In Cuba, blackouts have turned residents into experts at counting the hours of darkness.
View of the city in darkness from the ’14ymedio’ newsroom during this weekend’s blackout, which lasted 37 hours and 19 minutes. / 14ymedio
14ymedio, Yoani Sánchez, Havana, October 18, 2026 / On Friday, at 5:30 in the afternoon, an invisible clock started ticking. It had no hands, made no sound, and no one knew when it would stop. Its mechanism was simple: to count every minute without electricity in our Havana neighborhood. This Sunday, it would finish its journey after ticking for 37 hours and 19 minutes.
During that time, this zone of high-rise buildings was left suspended in a kind of parentheses. Saturday ceased to be Saturday and became “the day entirely without electricity.” Sunday began as “the second daybreak without power” and finally ended with the return of electricity.
The sad thing is that we’ve learned to measure the absence of electricity with a precision we apply to almost nothing else. We don’t know how many hours we lose waiting for a bus, how much time we’ve dedicated to searching for medicine, or how many days of our lives have been spent standing in lines. But we can say, without hesitation, that we’ve been without power for 18 hours and 43 minutes.
We’ve also developed a strange hierarchy of suffering. Someone who’s been without electricity for 12 hours listens with a certain embarrassment to someone who’s accumulated 24 hours. Someone who’s been without it for 30 seems to have the right to interrupt any conversation. And there’s always someone, from another province, like Matanzas, ready to remind us that what we’re going through is nothing, because they’ve been without it for more than 70. continue reading
Each activity depends on an intangible authorization that is granted when the current arrives and is revoked with its subsequent disappearance.
Electricity ends up occupying more space in our minds when it iss absent than when it is present. In addition, a blackout robs us of the ability to improvise. We can no longer freely decide when to read, to cook, to work, or simply to do nothing. Every activity depends on an intangible authorization granted when the power arrives and is revoked with its next disappearance.
That is why, this morning, when the power finally came back on, I didn’t exactly feel relief, but rather urgency. I had to charge the batteries, do the laundry, get ahead on everything that needed energy, make the most of every watt, and prepare for the next blackout. I looked at the clock that only my neighbors and I could see: 37 hours and 19 minutes had passed.
I prepared myself to start counting again.
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COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORK: The 14ymedio team is committed to practicing serious journalism that reflects Cuba’s reality in all its depth. Thank you for joining us on this long journey. We invite you to continue supporting us by becoming a member of 14ymedio now. Together we can continue transforming journalism in Cuba.
Díaz-Canel’s visit to the neighborhood brings police, plainclothes agents, and a stay-at-home order that disrupts even the most basic tasks.
Today someone decided I can’t go out to buy an avocado. And the avocado, suddenly, takes on an unexpected political dimension. / 14ymedio
14ymedio, Havana, Yoani Sánchez, Generation Y, October 6, 2026 / This Tuesday my house is still my house, but the boundary of my home has shifted to the ground floor of the building.
Miguel Díaz-Canel participated in an official event nearby, and, as so often happens when a high-ranking official is in this part of Havana, the neighborhood’s appearance changes. Unfamiliar faces appear: police officers, plainclothes agents, people who have been standing in the same spot for hours doing nothing a neighbor would consider normal. Some are watching the street; others, the entrance to the stairwell.
I could describe this day as a complaint about police surveillance, but that would only tell barely half the story. The other half is more mundane and, perhaps for that reason, explains better what it means to be locked up.
To live in Cuba today requires a very close relationship with the street. You don’t do a weekly shop and store everything neatly in the pantry. You go out because bread has appeared, because someone said eggs are being sold cheaper on the corner, because you need to find medicine, recharge your phone, sort out some paperwork, ask about something that wasn’t there yesterday and might not be there tomorrow either. Daily life is a series of small excursions into the outside world. continue reading
Preventing someone from leaving their home isn’t just about taking away a few hours of freedom. It is about disrupting a domestic routine held together by a thread.
That is why preventing someone from leaving their home isn’t just taking away a few hours of their freedom. It’s altering a domestic routine held together by a thread. What in another country might be postponed until tomorrow, here can become unavailable in the blink of an eye.
There is a miniscule dimension of control that barely surfaces in grand discourses about rights, repression, or authoritarianism. It is something much simpler. Today, someone decided I can’t go out to buy an avocado.
