare the concrete tools necessary to end Cuban communism. Only then will the strategic goals articulated in 2025 and the moral imperative recognized in the July 2026 report be fully realized.

Suriname Stands Out as a New Migration Destination for Cubans

Of the 40,000 migrants from the Island who have settled in that country over the past five years, 99% work illegally.

They estimate that 70% of those in Cuba travel with a migratory intention or with the idea of exploring possibilities for settling abroad. / Granma

14ymedio, Havana, August 19, 2026 – Suriname has begun to emerge as a migration destination for Cubans in 2026. The country, neighboring Guyana, where the oil boom caused more than 135,000 people from the Island to migrate in 2025, is becoming one of the most requested destinations at travel agencies in the country.

Pedro Escalante, Operations Director of DP Travels, based in Holguín, tells 14ymedio that the smallest country in South America began to attract interest among the Cuban population several months ago. “The increase in inquiries about Suriname has been clearer since May, although the interest did not appear overnight,” he says. “At first they were isolated inquiries and, later, we began receiving more questions related to flight availability, entry requirements and possibilities for traveling,” he adds.

Escalante emphasizes that “during 2025 and, especially, in 2026 we have noticed that the destination began to appear more frequently in conversations with clients.”

According to the agency’s figures, there has been steady growth and so far this year, through this Wednesday, August 19, the number of Cubans who traveled to Suriname with DP Travels already exceeds by almost one third those recorded throughout 2025, although the numbers remain small. “Our records show approximately that in 2024, 32 people traveled to that country; in 2025, 54, and in 2026, from January to continue reading

August, 73,” Escalante details.

“Our records show approximately that in 2024, 32 people traveled to that country; in 2025, 54, and in 2026, from January to August, 73”

Guyana also shows a sustained increase in travel carried out by the agency since 2024. That year, 122 Cubans traveled with the company; a year later, 178, and so far this year, 224.

“We have begun to notice greater interest in Suriname,” he says, although the reasons, according to his experience, are different. “Some clients see it as a destination to remain in, while others consider it part of a broader route within South America,” he says.

In the case of those who arrive in the country to settle, most of the time they do so irregularly. They enter the country as tourists and begin looking for some kind of employment. In this regard, DP Travels points out that other services promise to obtain a visa, a job or residency in exchange for money, “when in reality no one can guarantee a decision that belongs to an immigration authority.”

In those cases, Cubans accept the work they find and receive whatever they are offered. Last May, Starnieuws, Suriname’s main media outlet, reported that 99% of Cubans living in that country work illegally.

Of the 40,000 Cubans who have settled in Suriname since 2020, according to the report, only 248 have applied for work permits, according to figures from that country’s Ministry of Health, Welfare and Labor.

Of the 40,000 Cubans who have settled in Suriname since 2020, according to the report, only 248 have applied for work permits

Most enter via Panama on flights operated by Copa. At Tocumen Airport, flights to Paramaribo are usually full, “mainly because of Cubans who frequently travel to Suriname with their entire families,” the outlet maintains, adding that of the 40,000 Cubans in the country, only 1,292 have legal status.

“In some cases, clients already have a trade before traveling and their intention is to use that experience to look for employment opportunities,” Escalante indicates, noting, based on the contact he has been able to establish with some of the travelers, that they try to enroll in sectors such as “construction, services, commerce, restaurants, transportation, informal work and other trades.”

If they do not take those jobs, the alternative is to return to an Island where opportunities are increasingly scarce and where a crisis is deepening rapidly and irreversibly. “We have seen an increase in inquiries and demand for certain destinations,” the agency says, emphasizing that, although “it is difficult to attribute each trip exclusively to Cuba’s economic or social situation, it would be naïve to ignore that the country’s current conditions influence the decisions of many people.”

The Operations Director of DP Travels asserts that in conversations with clients, “concerns related to the economic situation, employment, income, the possibility of providing financial assistance to their families and the search for better opportunities frequently arise.”

“Concerns related to the economic situation, employment, and income frequently arise”

“If I had to make an estimate based exclusively on what we see at our agency, I would say approximately that 70% travel with a primarily migratory intention or with the idea of exploring possibilities for settling, while 30% do so for tourism, family visits, business or other reasons,” Escalante indicates.

Finally, the agency, with 12 years of experience, points out that it faces some difficulties because “the Cuban context makes working with international travel particularly complex, and changes in departure and entry conditions, documentation and routes can directly affect both the client and the agency.”

It also faces problems in an environment filled with distrust due to the constant cases of fraud. Faced with a population seeking to leave the country, desperation has become fertile ground for dozens of Cubans to be scammed with fake tickets, nonexistent reservations, supposed agents, visas, lodging or immigration processes.

