Category: José A. Adrián Torres

Cuba’s New Heroes and Founding Fathers of the Fatherland

EcoFlow, solar panels and solar-powered generators replace the old revolutionary epic in blackout-ridden Cuba

The national electricity system – SEN for short – has suffered so many outages that the word “national” is starting to sound like the most optimistic part of its name. / 14ymedio

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, José A. Adrián Torres, Málaga, September 6, 2026 / Perhaps one of the few things that isn’t scarce in Cuba is the sun. It rises every day without the Electric Union announcing its synchronization with the National Electric System (SEN), it doesn’t need fuel oil, it doesn’t wait for a spare part, and so far no breakdown has taken it offline. Nor does it depend on a friendly oil tanker docking or a Political Bureau meeting concluding. On the Island of Blackouts, the sun is the only energy provider that still doesn’t require foreign currency for its supply.

The Revolution and its leaders took almost seven decades to see the sun as a lifeline, even though it had always been right in front of their Fidel-style caps. Now the government is presenting photovoltaic energy as the path to energy sovereignty and claims that the more than 50 installed solar parks, with over 1,000 megawatts peak capacity, provide around 38% of the energy consumed during the day during peak sunlight hours. This is positive news, of course. At this point, arguing with the sun would be absurd, even for a system that has been arguing with the real economy for years.

The sun works for free, but storing its energy comes at a price: Cuba lacks sufficient battery banks and a stable grid capable of integrating them. The first storage systems serve primarily to regulate frequency, not to shift the midday to the nighttime peak. When the sun sets, the aging thermoelectric plants return, along with out-of-service units, high-sulfur Cuban crude, a shortage of spare parts, and generators without fuel. Demand hovers around 3,000 megawatts, and the deficits have left more than half the country simultaneously in darkness. The national electricity system—SEN to its ‘friends’—has suffered so many collapses that the word “national” is beginning to sound like the most optimistic part of its name.

The embargo did not age the thermoelectric plants, it did not deplete on its own  the reserves of spare parts, nor did it impose decades of insufficient investment and misguided priorities.

The oil embargo imposed by Washington has aggravated the shortages to an extreme; to omit this would be to deceive. But the embargo did not age the thermoelectric plants, nor did it single-handedly deplete the reserves of spare parts, nor did it impose decades of insufficient investment and misguided priorities. External pressure explains much of the acceleration of the crisis; it does not absolve 67 years of energy policy. This is a renewed Special Period, without continue reading

a name: perhaps the authorities avoid calling it that because a temporary emergency that lasts for decades is beginning to resemble the system itself too closely.

In homes, physics has imposed a less solemn solution: a panel, a battery, and the meticulous management of every watt. This is how EcoFlow has ascended to the pantheon of Cuban household icons. EcoFlow is a Chinese brand of portable power stations, founded in 2017, but in Cuba, its name is beginning to function as a common noun, just as other brands have

When Flirting Started To Be a Way To ‘Resolve’ Daily Life in Cuba

How the Revolution turned the Cuban art of flirting into a survival strategy

The Revolution can perhaps claim one last moral victory: it has reduced prostitution, not because it has redeemed the prostitutes, but because it has scared away the tourists. / 14ymedio

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, José A. Adrián Torres, Málaga, August 23, 2026 / For years I have resisted writing about Cuban jineterismo. Not out of decency or shame, nor because the subject was taboo, but for something almost worse for a columnist: because it seemed to have been written about too many times. Between the lubricated curiosity of the tourist, the revolutionary sermon, and the moral condemnation, the jinetera had been reduced to a prostitute and the jinetero to a hustler. Much was said about their bodies and very little about the society that had produced them.

It only interested me to revisit the topic if I could find a perspective that permitted me to understand it as a historical, sociocultural, and psychological phenomenon: as the transformation, under revolutionary necessity, of a much older repertoire of cunning, charm, sociability, and satire. Because jineterismo didn’t invent the Cuban art of charming; it made it a means of earning a living.

The word satería deserves a brief reappraisal. The Dictionary of Americanisms of the Association of Spanish Language Academies defines “sato” or “sata” as a person who is “flattering and excessive with those of the opposite sex.” In Cuba, however, the word possesses nuances that no dictionary can fully capture. Satería is not merely flirtation. It is the mixture of grace, effusiveness, theatricality, charm, and mischief with which someone can attract attention, obtain a favor, or disarm resistance without directly asking for anything. continue reading

‘Satear’ is to insinuate without committing, to promise without forming the promise, and to withdraw, leaving the other person with the impression of having been at the point of achieving something.

Satear is to insinuate without committing, to promise without forming the promise, and to withdraw, leaving the other person with the impression of having almost achieved something. It could be a self-serving practice, certainly, but also a social game, a small performance, and even a form of female power within a society organized by men. La satería didn’t promise surrender; it managed the possibility.