And the avocado suddenly acquires an unexpected political dimension.
Also the detergent that needed to be sought out, the pending visit, the dog that needed a walk, the conversation that could only happen face to face. Power enters life in this way, not always with a spectacular blow, but by disrupting a shopping list, postponing hugs, and reducing the food on our plates.
If I had a doctor’s appointment, one of those that can take months to get, I’d have to choose between missing it or trying to explain to an agent of the political police that my body also has its own agenda. If today were the deadline for some paperwork, I’d sit on the balcony watching the hours pass by while an office, just a few blocks away, opens, serves customers, and finally closes.
I also couldn’t get a fan essential for sleeping during blackouts repaired, or keep an appointment with someone who might have crossed half the city to see me. I couldn’t even take out the trash at its time. In Cuba, where almost nothing can be resolved with a phone call, a click, or a home delivery, being physically present remains an indispensable requirement for surviving the bureaucracy and shortages.
All because, just a few meters away, someone important needed to pass by. To ensure the movement of one, others are immobilized. The government motorcade moves along an unobstructed street; but behind some doors, life is on hold.
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COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORK: The 14ymedio team is committed to practicing serious journalism that reflects Cuba’s reality in all its depth. Thank you for joining us on this long journey. We invite you to continue supporting us by becoming a member of 14ymedio now. Together we can continue transforming journalism in Cuba.
New York Times, Opinion, Guest Essay, Yoani Sanchez, 16 January 2026.
The first messages in Havana about Nicolás Maduro’s capture, sent through WhatsApp before they reached official channels, were intermittent and contradictory. People felt hope and fear. Was something going to change here? many wondered as they waited in bread lines, at the bus stop or beneath the yellowish light of a rechargeable lamp during a blackout. The downfall of one of Cuba’s most important allies wasn’t a remote event for Cubans; it was a wave hitting us full on.
The most frequent question now heard by my colleagues at the 14ymedio news site, which I direct, is about what will happen to the Venezuelan oil, which Cuba relies on so much. Many Cubans have been overwhelmed by the particular worries of not knowing whether there’ll be electricity tomorrow, whether the refrigerator will shut off again, whether the struggling public transportation system will collapse. In markets, parks and hallways, they say, one comment is repeated over and over, with the same resigned cadence: “If there’s no more oil, things are going to be even worse.”
It’s not paranoia. In the fourth quarter of 2025, Venezuela sent Cuba about 35,000 barrels of oil a day. While that isn’t enough to keep all the island’s lights on, its industry functioning and its transportation flowing, it has kept the essential gears of our nation in motion. Losing that fuel, or having it drastically reduced, would be a severe shock to an economy that is exhausted, low on foreign currency, and increasingly constrained by American sanctions. Already a U.S. blockade of tankers has cut off some of the supply, and Mr. Trump on Sunday declared that Venezuela would send “no more oil or money” to Cuba.
It is true that Havana does not depend solely on Caracas. Mexico has kept up its fuel shipments, Russia sporadically lends a hand and we have low-quality local oil. But islanders aren’t kidding themselves. The Cuban regime has always been clear about its hierarchy of needs. If it is a choice between keeping the lights on in a hospital or guaranteeing fuel for police patrols, the balance will unerringly tip toward retaining a grip on society. A whole city will go dark before the state security headquarters does.
That is why the atmosphere among Cubans right now is not one of euphoria but anxiety. Some see Mr. Maduro’s capture as a spark that could set off a blaze on our island. “If the Venezuelan dictator can be removed, what’s keeping Castroism in place?” a young friend who has never known any other political system asked me.
In the opposition and in the Cuban diaspora, what happened in Venezuela is being interpreted as a sign that the unchangeable might change. Mr. Trump fueled that feeling by adding on Sunday, referring to Cuba’s government, “I strongly suggest they make a deal, before it is too late.”
Yet that desire comes up against an uncomfortable reality: After 67 years of the same regime and a mass exodus of those most opposed to it, Cuba does not have a well-articulated opposition group on the island that would be capable, in the short term, of vying for power.
Repression and banishment has largely dismantled the Cuban dissident movement. Its leaders are in prison, in exile or subjected to constant harassment. Emigration has sharply reduced the number of potential protesters for a popular revolt such as the one that erupted on July 11, 2021. Although widespread fear has waned, it remains a powerful deterrent in a country with nearly 1,000 political prisoners.