“We have received comments from many clients, as was the case with one who was scammed out of $7,500. She lost her house and, with two children, had to rent, and over time managed to leave the country again with our agency. Many, before reaching us, also recount negative experiences with people who offered supposed services related to travel,” he warns.

Translated by Regina Anavy

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Does Communist Cuba Deserve a Priority 1 Intelligence Threat Classification?

The CubanAmerican Voice, Julio M. Shiling / The elevation of communist Cuba to “Priority 1” status within the National Intelligence Priority Framework places the island on the same plane as China, Iran, and Russia. Some will scoff at the decision. They will measure Cuba by the size of its navy, the range of its missiles, or the volume of its GDP, and declare the ranking absurd. That metric is the wrong one. National security priorities are not a ranking of conventional military mass. They are a ranking of the threats that can most effectively wound the United States—through subversion, intelligence penetration, ideological warfare, and the cultivation of domestic radicalism. By those measures, Castro- Communism has earned its place.

Cuba does not confront America with carrier groups. It confronts America with a doctrine refined over six decades: the deliberate export of Marxist revolution and the systematic penetration of the institutions that shape American political, academic, economic, and cultural life. The State Department’s recent report, “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism,” maps this strategy with clinical precision. Havana long ago abandoned any pretense of merely defending an island fortress. It positioned itself as the operational and ideological hub of a global project aimed at the internal erosion of Western societies. That project did not end with the Soviet collapse. It adapted, mutated, and found continue reading

new hosts among the far left in the United States itself. It should not be forgotten that the Cuban communist revolution geometrically fortified what we today know as the “New Left” and cultural socialist precepts.

From the 1960s onward, Cuban intelligence cultivated symbiotic relationships with domestic communist and terrorist networks inside the United States. These were not romantic gestures of solidarity. They were operational partnerships. Training, funding channels, propaganda coordination, and intelligence sharing created durable pipelines between Havana and American radicals. The result is not ancient history. It is a living architecture of influence that continues to shape narratives, recruit cadres, and erode institutional trust. When a foreign power maintains decades-long access to the domestic far left—supplying it with ideological oxygen, tactical experience, and a sense of international legitimacy—that power becomes a force multiplier for America’s adversaries. China, Russia, and Iran understand this. They cultivate Cuba precisely because Havana offers something they cannot easily manufacture: intimate, long-cultivated access to the American radical ecosystem.

Communist Cuba’s value to those powers is not limited to rhetoric. The island hosts sophisticated signals-intelligence facilities operated by Russia and China. These installations sit ninety miles from Florida and are designed to intercept sensitive American communications. Hosting such capabilities is not neutrality. It is active participation in the intelligence war against the United States. Add to this Cuba’s alignment with Iran, its support for transnational terrorist groups, and its role as a logistical and ideological node, and the picture clarifies. Havana, as a matter of fact, functions as a force-projection platform for America’s principal enemies, one that operates below the threshold of conventional conflict yet above the threshold of mere nuisance.

The sophistication of Cuban intelligence itself has been underestimated for too long. The services provided by the Castro regime have repeatedly demonstrated an ability to run agents inside American institutions, to harvest sensitive information, and to shape cultural and academic discourse. Their tradecraft is patient, culturally fluent, and ideologically disciplined. They punch far above the island’s economic weight because they are not constrained by the need to produce consumer goods or maintain a modern industrial base. Their product is influence and information. In an era when information and internal cohesion are decisive, that product is strategically lethal.

The Trump administration’s decision to raise communist Cuba to Priority 1 and the subsequent creation of a dedicated CIA task force simply align resources with reality. The unit—staffed with case officers, analysts, cyber specialists, and covert influence experts—exists to generate the intelligence and operational options necessary to exploit fractures inside the Cuban dictatorial elite and to pressure for the collapse of the kleptocratic Marxist dictatorship. Increased intelligence assets on and around the island are not theater. They are the minimum required to understand a regime that has spent 67 years perfecting the arts of secrecy, denial, and asymmetric warfare. Without current, granular knowledge of Castro-Communist intentions, capabilities, and internal dynamics, any policy—diplomatic pressure, economic isolation, or contingency planning—operates in the dark.

Critics will claim this is overreach, a revival of Cold War paranoia, or a distraction from “real” threats. The opposite is true. Ignoring a dedicated revolutionary state that systematically cultivates domestic subversion, hosts adversary intelligence bases, and serves as a transmission belt for anti-American ideology is the true strategic malpractice. Priority rankings exist to force the intelligence community to allocate scarce resources against the most consequential dangers. Cuba’s military is modest. Its capacity to damage the American body politic from within is not.