Although there were—and are—men perfectly capable of wielding it, Cuban culture ended up associating it primarily with a certain Havana woman: flattering, charming, quick-witted, aware of her influence, and not at all inclined to hide it. It wasn’t a genetic condition nor some tropical essence dissolved in the waters of the Almendares River. It was a historical persona learned and perfected over generations.

If we look for its distant relatives, we look first to the Spanish picaresque tradition. From Lazarillo de Tormes in the 16th century to the great rogues of the 17th, the character survives by reading others’ weaknesses, changing masters, feigning, exaggerating, and finding a way out where the straight path is reserved for others. The rogue doesn’t reform the social order: he learns to outwit it. He is, in a sense, a precocious expert at problem-solving 

It is no coincidence that some of that literature and that attitude toward life matured in southern Spain, around the diverse and theatrical port cities of Seville and Cádiz. Through them the riches of the Indies passed, but they didn’t always end up in the hands of those who loaded the ships. Visible abundance and real poverty are often excellent schools for mischief.

Between those ports and Havana, circulated goods, words, music, gestures, and forms of interacting. Andalusian and Canarian Spanish provided a good part of the Antillean linguistic base, but the satería language did not disembark already formed from a galleon. Cuba reworked it in its own unique blend: port life, the Afro-Creole experience, the tenement courtyard, music, the street, theater, and a sociability accustomed to turning any conversation into a performance.

They were not schools of prostitution, but living archives of gestures and attitudes that could later reappear in other contexts.

The Spanish cuplé, zarzuela, and sainete found in the island a kind of comic theater, guaracha music, and mockery. Later came the revue, the vedette, and the cabaret. In all of these, a stage femininity was perfected, capable of holding an audience’s gaze, timing a pause, and converting a swaying of the hips into social commentary. These were not schools of prostitution, but living archives of gestures and attitudes that could later reappear in other contexts.

La Macorina represents one of the most provocative forms of that autonomy. María Calvo Nodarse was not a prostitute before her time, but an exceptional courtesan within a society where prostitution was perfectly recognized, hierarchical, and localized. Legend later retouched her biography, but preserved the essential: this woman who drove cars, displayed jewelry, and smoked with an ease then reserved for men, transformed her beauty into money, independence, and a public personage.

It isn’t necessary to moralize her or whitewash her profession. Her importance is in having reversed, as far as possible, a power relationship: she didn’t appear as a chosen woman, but as a woman who made choices. Her case was extraordinary precisely because the majority of prostitutes of the era didn’t drive convertibles nor receive musical tributes. She worked in brothels, bars, and low-life dens, principally around the port and the red-light districts.

Rita Montaner embodied another side, very distinct and entirely artistic facet of cubanía. With a solid musical background, she moved from zarzuela to guaracha, from theater to radio, film, and cabaret, commanding a presence didn’t need to ask permission. In Rita, her grace was not submission or subservience, but stage presence. She knew how to charm without demeaning herself and how to make irreverence a form of authority. They called her La Única (The One and Only) because any other classification fell short of describing her.

La Macorina transformed the desires of others into a personal legend; Rita Montaner transformed talent and personality into national art. There is no need to confuse them or morally link them. Together, they serve as a reminder that, long before the rise of jineterismo, Cuba already possessed a feminine repertoire of defiance, sensuality, theatricality, and mastery of the male gaze.

La Macorina transformed the desires of others into a personal legend; Rita Montaner transformed talent and personality into national art. There is no need to confuse them or morally link them.

Nor  should we imagine the Republic as a succession of elegant couplets, red cars, and lavish cabarets. Prostitution was widespread and, in many cases, miserable. American sailors constituted a significant clientele, especially in the port areas, but not the only one: there were Cubans, merchants, tourists, gamblers, and travelers. Alongside a few high-class courtesans, there existed a mass of women exploited in disreputable establishments. Furthermore, the commercial sexualization of mulatto women predated 1959.

Castro’s propaganda has always been known how to employ a half-truth as if it were the whole truth. The existence of that reality doesn’t mean all of Havana was a brothel, but neither is it necessary to perfume the Republic to criticize what came after. The fundamental difference is not that there was artistic seduction before and prostitution after. It is that the former prostitution had designated spaces, intermediaries, and a recognizable professional identity, while revolutionary jineterismo ultimately decentralized and expanded the trade.

During the early 1960s, the new regime closed bordellos, prosecuted pimps, and subjected many prostitutes to rehabilitation and work programs. The regime presented the disappearance of red-light districts as the definitive end of the phenomenon. In a certain measure it succeeded in dismantling that visible circuit. But eliminating the geography of a practice does not eliminate the conditions that can reproduce it.

When Soviet subsidies collapsed and the so-called Special Period began, prostitution didn’t return to its old neighborhoods. It reappeared in a different, more dispersed, and far more ambiguous form. The dollar was legalized, tourism became the state’s lifeline, and foreigners began circulating on the island like walking currency exchanges with legs. A doctor, an engineer, or a teacher earned a salary in pesos that wasn’t enough to fill a refrigerator; any tip or gift from a tourist could acquire exorbitant value.