The regime has proved remarkably capable of surviving even greater cataclysms, such as the fall of the Soviet Union, its patron, and the abrupt loss of almost all its foreign trade in the 1990s that ensued. Its strategy, when it feels up against the ropes, is to radicalize its public statements, appeal to nationalist sentiment, sharpen its anti-imperialist slogans and make some timid economic reforms that serve as an escape valve. Granting amnesty to political prisoners, as brokered by the Vatican and Spain in the past, is another way to buy time.
However, Cuba is quite different from what it was after the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. There is no Fidel Castro to turn privation into heroism, no believable ideological narrative to seduce younger generations. Leadership of the Communist Party is disconnected from the people and deeply unpopular. President Miguel Díaz-Canel lacks charisma and the capacity to mobilize society in moments of crisis.
Furthermore, Mr. Maduro’s capture has made it clear that Cuban troops are not invincible, as the party line asserts. The death of 32 Cubans who the Cuban government said died during the operation and the speed with which Washington extracted Mr. Maduro were harsh blows to the image of Castroist security forces. Throughout the island, the powerful symbolism of that failure undermines the power of the regime to intimidate.
The next few weeks will be critical. If Chavismo manages to reorganize under Mr. Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, and Venezuela maintains its fuel commitments to Havana, the Cuban regime will breathe a sigh of relief. If, on the other hand, the negotiations between Caracas and Washington entail cutting the oil supply to the island and ending Cuban medical missions (one of Cuba’s main sources of foreign currency) in Venezuela, the fragility of the Cuban system will become even more manifest. That weakness does not guarantee a change but it could create visible fractures in the power structure, and cracks are always very dangerous to the survival of closed regimes.
On the streets of Cuba in recent days, my colleagues and family haven’t heard talk about revolution or transition. It’s been all about survival. But now, that talk of survival comes with a question that no longer sounds completely naïve: What if the time has come? It isn’t a gushing, radiant hope. It is something much more fragile and more real: the feeling that, finally, the future is no longer completely shut down.
Yoani Sánchez (@yoanisanchez) hosts the podcast “Cafecito Informativo” and is the director of the digital newspaper 14ymedio. This article was translated by Mara Faye Lethem from Spanish.
The official spokesperson Humberto López at a moment during the broadcast of the program on Cuban Television. (Razones de Cuba/YouTube/Screen capture)
14ymedio, Yoani Sánchez, Generation Y, Havana, 13 December 2023 — There was a time when official stories were better constructed or perhaps we were more gullible. In those years, they painted dangers that were really scary, bad guys that were truly fearful, and attacks that made everyone’s hair stand on end. Perhaps it was our naivety as a people combined with the information monopoly enjoyed by the Communist Party at the time, but it was enough for us to be told that “the enemy” was planning to poison the cisterns of day care centers and schools for us all to stop, for a few days, drinking even one drop of water at school.
Of those skillful narrators and our innocence not even a memory remains. For this end of the year, Cuban Television has launched itself to create the umpteenth story that, from the Cuban exile, sabotage is being prepared, weapons are being prepared and landings are planned. The example given is laughable. A lone man, who supposedly arrived on the island on a jet ski, armed with three pistols and a few bullets. Faced with such a description, one cannot help but remember when, in the stories of yesteryear, the villain really instilled fear and not pity. continue reading
For this end of the year, Cuban Television has launched itself to create the umpteenth story that, from the Cuban exile, sabotage is being prepared, weapons are being prepared and landings are planned
It is no coincidence, either, that every time the economic crisis escalates and popular indignation grows, these reports appear with all the traces of following a script to scare Cubans and thus prevent us from showing our discontent, taking to the streets or join a general strike. The theatricality of the scripts created with this objective abandoned realism long ago and has entered the realm of the fantastic, appealing to increasingly bizarre individuals, plans and devices.
The most recent delusions of persecution and invasion that official propagandists have spread show a very high level of desperation. They have lost any hint of objectivity, if they ever had it, to end up in the absolutely grotesque. Thus, with these caricatures of alleged evildoers and attacks, no one believes anything.
A piece of advice for bad writers of so many serials: perhaps training with Marvel or Netflix would give them more credible results.
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COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORK: The 14ymedio team is committed to practicing serious journalism that reflects Cuba’s reality in all its depth. Thank you for joining us on this long journey. We invite you to continue supporting us by becoming a member of 14ymedio now. Together we can continue transforming journalism in Cuba.