Communist Cuba has never been a status-quo power. It has been a permanent revolutionary project directed against the United States and the civilization that produced it. Elevating it to Priority 1 is not an exaggeration. It is overdue recognition that the threat Havana represents is measured not in divisions and warheads, but in the depth of its penetration, the durability of its ideological networks, and the strategic value it provides to America’s most determined enemies. The classification is correct. The only remaining question is whether the resources and resolve that accompany it will be sustained long enough to make the regime confront the consequences of its own history.

Author Julio M. Shiling

Petro Returns from Cuba with an Openly Coup-Mongering Speech

The outgoing president refuses to recognize Abelardo de la Espriella’s victory, encourages “resistance,” and erodes the legitimacy of the presidential handover

Colombia’s outgoing president, Gustavo Petro, in a file photograph. / EFE/Carlos Ortega

14ymedio, Clara Riveros, Bogota, August 7, 2026 / Gustavo Petro closed out his international agenda as president and head of state of Colombia with a visit to Cuba. That trip brought his total to 85 international trips. He was in Cuba for barely 48 hours – a trip with no apparent relevance for Colombia, but one that will hold some significance for the Colombian politician given the regard he holds for the Castro regime.

This Friday, August 7, President Abelardo de la Espriella takes office, with a foreign-policy program markedly different from the one carried out by the Historic Pact, Petro’s political movement, which prioritized the Colombian president’s ideological affinities, even at the expense of the country’s traditional diplomatic interests and guidelines. Among the new government’s foreign-policy announcements, it stands out that it will break relations with the dictatorships of Cuba and Nicaragua and will repair the damage Petro inflicted on the bilateral relationship with Israel.

In the twilight of his term, the outgoing president remains convinced that he plays a leadership role in what progressivism calls the Global South. Hence his call to fraternize with the Havana regime when he urges that “humanity show solidarity with Cuba.” Petro’s has not been a call for solidarity with the Cuban people, who suffer poverty and repression and who are demanding change, openness, rights, and freedoms – the kind of call Yotuel made on Saturday night in Bogota during the 7th Concert of Hope. Hollman Morris must have taken little pleasure in that dose of reality from the Orishas vocalist. Morris is the widely questioned manager of the Public Media System, which has been turned into a propaganda apparatus for the Historic Pact and, further still, into a conveyor belt for the populisms and autocracies aligned with it.

The soon-to-be former president of Colombia is addressing his base with the aim of keeping the spark alive and generating chaos, “civil disobedience,” and insurrection once he leaves power

Petro also said from Havana that he had asked the Trump Administration to “respect the diversity of peoples” and that “by coming here I’m getting myself into trouble,” a reference to his inclusion, since 2025, on the list of those sanctioned by the United States. Since returning from Cuba, the Colombian president has kept up a tone even more inflammatory and continue reading

authoritarian than the one he had struck in recent weeks and throughout the election process.

Petro never acknowledged Abelardo de la Espriella’s victory and continues to declare his own candidate, Ivan Cepeda, the winner – a man who has been unable to break from his boss and who has named him leader of the opposition. Petro is stirring up delirious accusations of fraud, all of them theories and speculation with no foundation whatsoever.

The soon-to-be former president of Colombia is addressing his base with the aim of keeping the spark alive and generating chaos, “civil disobedience,” and insurrection once he leaves power. On Tuesday night, Petro openly refused to recognize the president-elect while addressing his supporters in a public square. It can be inferred from his words that he is urging them to form a kind of Chavista-style militia – that is, paramilitary groups – to defend his legacy and to refuse to recognize the new government.

The president’s words have been rejected by public opinion, though not by his fellow party members and militant intellectuals. “How long will the effects of that fraud last? They’re already saying, in Marco Rubio’s offices, ‘Abelardo the brief’ – they already sense that he won’t even last the full four-year term, that the Colombian people will force him to resign,” Petro declared. His crowd then chanted in response: “Cepeda for president. Resistance.”

“Petro is a coup-monger. He’s no longer just talking about fraud and refusing to recognize the president-elect – now he’s openly calling for him to be removed from power before his term even ends”

Santiago Velez, a columnist for El Espectador, noted on X this week that despite governing badly, lying, and improvising, Petro “completely dominates the public conversation” – proof of this being that nine of the ten most-liked tweets in Colombia over the past 30 days are his. Following the president’s inflammatory remarks, Velez stated in a couple of tweets that “Petro is a coup-monger. He’s no longer just talking about fraud and refusing to recognize the president-elect – now he’s openly calling for him to be removed from power before his term even ends. He is practically calling for a coup d’etat. That cannot be normalized.”