The Revolution proclaimed that it had redeemed Cuban women and ended up building an economy in which a smile paid for in dollars was worth more than a university degree.

The Revolution proclaimed that it had redeemed Cuban women and ended up building an economy in which a smile paid in dollars was worth more than a university degree paid in pesos.

That’s where jineterismo truly emerged as a revolutionary creature: not because the government decreed it, nor because sexual exchange didn’t exist before, but because the economic organization of Castroism produced that specific form. Prostitution was ancient; jineterismo, on the other hand, was a genuine child of the Revolution, not of its ideals, but of its failure.

A study by Charles Trumbull published in 201, based on fieldwork in Cuba and various sources from the 1990s, observed precisely this difference. A large network of brothels had not reappeared, nor was the traditional pimp predominant. Many relationships were established directly in hotels, discotheques, on beaches, in the streets, or through friendships. The jinetera might not consider herself a prostitute, nor might she work full-time: she could be a student, a technician, an employee, or a mother, and occasionally resort to a relationship with a foreigner to obtain what neither her salary nor the ration book could give her.

In that nocturnal economy, the boundaries between prostitution, hustling, and seduction with a migratory horizon were porous. Daliany Jerónimo Kersh notes that the expression jinetera-mambisa was already circulating in the 1980s … The jinetera became more associated with immediate or professional transactions, while the mambisa aspired to become involved with a foreigner and, if the “military campaign” prospered, to marry and leave the country. It was said of those mambisas, with the customary mockery, that they were “finishing off the Spaniards”; later, the enemy became multinational.

The boundaries, of course, remained fluid. There were Havana women who knew the ropes, girls from the provinces who circumvented residency restrictions to try their luck in the capital, and women who went out for a single night and ended up in show business. They weren’t distinct species or military ranks in a sexual taxonomy, but rather shifting positions within a continuum of necessity, curiosity, fun, ambition, and survival. Old-fashioned prostitution required entering a circuit; to hustle, all it took was finding a tourist and knowing how to please him.

The whole country was learning how to ‘resolve’, to get by: obtaining ‘on the left’ what couldn’t be obtained on the right, diverting resources, inventing family ties, feigning enthusiasm, and cultivating the right contacts.

Hustling wasn’t limited to sex, nor was it exclusively female. A hustler could sell counterfeit tobacco, find a room, act as a guide, fetch fuel, serve as an intermediary, or cultivate a self-serving friendship. There were also men who offered sexual services. The term encompassed much more than just the bed: it referred to any way of “riding” foreigners to overcome the scarcities.

That is why it came to be said that in Cuba anyone could hustle. It didn’t mean everyone was a prostitute, but rather that the logic of the transaction was no longer confined to a specific profession. The entire country learned how to ‘resolve’: obtaining ‘under the table’ means what couldn’t be obtained through legitimate means, diverting resources, inventing family ties, feigning enthusiasm, and cultivating the right contacts. The picaresque provided the method; satire, the style; the Revolution, the necessity.

The decisive transformation occurred in the meaning of the gesture. The ‘sata‘ turned another’s desire into triumph; the prostitute needed to turn it into income. One could enjoy leaving the admirer waiting; the other depended on that wait eventually paying for dinner, soap, perfume, or a passport. Perhaps the smile was the same, but the freedom from which it was offered had changed.

It was not, therefore, a natural evolution of Cuban street smarts into prostitution, but rather a repurposing of them under economic duress. Necessity requisitioned old social skills and put them to work. Sympathy became an investment, conversation a probing exercise, and romance a possibility through migration. There were sincere relationships, real affection, and marriages that cannot be reduced to a mere calculation. But therein lay the psychological complexity of the phenomenon: need, affection, and friendship could coexist without even those involved knowing where one ended and the other began.

Meanwhile, the State condemned the prostitute for doing on a retail basis what it practiced wholesale: selling a tropical fantasy to foreigners in exchange for currency. Tourist campaigns offered rum, music, sensuality, and smiling bodies, while the police watched over the Cuban woman who approached a visitor, trying to “smother” him. They called it “the siege of tourism.” She sold companionship; the State sold the island.

Havana could make fun of even that back room, but romanticizing jineterismo would be another way of misrepresenting it.

As it grew, this initially scattered activity also created its own rearguard. There wasn’t always a recognizable pimp: sometimes that role was played by the husband, the “little husband”—the informal partner—or even a brother who waited at home and participated in the takings; other times, it was the taxi driver who brought the tourist, the owner of a brothel who lent the room, or the policeman who took bribes to look the other way.

The girls who arrived from the provinces could rely on fellow countrymen and relatives to find lodging, protection, and a work area, or to move around certain nightclubs and bars. In some circles, there was even talk of groups identified by their province of origin, closer to networks of local ties, mutual aid, and territorial division than to organized crime groups. Among the newcomers, the old-fashioned solidarity of the eastern guajira and the good nature of many of those girls and women often outweighed any underworld discipline. The Revolution had closed the brothels; necessity rebuilt the supply chain.