Secondary school students during a cultural activity. (2015)(14ymedio)
(Note from Translating Cuba: This article is being reprinted because of its relevance to an article in 14ymedio today.)
Yoani Sanchez, Generation Y, Havana, 13 September 2007 — My son has worn this week for the first time his mustard color uniform at a junior high school building of Giron-style prefabricated architecture barely five minutes from our Yugoslavian model building. The last days of vacation were marked by the process of buying the shoes, the search for a new backpack, and the discussions about how much to narrow the oversized size 18 pants.
The morning of the first day went by with passionate words and promises of a perfect course. Then, it came time for us to get familiar with the new model of junior high school, so different compared to the years when I went to one. For instance, for a while now, junior high school students can’t go home for lunch. The measure seeks to eradicate the contrasts between those who have a good lunch waiting for them and those who have less or almost nothing. It tries as well to prevent them from wandering the streets and committing crimes.
Under this new system, at noon each student receives a sandwich of some protein food and a glass of yogurt. At that age, such a small portion only serves to awake the fierce appetite and makes their stomachs rumble during the next class hours. So from twenty past twelve, the parents start to approach the school’s surrounding fence with little containers, jars and spoons, to reinforce their children’s diet. Some schools have banned the practice of bringing food to students, and other schools have announced that the students must bring their lunch to school with them in the morning.
Every day, in a quite stealthy way, I go near the school and pass through the fence the “shopping bag” with the necessary reinforcement. I notice many parents outside doing the same, but I also notice that a good share of the kids don’t get the additional ration. In the end, by trying to erase the differences, another one has been created, a difference so visible and sad that I wonder if it wouldn’t be better to be more flexible with the above mentioned measure and let the youngsters have their lunch at home, while guaranteeing decent food for those who stay at school.
Everything that is imposed, whatever is mandatory and rigid, ends up being undermined, weakened and, worst yet, rejected.
Yoani Sanchez, Havana, 7 March 2020 — On the ground floor of our building we have a State Security operation. The neighbors are annoyed because surveillance strangles the black market… necessary to survive. Here is a picture of one of the “intruders.” The “Beware of the Dog” sign you see is purely coincidental.
Yoani Sanchez, via Twitter, Havana, 8 May 2019 — A nice “touch” in the fright of the arrest of @Luz_Cuba (Luz Escobar): After waiting five hours at the police station for the State Security agent to arrive to interrogate her, the “seguroso” never arrived because he didn’t have gas for his motorcycle. [#The Crisis Comes to the Political Police]
Yoani Sanchez, Havana, 8 May 2019 — Thanks to all those who demanded the release of @LuzCuba (Luz Escobar). She just called us on the phone to say that she had been released after being under arrest for five hours. We will only have the details when she arrives at the 14ymedio newsroom and we speak with her. THANK YOU.
Yoani Sanchez, Twitter, 13 July 2018 — Activist Iliana Hernandez arrested, director of the alternative program “Lente Cubano” (Cuban Lens). The dissident was taken to the Guanabacoa police station in Havana, where she is now, according to information received by 14ymedio from her mother.
Students at the barricades in Managua. 12 June 2018.
Yoani Sanchez, The Voice of Your Rights, Havana, 14 June 2018 — With the roads cut off, the universities turned into barricades or makeshift infirmaries, and a figure of 146 people who have lost their lives in the protests that broke out last April, Nicaragua today is a nation awaiting a decision that must be taken by a single man. Daniel Ortega has in his hands the ability to allow the country to resume the democratic path or to sink into a spiral of violence and death.
The Nicaraguan Civic Alliance for Justice and Democracy, which brings together broad sectors, has called a national strike for next Thursday with the aim of demanding an end to the “repression.” Another of the objectives of this call is to demand the resumption of a dialogue that would allow ending the socio-political crisis in the country. continue reading
The strike is one more among the many signs Ortega has received in recent weeks of Nicaraguans’ rejection of the government formed by him and his wife, vice president Rosario Murillo. However, the former Sandinista guerrilla believes he is the only man capable of leading the Central American country towards a bright future that only exists in his delusions. He considers himself a kind of irreplaceable anointed.