In another tweet he expanded on his observation: “Petro calling for the formation of paramilitary groups and calling for the president-elect to be brought down doesn’t surprise me. After all, he has always been an insurgent who took up arms against the State and never stopped holding legality and institutions in contempt. What is truly terrifying, to paraphrase Martin Luther King, is not the shouting of bad people, but the silence of good ones: the silence of so many important, educated, influential, and supposedly institutional people who today prefer to say nothing. In two days Petro has called for the formation of paramilitary groups and for a coup d’etat. And I am not exaggerating,” the lawyer stated.

This state of tension and uncertainty toward which the outgoing president is pushing the country – unprecedented until now in the recent history of Colombian politics – no longer merely reflects a bad loser and an antidemocratic politician, but confirms the enormous damage Gustavo Petro has caused to the dignity of the office he holds, in addition to using that position to damage and erode trust in institutions, as well as the forms, customs, and practices governing the transfer of political power in Colombia – practices that, until his arrival at the Casa de Narino, had been respected regardless of the sitting president’s political and ideological leanings.

The widespread suspicion is that Petro does not act this way because he genuinely believes all the outlandish claims he makes, without evidence or any real basis, but because he needs to distract from and downplay the multiple corruption scandals that have erupted around him in recent months, adding to those that have been piling up since he took office.

Translated by GH.

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New US Sanctions Against Those Who ‘Facilitate Arms Shipments to the Cuban Regime’

The State Department penalizes five entities and eight senior Cuban officials, including the Minister of the Armed Forces, Álvaro López Miera

The Minister of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Cuba, Álvaro López Miera, in a file photograph. Luong Thai Linh / EFE/EPA/Luong Thai Linh

14ymedio, Madrid, August 7, 2026 / Two weeks later, following the last wave, the United States has once again announced sanctions against five state entities and eight senior Cuban officials, including the Minister of the Armed Forces, Álvaro López Miera. Those affected are accused of facilitating military cooperation with adversaries of Washington and the acquisition of weaponry destined for the island’s Army.

“Today, the Trump Administration is taking new measures to protect our national security by imposing sanctions on entities and individuals that facilitate Havana’s military relations and arms shipments to the Cuban regime,” said Secretary of State Marco Rubio in a statement this Thursday.

These new sanctions are another turn of the screw in the US government’s pressure to force economic and political change on the island, and are directed against the company Tecnoimport, the commercial company Duna S.A., the Military Industry Union (UIM), and the military-industrial company Yuri Gagarin. Also included on this list is the Cuban Export-Import Company for Specialized Services, Articles and Technical Products (Tecnotex), a subsidiary of the military-business conglomerate Gaesa, previously sanctioned and a primary US target.

Among the officials are, in addition to the Minister of the Cuban Armed Forces, the Chief of the General Staff, Roberto Legrá Sotolongo, the head of Foreign Relations for that ministry, José Antonio Remón Rodríguez, and its economic director, Oscar Enrique Biosca Gallego. Also included are the Cuban military attachés in Russia, Mónica Milián Gómez, and in China, Waldo Pérez Cortés, as well as the directors general of the UIM, Roberto Jesús Viciana Mousset, and of Tecnoimport, Heriberto Sánchez Alleyne.

Also included are the Cuban military attachés in Russia, Mónica Milián Gómez, and in China, Waldo Pérez Cortés, as well as the directors general of the UIM, Roberto Jesús Viciana Mousset, and of Tecnoimport, Heriberto Sánchez Alleyne

Rubio insisted that “the Cuban communist regime is a state sponsor of terrorism that uses its military and intelligence apparatus to spy on the United States,” in addition to “serving as a platform” for adversaries of Washington “such as continue reading

Russia, China, and Iran to carry out operations against the country.”

The designation comes in the same week that several US media outlets have reported an increase in CIA operations on the island, presumably aimed at updating their information on the capabilities of the Cuban Army, as well as creating friction within the leadership to force a revolt of pragmatists against hardliners.

The Secretary of State added that “Cuba’s military and intelligence institutions are also the main instruments of internal repression and hubs of kleptocracy, primarily through Gaesa.”

The measure places the assets and property of the entities and individuals mentioned under US jurisdiction and prohibits transactions between US persons or institutions and them. Minister López Miera had already been sanctioned since 2021 – for the repression of July 11 – under the Magnitsky Act, which allows Washington to freeze financial assets and ban travel for those who violate human rights in any country in the world. Now, the sanctions fall under Trump’s order establishing the secondary route, also affecting those who facilitate transactions with those sanctioned.

Washington’s siege against the island’s political and economic leadership has increased to unprecedented levels to directly strike even the family circle of the regime’s leaders. Among the most prominent names to be added to this Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) List of the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) are Miguel Díaz-Canel, his wife, Lis Cuesta Pedraza, and his stepson, Manuel Anido Cuesta.