Havana could make light of even that back room, but romanticizing prostitution would be another way of distorting it. There was exploitation, deception, violence, degradation, and a profound erosion of trust. When every kindness can conceal a price and every infatuation a visa application, sensitivity ends up defending itself through cynicism. The foreigner learns to interpret every smile as an offer; the Cuban, to see every foreigner as a possible way out of a problem. The moral damage lies not in the loss of a supposed purity or freshness of sex, but in the colonization of intimacy by survival.

The art of distance was also lost. The old satire thrived on insinuation, circumlocution, and what might never actually happen. Revolutionary urgency shortened the distance between a wink and the price, with brazenness as the only stop along the way. The so-called “flip-flop slap” or ” flip-flop-ification” wasn’t about poverty or footwear, but about the disappearance of ceremony, the ritual of courtship: when seduction ceased to be a game and became a mere formality.

Now that ecosystem is also dying out. According to official figures from the National Office of Statistics and Information (ONEI), during the first half of 2026 the number of international visitors received by Cuba was only 39.3% of that recorded in the same period of the previous year. Even the caricature of a tropical paradise is beginning to lose its audience.

In Cuba, meanwhile, the concern has become less erotic and more electric. Desire needs a certain confidence in tomorrow, some intimacy, and, if it’s not too much to ask, electricity. Before thinking about falling in love, seducing, or procreating, one has to find out what time the power comes back on.

The Revolution can perhaps claim one last moral victory: it has reduced prostitution, not because it has redeemed the prostitutes, but because it has scared away tourists and because many of them left to build their futures in other countries, far from the revolutionary “burundanga” that had driven them to seek work.

Today, the Cuban people, exhausted even from practicing that old art of catcalling, wait for someone or something to change their destiny. But no collective destiny changes simply by waiting, however much, ninety miles away, there may be those longing for a good excuse to act. In the Cuba where once people went out to meet tourists, today they wait for the tide to turn. And even flirting waits its turn to start its engine.

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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.

Cuba Was Neither a Spanish Wasteland Nor an American Miracle

The United States modernized an island devastated by war, but also placed conditions on its sovereignty: reading the Cuban present through the lens of 1899 demands more history and less rescue epic

Perseverancia Street, in Centro Habana, reflects the urban decay affecting large areas of the Cuban capital.  / 14ymedio

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, José A. Adrián Torres, Málaga, Spain, June 6, 2026 /
Rolando Gallardo published on 30 May, in 14ymedio, a thought-provoking article on North American intervention in Cuba and the possibility that history might repeat itself. His argument has a defensible core: the US occupation of 1899-1902 effectively addressed the sanitary, administrative, educational and logistical problems the island was suffering acutely in the aftermath of war. To deny this would be absurd. The Cuba that the United States encountered was wounded, impoverished, exhausted and disorganized. The war of independence, the reconcentration policy, the destruction of fields, roads and sugar mills, and the final collapse of Spanish power had left a critical situation.

But acknowledging that reality is one thing, and quite another to present the Cuba of 1899 as though it had been a wasteland of poverty, ignorance and general neglect upon which Washington had to build everything from scratch. That is where the comparison becomes too convenient. And convenient comparisons tend to have a problem: they explain a great deal all at once, but they understand very little. Complex matters are not explained by simple reasons – those only make them more digestible for the public or the voter. Turning 1899 into a template for the present distorts history and oversimplifies the future.

Late nineteenth-century Cuba was not a blank page. It was a society devastated by war, yes, but also an urban, port-based, sugar-producing, commercial and culturally rich society. Havana, Matanzas, Santiago, Cienfuegos, Trinidad, Camagüey and Holguín were not villages lost among palm trees, mosquitoes and tropical resignation. They were centers with history, architecture, printing presses, theatres, cultural societies, international trade, ports, economic activity and a complex social life. One must not confuse an island ravaged by war with an island that had no existence before the arrival of the North American administrator with his ledger, his sanitation brigade and his wholesome faith in efficiency.

Avenida Zulueta in Havana, in 1900. / Library of Congress

It bears saying plainly, because otherwise one falls into a new version of the old Black Legend, now pressed into the service of a North American White Legend. Spain arrived at 1898 breathless, politically defeated and with a manifest inability to offer Cuba any acceptable way forward.

Spanish administration had been tardy, uneven, rigid and often incapable of grasping the depth of Cuban demands, trapped as it was in the tensions of the peninsular political system and in an alternation between conservatives and liberals that failed to deliver a real solution to the Cuban problem in time. Slavery was abolished late, autonomy came late, reforms came late, and war eventually blew everything apart. But from that to suggesting that under Spanish sovereignty Cuba – let alone its great cities – had known no material, cultural or economic development is a distance that history does not permit. continue reading

One thing is to acknowledge that reality and another to present the Cuba of 1899 as if it had been a wasteland of poverty, ignorance and general neglect upon which Washington had to build everything from scratch

Havana was not invented by Leonard Wood. Matanzas did not wait for the US occupation to become an economic and cultural center of the first order. Cienfuegos was not born from a North American sanitary decree. The Cuban railway did not appear by spontaneous generation between 1899 and 1902. The Albear Aqueduct did not spring up like a mushroom after an imperial shower. The Cuban sugar industry, with all its shadows – including the slavery that sustained it for far too long – was already one of the great economic realities of the Atlantic. The North American intervention rebuilt, reorganized, sanitized and modernized; but to modernize is not to create from nothing.