From his Latin American allies and mentors, in the style of Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez, Ortega learned to hold on to power no matter at what cost. The presidential chair for him is not only a post from which he controls every detail of national life, but also a fortress that protects him from the law. As long as he stays inside the palace he will be safe, he thinks. A mistake made by many of the operetta caudillos who have ruled in Latin America.
Retaining the highest office in the country and not agreeing in time to resign may be the worst of the decisions that Daniel Ortega has made throughout his long political life. The protests have touched an emotional fiber in millions of Nicaraguans, especially among the youngest. Many of them, turned into improvised street fighters, intuit that there is no turning back and that allowing the continuity of ‘Orteguismo’ will result in a prison sentence or death.
That revolutionary fervor Sandinismo once counted on and the social mysticism that elevated it to power is now in the hands of its adversaries. Ortega does not have the support born of ideological passion nor does the enthusiasm of yesteryear animate the people. That connection was broken irremediably and the repression that he has unleashed against the demonstrators has ended by crumbling the little ascendency that was left to Nicaraguans.
Every hour that passes, every second that the caudillo does not negotiate his exit from the presidency, brings him closer to a more violent end.
In Managua, a man addicted to power takes refuge in his stubbornness without being willing to recognize that if he chooses to give up power and retire, when it is still possible, he would save countless lives, including his own.
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, former president of Brazil. (Picture-alliance/AP Photo/E. Perezs
Deutsche Welle, Yoani Sanchez, 6 April 2018 — A few years ago, the socialism of the 21st century, that populist imitation that deftly disguised itself with a discourse of social justice and opportunities for all, seemed to be in full force in Latin America. The region was dotted with leaders who resembled something more than the ideology they embraced: they loved to hear themselves speak in public, they suffered from a chronic intolerance of political opposition and they believed they embodied the feeling of an entire nation.
That motley explosion of charismatic and authoritarian leaders ranged from the vociferous Hugo Chávez, to the arrogant Rafael Correa, the coca grower Evo Morales, and the popular Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. The latter was described as having emerged from the most humble strata of Brazilian society and, once in Planalto Palace, to have promoted changes to lifting more than 30 million people up from poverty. With these credentials, it was difficult not to applaud him and many international organizations fell at the feet of the steelworker become president. continue reading
However, behind the image of an austere man and implacable enemy of political corruption, Lula was creating his own networks of favors and support to which he responded with privileges and perks. The Workers’ Party became a more powerful force every day, one that harassed its political opponents, supported untenable regimes like that of Cuba and was constantly accused of diverting funds and mismanagement. However, Lula maintained his impressive popularity in Brazil and almost unanimous support beyond its borders.
Now, the former trade unionist seems to be coming to the end of his road. Last year he was convicted of corruption and money laundering and this month the Supreme Court rejected the last legal recourse to stop his imprisonment. Although the seasoned populist still draws crowds and leads the polls for the October elections, on his last tour of Brazil eggs were thrown and taunts shouted.
Cornered, the former president has chosen to to keep running forward. He has redoubled his discourse to the popular classes and has presented the whole judicial process in which he is immersed as an attempt to silence him politically or as a revenge of the elites and his old ideological adversaries. Others, however, accuse him of running for president to elude justice. Despite this attack from the podiums and from the media, it has not managed to prevent the myth from suffering major cracks.
With the conviction of Lula, part of the illusion that he fueled also falls, that of a leader who rises from below, who understands the poor, who will never steal from them. His fall from grace is also a blow to the left’s populist forces in the region, many of them tarnished by corruption scandals linked to the extensive maneuvers of Brazilian giant Odebrecht.
The socialism of the 21st century was not only killed by its own inefficiency in finding solutions to the serious problems of the continent, but by its dirty financial management. Their most distinguished representatives encouraged networks of loyalties and bribes that ended up taking their toll. The coup de grace was not “the empire” so much reviled, nor the “bourgeoisie,” but their own ambition.
The number arrested grows; now they are: (clockwise from top left) Lia Villares, Tania Bruguera, Iris Ruiz, Luis Manuel Otero,Amaury Pacheco and Yanelis Nuñez, according to witnesses outside El Círculo gallery, where today the monologue “Psychosis” was staged.
Cuban members of the National Assembly of People’s Power lodge in the Hotel Tulipán during their regular sessions (14ymedio)
14ymedio, Generation y, Yoani Sanchez, 14 July 2017 — Wednesday night. The neighborhood of Nuevo Vedado is sliding into the darkness. Catchy music resonates in the Hotel Tulipán where parliamentarians are staying during the current regular session. They dance, drink under the sparkling lights of the disco ball and sing karaoke. They add their voices to a programmed score, the exercise they know how to do best.