Also included are most of the visible – and not so visible – figures of the Castro clan, beginning with former president Raúl himself, and continuing with all his children, Mariela, Alejandro, Déborah, and Nilsa Castro Espín, as well as his grandson Raúl Alejandro Castro Calis, specifically designated, in contrast to the exceptional situation of Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro, El Cangrejo, who is spared despite being a visible figure – or, precisely, because of it, since he is an interlocutor with Washington -. The rest of the grandchildren simply inherit their parents’ visa restrictions.

In addition to individuals, the battery of sanctions focuses on the Gaesa military conglomerate and any other entity serving as a front for it. Also targeted are several ministries, especially the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of the Revolutionary Armed Forces, and other support bodies, such as the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR) and the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples (ICAP).

In Havana, which has already accumulated many “black Thursdays,” they did not even bother to react this time

In Havana, which has already accumulated many “black Thursdays,” they did not even bother to react this time. Although the activity of its senior officials was significant on social media yesterday, there were no statements on the matter, and they focused instead on highlighting the condemnation of the previous US sanctions issued by several UN rapporteurs.

The rapporteurs – independent experts appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council for specific issues – stated that the measures adopted by the United States are “an attempt to alter the constitutional order of a sovereign state through threats and coercion” and urged the Security Council and the General Assembly to “urgently address these threats as a matter of international peace and security.”

Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez thanked the experts for their statement, as did his deputy, Carlos Fernández de Cossío, but they remain silent on the extension of the sanctions. Which will probably not be the last.

Translated by GH

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The Battle for Miami

The CubanAmerican Voice, Julio M. Shiling / The Cuban nation has two great cities. One is Havana, the historic capital that today remains captive under the weight of a Marxist-Leninist dictatorship. The other is Miami, a city within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States but one that has, over the decades, become no less Cuban than Havana itself. If Havana embodies the tragedy of an occupied republic, Miami represents the continuity of the Cuban nation in freedom. It is there that a vigorous exile community has preserved the ideals of constitutional government, individual liberty, and democratic restoration. It has become the political, intellectual, cultural, and economic center of a Cuba that refuses to surrender.

For more than six decades, the Cuban nation beyond the island has maintained a remarkably consistent position. The crisis of Cuba cannot be solved through cosmetic reforms, administrative adjustments, or economic openings designed merely to prolong the life of the existing regime. Genuine national reconciliation requires something far more profound: the complete dismantling of the totalitarian system and the restoration of a democratic republic governed by the rule of law. Whether the Castro-Communist state were to imitate the economic models of China, Vietnam, or post-Soviet Russia would not alter the fundamental reality that a Leninist political monopoly remains incompatible with liberty.

It is precisely this unwavering position that has become one of the dictatorship’s greatest strategic obstacles. Since 1959, Castro-Communism has devoted enormous resources to influencing, dividing, infiltrating, and neutralizing the Cuban nation abroad. Opposition organizations, academic circles, cultural institutions, political networks, business communities, and media platforms have all, at various times, become targets of influence operations designed to weaken support for democratic change. The objective has rarely been to persuade the exile community to embrace communism outright. A far more attainable goal has been to cultivate neutrality, resignation, ambiguity, or fatigue regarding regime change itself. That effort has largely failed. continue reading

If anything, Miami has become the principal democratic reserve of the Cuban nation. It has generated the political leadership, institutional memory, economic resources, and international advocacy that continue to expose the true nature of Castro-Communism before the world. Recognizing this reality, the dictatorship has steadily refined its methods. Since the 1990s, the campaign to domesticate Miami has accelerated considerably. Each passing decade has witnessed increasingly sophisticated efforts to normalize the dictatorship, blur moral distinctions, and redefine what constitutes acceptable discourse about Cuba. Today, with a U.S. administration placing renewed attention on Cuba and a Cuban-American Secretary of State helping shape Washington’s policy toward the island, the strategic importance of neutralizing the external Cuban nation has become even greater from Havana’s perspective.

It is within this broader strategic context that certain carefully cultivated narratives deserve thoughtful scrutiny. One fact is beyond serious dispute. Cuba’s political prison system has, for decades, been documented by former prisoners, families, international organizations, and countless eyewitnesses as a system characterized by severe deprivation, psychological coercion, physical abuse, arbitrary punishment, prolonged isolation, and systematic violations of human dignity. This is not an isolated allegation but the overwhelming historical record. It constitutes the rule rather than the exception.

History also teaches that exceptions exist. Throughout the history of communist prison systems, some inmates have accepted varying degrees of accommodation with prison authorities and, in return, experienced treatment less severe than that imposed upon the majority. Such cases have appeared in many authoritarian systems. Their existence does not invalidate the brutality of the system itself; rather, they underscore the discretionary power of totalitarian institutions to dispense privilege selectively whenever doing so serves institutional interests.