That nuance is not a scholarly footnote. It is the crux of the problem. Because if one starts from the idea that the United States found a Cuba without structure, without institutions, without urban culture and without economic capital, then the intervention appears as an almost providential operation: the Seventh Cavalry of the Western movies arriving, once again, to the rescue. The image may work in a film, but it should not suffice for
interpreting Cuban history.

Paseo del Prado, Havana, in 1900. / Library of Congress

The US occupation had genuine merits. In the sanitary field, the campaign against yellow fever was decisive, though one should not forget that the fundamental theory regarding the transmitting mosquito had been formulated by the Cuban physician Carlos J. Finlay. The United States contributed resources, organization, administrative discipline and executive capacity. In education, it promoted an ambitious reform, expanded the school network and fostered teacher training. In infrastructure, it repaired roads, bridges, railway lines and urban services damaged by war.

In the years that followed, the new republican era also left a vanguard, eclectic and often dazzling architecture, marked by North American and European influences, which gave Havana – and other Cuban urban centers – an essential part of its cosmopolitan splendor. In administration, it introduced more effective procedures and helped to organize a country emerging from a devastating conflict.

All of this must be acknowledged. But the reverse must also be remembered. That modernization was not an act of international charity nor an angelic mission of tropical sanitation. The United States acted with a mixture of pragmatism, economic interest, strategic vision and a will to regional influence. The Platt Amendment was the political price of that reconstruction: a formally independent republic, but one held under tutelage.

If one starts from the idea that the US found a Cuba without structure, without institutions, without urban culture and without economic capital, then the intervention appears as an almost providential operation

Cuba entered the twentieth century with its own flag, yes, but also with a sovereignty conditioned by Washington. The modernization brought sewers, schools and sanitary campaigns; it also brought naval bases and the right of intervention. That tutelary shadow fed for decades an anti-interventionist nationalism that would later be exploited, with varying intensity and no small degree of manipulation, by several generations of Cuban politicians, including the revolutionary one.

This is why the parallel with present-day Cuba must be handled with care. There are visible similarities: health crisis, infrastructure deterioration, shortages, power cuts, transport collapse, productive ruin, mass emigration and an exhausted population. But the historical causes are not the same. The Cuba of 1899 emerged from a war of independence against a retreating European metropolis. The Cuba of today emerges – if it manages to emerge at all – from more than six decades of communist rule, political monopoly, managed economy, repression, exodus, external dependence and institutional decay. One emerged from war; the other emerges from a long administration of failure and bearded messianism.

Cubans in front of Havana Bay, in 1899. / Library of Congress

The difference is no small matter. In 1899, the United States occupied a country that had just broken violently with Spain and needed to organize its transition to a republic. Today, Cuba does not need to replace Spanish tutelage with North American tutelage, because it is not under Spain or any European colonial power. It is under a national regime that turned sovereignty into a slogan while emptying the real freedom of Cubans of all content. That regime cannot be explained as a simple legacy of 1898 or as the inevitable consequence of the colonial past. The historical alibi has its limits, even in the Caribbean, where certain alibis tend to age in admirable health with a curiously gallego pedigree – in the old Cuban sense of the word.

The Cuban present cannot be explained indefinitely with a finger pointing at 1898, at Washington, or at historical fatality

It is true that republican Cuba inherited deep-seated conditioning. It is true that the United States intervened too much in the political, economic and strategic life of the island. It is true that the Platt Amendment left a mark of dependence. But it is also true that Castroism has spent more than sixty years administering the country, controlling its institutions, monopolizing patriotic discourse, expelling talent, impoverishing the economy and turning the supposed revolutionary exceptionalism – the eternal special period – into a routine of power cuts, queues, surveillance and flight. The Cuban present cannot be explained indefinitely with a finger pointing at 1898, at Washington, or at historical fatality. At this point, the Revolution is no longer a betrayed promise: it is a result.

Hence any eventual external assistance to Cuba, necessary in many respects, must not be conceived as a repetition of 1899. Cuba will need investment, technical assistance, energy reconstruction, institutional rehabilitation, productive recovery, sanitary modernization, educational opening and economic reintegration. But that is not equivalent to calling for a new foreign administration, nor to imagining that a North American intervention would resolve, on its own, what Cubans must rebuild with their own institutions, political pluralism and genuine sovereignty.