With only two sessions a year, the Cuban legislative body gathers to stuff the population full of dates, figures, promises to keep, and critiques of the mismanagement of bureaucrats and administrators. A monotonous clamor, where every speaker tries to show themselves more “revolutionary” than the last, launching proposals with an exhausting generality or a frightening lack of vision. continue reading
Those assembled for this eighth legislature, like their colleagues before them, have as little ability to make decisions as does any ordinary Cuban waiting at the bus stop. They can raise their voice and “talk until they’re blue in the face,” and enumerate the inefficiencies that limit development in their respective districts, but from there to concrete solutions is a long stretch.
On this occasion, the National Assembly has turned its back on pressures that, from different sectors, demand new legislation regarding the electoral system, audiovisual productions, management of the press, same sex marriage and religious freedoms, among others. With so many urgent issues, the deputies have only managed to draft the “Terrestrial Waters Bill.”
Does this mean that they need to meet more often to fix the country’s enormous problems? The question is not only one of the frequency or intensity in the exercise of their functions, but also one of freedom and power. A parliament is not a park bench where you go to find catharsis, nor a showcase to demonstrate ideological fidelity. It should represent the diversity of a society, propose solutions and turn them into laws. Without this, it is just a boring social chinwag.
The parliamentarians will arrive on Friday, the final day of their regular session, in front of the microphones in the Palace of Conventions with the same meekness that they approached the karaoke party to repeat previously scripted choruses. They are going to sing to music chosen by others, move their lips to that voice of real power that emerges from their throats.
The man, who in life was the target of thousands of jokes about his death, has been dead for more than half a year without popular humor deigning to mention it. (EFE)
14ymedio, Generation Y, Havana, 3 July 2017 — For decades Cubans were bombarded by official propaganda filled with materials about Fidel Castro’s supposed genius. In these vindications he was not only a father, but also a strategist, visionary, pedagogue, farmer and cattle rancher, among other lofty characteristics and pursuits. However, that prototype of patriarch, scientist and messiah had some “soft spots.”
Over time, many of us came to understand that the Maximum Leader was not as outstanding as they wanted to make us believe. Counting against him, he had several capital defects: with a complete lack of any capacity for self-criticism, he never engaged in debate, and he was not given to irony or humor, the most difficult and elevated scales of the human intellect.
Despite all the ill-advised decisions he made, Castro died without saying “I’m sorry,” contrary to those who say “to err is human but to rectify is wisdom.” My generation waited in vain for his apology for the high schools in the countryside, and other sad educational experiments, just was we waited for a mea culpa for the victims of the Five Grey Years, the Military Units in Aid of Production (UMAP) or the Stalinist purges. continue reading
Nor was controversy the terrain of the Commander-in-Chief. He shunned diatribe and prepared himself with selected data and later spewed it out over unsuspecting foreign journalists and crowds gathered in the Plaza of the Revolution. He liked them to say: “What a well informed man!” When in reality he was only a ruler with access to information that was not allowed to his citizens.
Castro drowned, in long hours of discourse, what could have been sound political talk and a constructive discussion to improve the nation. We had to worship him or applaud him, never contradict him. He never ceded the spotlight, fearing perhaps that we would realize that “the king is naked” or that the guerrilla had “not the least idea” of what he was talking about.
All the times the late leader approached controversy he was caught short. When he exercised that egregious sport that is verbal fencing, he was beaten in the first act.
All the times the late leader approached controversy he was caught short. When he exercised that egregious sport that is verbal fencing, he was beaten in the first act. His way of dealing with these defeats was to overwhelm the other with long speeches or to get his acolytes to destroy the reputation of his opponent. He was mediocre as a gladiator of the word.
Nor were jokes his forte. Although Castro was the target of thousands of humorous stories, at no time in his life did he demonstrate a gift for humor. In a country where there is always a parody waiting to break the surface, that corpulent character – dressed in olive green with his serious and admonitory phrases – was the constant butt of mockery.
His death has highlighted that lack of charming banter. The man, who in life was the target of thousands of jokes about this death and his presumed arrival in hell, has been dead for over half a year without popular humor deigning to mention him. Not even Pepito, the eternal child of our stories, has wanted to “portray” the deceased.