Against this well-established backdrop, accounts involving the production of thousands of works of art during incarceration, the regular enjoyment of exceptional food, privileged access unavailable to ordinary inmates, or other unusually favorable circumstances naturally invite legitimate public questions. Such anomalies cannot simply be detached from the broader realities of a prison system whose defining characteristic has long been repression. Extraordinary experiences within an extraordinarily cruel prison system demand extraordinary explanation.

One need not allege formal recruitment or conscious collaboration to recognize how authoritarian intelligence services operate. Modern influence operations frequently rely not upon overt agents but upon situations, narratives, personalities, and circumstances that objectively advance strategic objectives. An individual need not intend to serve propaganda for propaganda to derive benefit from the individual’s public image, testimony, or conduct.

The objective is not necessarily to persuade observers that Cuba’s prisons are humane. Such a claim would collapse under the weight of thousands of testimonies accumulated over more than six decades. Rather, the purpose is subtler: to introduce confusion where moral clarity once existed; to normalize exceptional cases until they appear representative; to replace overwhelming historical evidence with carefully amplified anomalies; and, above all, to transform the extraordinary into the ordinary. This is the banality of evil in another form—not the outright denial that oppression exists, but its gradual dilution through selective storytelling until the exceptional overshadows the rule.

The dictatorship has long understood that every successful totalitarian project requires more than police power. It requires the construction of a cultural environment in which citizens begin to question realities that were once self-evident. It seeks not merely obedience but the redefinition of truth itself. What has been accomplished over decades inside Cuba is now pursued, by different methods, beyond its shores. The battlefield is no longer confined to the island; it now extends into the institutions, media, and cultural life of the free Cuban nation.

For that reason, Miami must remain intellectually vigilant. The response cannot mirror the intolerance of the dictatorship. Every individual possesses the right to speak freely, to create art freely, to express unpopular opinions freely, and even to employ language or behavior that others may regard as vulgar or offensive. These freedoms distinguish democracy from totalitarianism and must remain inviolate. Yet freedom of expression has never implied freedom from public examination. Others possess an equal right to question extraordinary claims, analyze improbable circumstances, criticize public conduct, and evaluate narratives against the accumulated evidence of history. Democratic discourse demands precisely that exercise of reasoned judgment.

The battle for Miami is therefore not merely geographical. It is a battle over historical memory, moral clarity, political legitimacy, and the future identity of the Cuban nation itself. Havana understands that as long as Miami remains intellectually unconquered, the democratic aspirations of the Cuban people remain alive. In the end, the most consequential work of art has not been painted on canvas. The real painting, in this recent case, has been painted by Castro- Communism.

Havana, a Dead City, Faces an Unprecedented Blackout Today

The Elecric Union (UNE) Forecasts a Record 2,380-Megawatt Shortfall During Peak Hours.

Exterior of the Cuban Art Factory, completely dark. / 14ymedio

14ymedio, Darío Hernández, Havana, July 29, 2026 – Cuba’s Electric Union (UNE) forecast a record shortfall of 2,380 megawatts (MW) during peak hours this Wednesday, a figure that, if realized, would further deepen the paralysis of a country battered by blackouts, the lack of transportation, and the deterioration of its cultural spaces. The outlook was already bleak last weekend, when a nighttime tour by 14ymedio through several central areas of the capital confirmed that Havana is dead.

It was around nine at night, and only a few cars were traveling along Línea Street. The sidewalks were empty, the building facades blended into the darkness, and the few buildings that still had some light looked like isolated islands in a deserted city. There were no groups of young people walking, no couples looking for a place to sit, and no audience waiting to enter a concert. “There’s nowhere to go,” summed up a young man from Havana. The darkness swallowed everything.

And this Wednesday threatens to be even worse. UNE estimates that during the period of highest consumption there will be demand for 3,200 MW compared with availability of just 850 MW, enough to cover little more than a quarter of the country’s needs (26.5%). If the projected 2,380 MW shortfall is reached, the figure will surpass the record of 2,341 MW recorded on July 8.

If the projected 2,380 MW shortfall is reached, the figure will surpass the record of 2,341 MW recorded on July 8

Although Havana has traditionally received more favorable treatment than the provinces, prolonged outages now frequently affect large areas of the capital. The deterioration of the electrical system coincides with the fuel shortage, the collapse of public transportation, the prohibitive cost of taxis, rising violence, and the loss of continue reading

purchasing power. Going out at night has become a difficult undertaking even before choosing a destination.