The underlying problem is not whether the United States can help. Of course it can. The problem is whether that help is conceived as cooperation with a free nation and a future ally, or as a temporary replacement for its political capacity. The first option may be necessary. The second reopens an old temptation: the belief that Cuba only functions when someone administers it from outside.

After more than six decades of authoritarianism, many Cubans on the island have not been able to practice or develop a genuine democratic culture

That idea, however well-intentioned in its formulation, sidesteps an uncomfortable question: after more than six decades of authoritarianism, many Cubans on the island have not been able to practice or develop a genuine democratic culture. Not from any natural incapacity, but because the regime has denied them for generations the everyday practice of deliberation, responsibility for public affairs – replaced too often by the national verb resolver [to resolve, to manage, to get by] – alternation in power, institutional trust, a culture of effort and free decision-making.

A society subjected to obedience, to double standards, to surveillance and to the liturgy of collective sacrifice will also need to rebuild civic habits, a culture of work, a sense of individual responsibility and ethical values damaged by decades of real socialism. But that political maturation cannot be imported packaged from Washington or decreed by a foreign administration: it can only be learned by exercising freedom.

The history of 1899, therefore, serves as a double warning. It warns against the delusional self-sufficiency of the Cuban regime, incapable of guaranteeing basic services while boasting of sovereignty. But it also warns against the fantasy of the external savior — that hope that a power will arrive, impose order, clean up, invest, discipline and then hand over a republic ready to be unwrapped. The American experience demonstrated efficiency, but it also left dependence. The Castroite experience proclaimed independence, but has left ruin. Between these two lessons, a third way should open up: national reconstruction with external support, but without ultimate political tutelage.

Cuba must not start over as though its history could be erased and rewritten under foreign supervision

Cuba must not start over as though its history could be erased and rewritten under foreign supervision. The island needs to free itself from an exhausted regime, yes; it needs to rebuild infrastructure, healthcare, education, currency, agriculture, industry and public trust. But it needs to do so without comfortable, false mythologies: not that of a Spain that left only backwardness, nor that of a United States that brought only modernity, nor that of a revolution that continues to blame the past and the external enemy for a ruin that is, for the most part, its own work.

History does not repeat itself exactly, but neither does it absolve — nor will it ever absolve — those who destroyed Cuba. Sometimes it merely disguises itself to confuse us. And in Cuba, where the political disguises in olive green have lasted far too long, it is worth looking carefully before applauding the entrance of the next savior.

Translated by GH.

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COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORK: The 14ymedio team is committed to practicing serious journalism that reflects Cuba’s reality in all its depth. Thank you for joining us on this long journey. We invite you to continue supporting us by becoming a member of 14ymedio now. Together we can continue transforming journalism in Cuba.

A Transition for Cuba Cannot Be Based on Secular Saints

Reflections on Rolando Gallardo’s proposal for the republican refoundation of Cuba

There is exhaustion, disillusionment, anger, and a desire for escape, but the desire for change does not automatically equal the capacity for insurrection. / 14ymedio

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, Málaga, José A. Adrián Torres, May 15, 2026 — I read with great interest Rolando Gallardo’s article on the need for a republican refoundation in Cuba. I agree with much of the diagnosis: speaking of a conventional transition may be insufficient for a country where the regime has degraded not only institutions, but also social trust, personal initiative, public responsibility, and collective hope. Cuba is not facing merely the problem of replacing one government with another; it is facing the much more arduous challenge of rebuilding a political community after decades of fear, dependence, simulation, and moral impoverishment.

Precisely for that reason, the author’s proposal seems lucid in its starting point but overly confident in its development. The idea of a civil council made up of jurists, intellectuals, and figures of proven integrity may be desirable as a goal, but it risks resting on an excessively idealistic premise: that a group of morally qualified individuals, without immediate political ambitions and motivated by patriotism, will be capable of managing a transition of enormous complexity without becoming trapped by interests, factions, external pressures, or internal power struggles.

That assumption recalls, despite all differences, another form of anthropological faith: the belief that a political process can produce new men, selfless, virtuous, and devoted to the common good. Castroism turned that fantasy into revolutionary dogma, and reality ultimately showed something far older and less epic: human beings do not cease to have interests, vanities, fears, loyalties, and appetites simply because they are assigned a historic mission.

The Cuban transition will certainly need valuable people. But it cannot rest on the presumed moral purity of its protagonists

The Cuban transition will certainly need valuable people. But it cannot rest on the presumed moral purity of its protagonists, but rather on rules, limits, oversight, counterweights, and verifiable procedures. The problem is not finding heroes; the problem is building institutions that function even when the heroes grow tired, make mistakes, or begin behaving like continue reading

any ordinary person with a bit of power in their hands.

It is also important not to underestimate the degree of discouragement in Cuban society today. The Cuban people are not incapable, nor do they lack dignity, nor have they completely lost their instinct for freedom. But they are exhausted, impoverished, monitored, fragmented, and for too long accustomed to surviving rather than organizing. To think that a massive, spontaneous, and sustained internal mobilization alone will be enough to bring about change may be as naïve as thinking that a transitional administration led by an enlightened elite will solve the problem from above.