Sad is the fate of those who are not remembered in a single joke. Poor is the man who never said “I was wrong,” who never knew the pleasure of engaging in arguments with an adversary, and who couldn’t even manage to taste the grace of humor.
Karla Pérez González has been the victim of a new type of harassment, this time incarnated in a campaign of character assassination. (Courtesy)
14ymedio, Generation Y, Yoani Sanchez, Havana, 4 May 2017 – I was in the third grade and the teacher chose the most aggressive girl in my class to be the room monitor. She was given carte blanche to control the other children. Later, the abuser rose to a position in the Federation of Middle School Students and joined the Union of Young Communists. Today she is an active part of a Committee for the Defense of the Revolution. She is corrupt and violent, but highly valued by the authorities in her area.
Cuba’s National Center for Sexual Education (Cenesex), led by Raul Castro’s daughter Mariela Castro, has launched a campaign against homophobic and transphobic bullying in schools. The initiative includes the family in order to “understand what it is about, to help the girls and boys, the teenagers, the young people, and all the staff of the school,” says the sexologist. continue reading
Mariela Castro says that the level of abuse in schools on the island is “fairly low,” an affirmation that demonstrates – at the very least – her lack of connection with the Cuban reality. Without reliable official figures, any investigation of the subject must appeal to the personal experience of individuals and this is when the stories and testimonies of bullying in the educational environment surface.
The high schools in the countryside, promoted by former president Fidel Castro, were a reservoir of these abuses, many of them carried out under the impassive eyes of the teachers
The high schools in the countryside, promoted by former president Fidel Castro, were a reservoir of these abuses, many of them carried out under the impassive eyes of the teachers. Suicides, rapes, systematic robberies of the most fragile, accompanied by power structures more typical of prisons than an educational institution, were the daily bread of those of us who attended these schools.
I remember the spring of 1991, when a student threw himself off the water tower of the People’s Republic of Romania High School in what is now Artemis province. He had been harassed by the taunts and pressures of several classmates. We were all crowded together in the central hallway during the evening’s recreation hour when we felt the thud of his body landing on the concrete.
His harassers never paid for that death, it never became a data point in the statistics of student victims of bullying, and a family had to bury a son without being able to put a name to what had happened to him: abuse. In the weeks after that death another student slit his wrists – fortunately he didn’t die – and a group of twelfth grade students beat up a tenth grader for “having feathers,” i.e. being effeminate.
However, abuse in the schools doesn’t end there. There are many ways to harass a student and not all of them come from his or her classmates, nor are they motivated by sexual stereotypes, strict gender roles or group bravado. Ideological violence, exercised by power and with the consent of the school administrators, is another way to inflict psychological damage.
A few weeks ago, a journalism student at the Central University of Las Villas was the victim of institutional abuse that will leave permanent psychic and social scars on this young girl, just 18. To make matters worse, it was the leaders of the University Student Federation who behaved toward Karla Perez Gonzalez as the school abusers, like the leaders of a gang or the thugs of the hour.
The former student has been the victim of a new type of harassment, this time embodied in a campaign of character assassination that would be laughable if it weren’t aimed at destroying her self-esteem and turning her into a non-person
Since her expulsion, the former student has been the victim of a new type of harassment, this time embodied in a campaign of character assassination that would be laughable if it weren’t aimed at destroying her self-esteem and turning her into a non-person. To do something like that to a student of such a young age is an act of rape from power, persecution dressed up in the robes of school discipline.
The abusers, protected from above, end up feeling that they can destroy lives, denounce innocents and beat others as long as they are protected by an ideology. A system that has fomented political thuggery in its schools and its streets cannot confront bullying in all the complexity that the problem presents.
Noisy campaigns to fill foreign media headlines and the collection of large funds from international organizations is not the solution for all the Cuban children who have to deal, right now, with the physical blows, the ridicule of their classmates or partisan indoctrination in their schools.
14ymedio, Yoani Sánchez, Havana, October 18, 2026 / On Friday, at 5:30 in the afternoon, an invisible clock started ticking. It had no hands, made no sound, and no one knew when it would stop. Its mechanism was simple: to count every minute without electricity in our Havana neighborhood. This Sunday, it would finish its journey after ticking for 37 hours and 19 minutes.