And there are not many destinations left to choose from either. In front of the entrance to the Cuban Art Factory (Fábrica de Arte Cubano) this past weekend, there were no lines, conversations, or street vendors. The building remained closed and completely dark. For more than a decade, the former industrial building has been one of the busiest centers of Havana nightlife. Its halls hosted exhibitions, concerts, theater, dance, cinema, and parties that could last until dawn. Now, the vertical FAC letters were barely visible beside the walls.

At the beginning of June, the venue announced a pause in its regular programming without specifying when it would fully resume activities, although it later reopened for some individual events. Its management said it needed to reorganize in the face of difficulties that were part of “a broader context.”

During the 14ymedio tour, the vehicle’s headlights were at times the only source of illumination. / 14ymedio [view video here]

The electrical crisis had already pushed the institution to the brink. In October 2023, the consumption plan assigned by the authorities only allowed it to operate two days a month instead of the usual sixteen. To keep some events going, it resorted to generators and even asked the public to bring their own sources of lighting.

The current closure has not been attributed exclusively to the blackouts, but it is impossible to separate it from a crisis that drives up fuel costs, makes air conditioning difficult, paralyzes equipment, and drives audiences away. Without electricity, the lights, sound system, refrigerators, and ventilation do not work; without transportation, there is no way to get home after a performance.

The paralysis extends along Línea Street, an avenue that for decades connected some of El Vedado’s main cultural venues. The street is home to theaters, cinemas, Café Brecht, and bars where musicians, actors, students, and audiences used to continue the night after performances. That night there was no trace of that activity.

The crisis at the Bertolt Brecht Cultural Center began even before the current worsening situation. The failure of its transformer left part of the facilities without adequate conditions, forced limitations on the use of its halls, and turned the heat into yet another enemy for artists and audiences.

The paralysis extends along Línea Street, an avenue that for decades connected some of El Vedado’s main cultural venues

Havana has always built part of its identity around the night. Cabarets, jazz clubs, theaters, cinemas, concerts, and cultural gatherings survived different periods of hardship. Even during the harshest years of the Special Period, when public transportation collapsed and the overcrowded camellos [‘camel buses‘] appeared, meeting places capable of sustaining some cultural life endured.

Now it is not just a matter of lacking electricity. There is also a lack of audiences, artists, fuel, transportation, and money. Many young people have emigrated; others remain in their homes to make use of the few hours of electricity or to avoid walking through completely dark streets.

During the 14ymedio tour, the vehicle’s headlights were at times the only source of illumination. They revealed trees, walls, parked cars, and closed entrances for a few seconds before everything disappeared again. The camera was not capturing a sleeping city, but a paralyzed city.

The forecast of a record 2,380 MW shortfall provides a technical measure of the disaster. Havana’s nightlife offers another one, visible in miles of avenues without pedestrians, closed cultural institutions, and an entire generation with nowhere to go. The capital that once prided itself on never sleeping can no longer even keep its lights on.

Translated by Regina Anavy

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Four Days After Granting It to Cuban Activist Otero Alcántara, the U.S. Approves Parole for Maykel Osorbo

The rapper received his first family visit at Guanajay prison after being transferred from Kilo 8.

Unlike Otero Alcántara, rapper and political prisoner Maykel “Osorbo” has not completed his prison sentence. / Redes sociales

14ymedio, Madrid, July 21, 2026 — The U.S. government has approved a special travel permit (parole) for Cuban rapper and political prisoner Maykel Castillo Pérez, known as Maykel Osorbo, according to information released Tuesday by the Observatory of Cultural Rights and activist and art historian Anamely Ramos.

The authorization is similar to the one granted to artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, who arrived in Miami last Saturday after fully serving his five-year prison sentence and being forced into exile. It was processed in parallel by those close to him. According to the joint statement from the Observatory and Anamely Ramos, the application is based “on the certainty that his arbitrary imprisonment has political origins and has violated his human rights, as well as his right to freedom of expression and artistic creation.”

It is therefore expected that the regime will follow the same course with Castillo as it did with Alcántara and grant his release from prison in exchange for exile.

The statement also reports that Osorbo received his first family visit on Tuesday since being transferred on July 10 to the maximum-security prison in Guanajay, Artemisa. During the visit, the musician confirmed that he had been placed in “La Incrementada,” the same section where Otero Alcántara was held until three days before being removed from the prison. He also explained that the authorities allowed him to bring his personal belongings into the new detention facility.