Here emerges a decisive issue that the article does not sufficiently develop: the relationship between internal repression, popular mobilization, and the legitimacy of any external assistance. In other communist regimes with strong police control, such as East Germany or Ceaușescu’s Romania, the fall of the system was preceded by visible, extensive, and difficult-to-hide popular pressure. It was not merely a problem of economic exhaustion or ideological decay: there came a moment when fear stopped functioning as the regime’s cement. The streets, with all their risks, produced an unequivocal image: society had publicly broken the pact of obedience.

The regime no longer convinces, but it still manages fear, fatigue, and social fragmentation. That is no small thing.

In Cuba, by contrast, that rupture has yet to consolidate. There have been significant outbreaks, and the Island-wide protests of 11 July 2021 showed that there was a real reserve of protest and exhaustion. But it also demonstrated the repressive effectiveness of the state apparatus and the extremely high personal cost of challenging it. Since then, protest has appeared fragmented, intermittent, and often absorbed by the daily struggle to survive: obtaining food, electricity, medicine, transportation, or simply escaping. The regime no longer persuades, but it still administers fear, fatigue, and social fragmentation. That is no small thing. The Cuban dictatorship may no longer possess epic appeal, but it still retains police, archives, prisons, informants, and considerable experience in crushing wills.

This absence of massive and sustained internal mobilization greatly complicates any hypothesis of decisive external assistance. A U.S. intervention—military, coercive, humanitarian, or presented as a stabilization operation—would require some kind of internal political legitimization: a widespread uprising, a visible fracture within the Armed Forces, an explicit request from recognizable transitional authorities, or a humanitarian crisis impossible to contain. Without such a trigger, assistance would risk appearing not as aid to an uprising nation, but as an external imposition. And there the regime, even moribund, would find its final propaganda fuel: presenting itself as the defender of national sovereignty against the old imperial enemy.

This point is especially delicate when considering current U.S. policy toward Cuba. Certain sectors, with figures such as Marco Rubio and Donald Trump himself, seem positioned within a logic of maximum pressure and strategic waiting: tightening the siege, hardening the rhetoric, and awaiting an internal situation that would make a more direct intervention politically viable. But that expectation requires a fuse inside the Island. Without a clear sign of popular rebellion, without an organized internal demand, and without a fracture within the power apparatus, any external action would be morally and politically exposed. It would not be enough to claim that Cuba is being helped; it would have to be demonstrable that assistance is being provided to a Cuba that has risen up.

Any intervention raises questions that cannot be solved with anti-Castro enthusiasm: who governs the next day? With what legitimacy? Under what international mandate?

From there arises the most uncomfortable question: the role of the United States and the Cuban diaspora. It is reasonable to admit that any real transition in Cuba will require external backing, economic assistance, security guarantees, technical support, and intense participation from the exile community. To deny this would be to repeat the old nationalist reflex that the regime itself has used for decades to shield itself. But something very different is turning that support into opaque political tutelage or, worse, into a military intervention born from a provoked or instrumentalized crisis.

An intervention by force might appear, in the abstract, to be the quickest solution. But every intervention opens questions that cannot be resolved through anti-Castro enthusiasm: who governs the next day? With what legitimacy? Under what international mandate? For how long? What is done with the Armed Forces? How are looting, revenge, mass flight, or the emergence of new mafia powers prevented? How can wounded nationalism be prevented from turning former oppressors into supposed defenders of sovereignty?

Cuba is not Iraq or Libya, certainly. It has a history, a diaspora, a cultural and family proximity to the United States, and a unique relationship with Miami that make the scenario different. Nor does there seem to exist in Cuba a deep and majority identification with the regime comparable to what other authoritarian systems managed to preserve for longer. There is exhaustion, disillusionment, anger, and a desire to leave. But the desire for change does not automatically equal the capacity for insurrection. Between wanting something to fall and assuming the risk of pushing it lies an enormous distance, especially when the person pushing knows they may end up in prison, in exile, or with their family ruined.

It will not be enough to expel Castroism from power; it will be necessary to prevent it from surviving in practices, fears, corruption, dependence, and the culture of simulation.

For that reason, the solution cannot be conceived solely as the overthrow of the regime. It must be conceived as the reconstruction of legitimate authority. And legitimacy is not imported wrapped in humanitarian aid, nor does it disembark intact at a port under military protection. It is built, negotiated, recognized, and subjected to limits. The exile community can contribute resources, vision, international pressure, and economic experience; the United States can offer guarantees, assistance, and deterrent capacity; but the ultimate legitimacy of Cuba’s refoundation will have to arise, in some way, from Cubans on the Island themselves. Without that anchor, the transition risks appearing as a replacement of tutelage: from Castroist tutelage to external tutelage, even if the latter comes wrapped in flags of freedom.