It is therefore expected that the regime will follow the same course with Castillo as it did with Alcántara and grant his release from prison in exchange for exile

Unlike Otero Alcántara, the rapper and fellow member of the San Isidro Movement (MSI), Maykel Osorbo, has not completed his sentence. Both artists share the same criminal case despite having been arrested at different times, one of the clearest signs of the arbitrariness of their prosecutions. While Alcántara was arrested on July 11, 2021, before he could take part in that day’s demonstrations, Osorbo was detained nearly two months earlier, on May 18, 2021

Both artists share the same criminal case despite having been arrested at different times, one of the clearest signs of the arbitrariness of their prosecutions

The events for which they were prosecuted took place in early April of that same year when they organized a street party outside Damas 955, the headquarters of the San Isidro Movement and Otero Alcántara’s residence, where Patria y Vida, by then already an anthem of dissent, was sung. On that occasion, the police, who had deployed a heavy operation throughout that area of Old Havana, attempted to arrest Maykel Osorbo, but he resisted. The image of the rapper with a handcuff dangling from one wrist went viral.

More than a year after his arrest, in June 2022, a court sentenced him to nine years in prison on charges of assault, resisting arrest, contempt, public disorder, and defamation of institutions, organizations, heroes, and martyrs.

Last June, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) concluded that Osorbo’s detention was arbitrary and recommended that the Cuban government overturn his conviction, release him immediately, and investigate the human rights violations committed against him.

“Maykel is a survivor and a fighter, and if I survived, he’ll be alright as far as possible.”

Having just arrived in Miami last Saturday, during an event at the Shrine of Our Lady of Charity where he reconstructed a broken image of the Virgin of Charity as a symbol of Cuba’s reconstruction, Otero Alcántara assured everyone that Maykel Osorbo would be in Miami “very soon.” According to him, the rapper could arrive in the US “in less than a month,” based on information he had received from the US Embassy in Havana. “Maykel is a survivor and a fighter, and if I survived, he’ll be alright, as far as possible,” he added.

The Observatory of Cultural Rights and Anamely Ramos concluded their statement demanding the immediate release of Osorbo and denouncing “the instrumentalization of the Cuban penitentiary system against artists, activists and critical voices that confront the Cuban government.”

Translated by Regina Anavy

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Residents of Sancti Spíritus, Cuba, Donate More Than $10,000 to Etecsa to Buy Solar Panels

Residents of Zaza del Medio raised the money to restore communications to the town during the blackouts.

The blackouts kept the residents of Zaza del Medio, in Taguasco, Sancti Spíritus, cut off from communication almost all the time. / 14ymedio

14ymedio, Mercedes García, Sancti Spíritus, July 18, 2026 – Faced with the lack of internet access, a group of residents raised $10,300 and 26,000 Cuban pesos to purchase solar panels and the rest of the photovoltaic kit needed to power the local radio base station of the state-owned telecommunications company Etecsa in the town of Zaza del Medio, in the municipality of Taguasco, Sancti Spíritus. The blackouts left residents cut off from communication almost all the time, as electricity returned for only a couple of hours between outages that could last more than a day.

According to residents, the initiative had its critics, who questioned why the residents themselves had to finance a state-owned company known for its abusive prices, poor service quality, and role in the government’s control of the internet. Even so, they raised the money to restore connectivity, above all so they could communicate with family members living abroad.

Installation of solar panels at Etecsa’s mobile radio base station in Zaza del Medio. / Radio Sancti Spíritus

The official press, however, in reporting on the installation of the photovoltaic system at the town’s radio base station, avoids explaining that the initiative originated with the residents themselves. The most it acknowledges is that “through a fundraising campaign carried out through different channels, all the financial support needed to obtain the solar panels was collected,” according to Luis Orlando Gómez Castro, president of the People’s Council, in statements to Radio Sancti Spíritus.

The official also admitted that much of the funding came from relatives living abroad: “We want to recognize those who, even from abroad, with Cuban blood still running through their veins, contributed the financial continue reading

support that was needed to restore communications in Zaza del Medio.”

“We want to recognize those who, even from abroad, with Cuban blood still running through their veins, contributed the financial support that was needed to restore communications in Zaza del Medio”

The state-run outlet acknowledges that the local government did not have the budget to finance “such a costly investment,” and while it highlights “the importance of public participation in securing the necessary funding,” it omits explaining where the initiative originated and how much money was contributed by the customers of a company that will continue charging them rates far above international standards for one of the worst internet services in the world.

Etecsa, Cuba’s only telecommunications operator, maintains a monopoly over telephone and internet services on the Island and is controlled by the military conglomerate Gaesa. The company has been the target of constant criticism for the poor quality of its services, its high prices, and its role in censorship and content filtering, as it is subordinated to the regime’s priorities rather than the needs of its customers. Numerous independent media websites and organizations critical of the Government remain blocked on its network, and users in Cuba can access them only through VPNs.

During periods of heightened political tension, the company has carried out Government orders to restrict internet access and block communications, as occurred during the massive protests of July 11, 2021, as well as through the selective blocking of the telephone lines of activists and opposition members.

Translated by Regina Anavy

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