Therefore, rather than an administration of notables or a military takeover, Cuba would need a transition architecture with international backing, decisive participation by Cubans both inside and outside the Island, security guarantees, institutional purging, transitional justice, orderly economic opening, and a realistic political timetable. It will not be enough to expel Castroism from power; it will be necessary to prevent it from surviving in practices, fears, corruption, dependence, and the culture of simulation.

The Cuban problem, therefore, does not consist solely in designing a transition architecture for the day after. The prior problem is how to reach that day. The author seems to trust that the collapse of the regime will naturally open a space for a supervised civil administration. But that collapse may not occur in a clean or heroic way. It may take the form of prolonged degradation, dispersed social protests, mass migration, energy collapse, internal fractures within the apparatus itself, or a chaotic combination of all these things. In that scenario, the question is not only who will rebuild Cuba, but what type of event will grant legitimacy to the beginning of that reconstruction.

The great difficulty will not only be toppling an exhausted structure. The great difficulty will also be preventing the vacuum from being occupied by the same reflexes that made it possible: caudillismo, clientelism, external dependence, redemptive epic narratives, and contempt for institutions. In this, the article is entirely correct: Cuba needs architecture, not romanticism. But that architecture will have to be designed for real human beings, not administrative heroes or republican saints. And it will have to begin from an uncomfortable truth: without a sufficiently strong, visible, and sustained internal signal, any external assistance risks becoming, in the eyes of many, an intervention. And any intervention without internal legitimacy may end up giving Castroism its final disguise: that of the patriotic victim of foreign aggression.

Translated by Regina Anavy

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By Pretending, the Cuban Ended Up Not Really Knowing Who He Is

In Report Against Myself, Eliseo Alberto confesses to what many Cubans learned to do to survive: speak with two voices

In the Cuba of the report, blame is not settled: it is archived. / 14ymedio

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, Málaga, José A. Adrián Torres, November 15, 2025 — There are books that are neither written nor read: they confess. Informe contra mí mismo (Report Against Myself), by Eliseo Alberto, belongs to this rare category. It is the story of a man who writes a police report — not against the enemy, but against his own family — and discovers that the real informer is not the one who signs the paper, but the system that managed to make it possible.

The novel, written from Mexican exile and silenced in official Cuba, could be read as the Cuban version of The Lives of Others. In the German film, a Stasi agent spies on a playwright and ends up redeeming himself out of compassion. In Report against Myself, on the other hand, the narrator does not redeem himself: he undresses. He does not save anyone. He only tries to save his conscience. Surveillance does not come from above, but from within. The snitch becomes his own victim.

Both works share the same moral axis: the abolition of the individual by the totalitarian state. But Eliseo Alberto adds something that the film cannot offer: the warmth of betrayed affection. There is no cold basement or interrogation room. There is a house in Havana, a poet father, a mother who puts out a lit cigarette, a family that sings while the son — a soldier in the reserves — receives the order to spy on them. It is horror with the smell of rum and the sad light of the kerosene lamp.

Eliseo Alberto was the son of Eliseo Diego and nephew of Fina García Marruz, heirs to a poetic tradition that believed in the dignity of language. That is why his testimony hurts even more: because it shows how a regime that proclaimed itself the redeemer ended up destroying even faith in the word.

The Lives of Others ends with a redemption; Report Against Myself does not. In the Cuba of the report, the guilt is not expiated: it is archived. The author says it with bitter irony: “I am imprisoned in a file.” That bureaucratic file is the real Cuban prison: one that does not need bars, just a people educated to distrust themselves. And he adds on another page: “No one is entirely guilty of his fear.”

Eliseo Alberto was not a counter-revolutionary; he went from “red” to “pink.” He loved the Revolution as one loves a youth, and that makes it more painful. Because he understood that the great success of the process was not literacy or reform, but to perfect the art of depersonalization. The Revolution turned obedience into moral virtue, loyalty into a test of faith continue reading

and fear into a form of belonging. It taught how to give up the self without feeling that it was given up.

The Cuban speaks like a militant in the ration store, a skeptic at home and a victim with foreigners or in exile.

From that moral experiment emerged a phenomenon that still defines Cuba: the multifaceted self. It is not a psychological split, but a pragmatic identity that rotates according to the context without being dissociated: a strategy of moral and linguistic adaptation in an environment where personal coherence could be dangerous. It is the ability, or need, to change both face and language according to the context. The Cuban speaks like a militant in the ration store, a skeptic at home and a victim with foreigners or in exile. Each environment activates a code, a lexicon, a “way of thinking.” That verbal and moral plasticity, born of fear, ended up becoming — like jokes and humor — another survival strategy: learning to say the “right” thing where appropriate.

It is not hypocrisy, but adaptation. In a country where sincerity could cost at least a punishment, work or freedom, discourse was fragmented. This created a culture of interchangeable opinions, where words serve to protect, not to reveal. The result: a people who, by force of pretense, ended up not knowing at all who they are.

Report Against Myself is the autopsy of that loss. Eliseo Alberto does not accuse, he does not pontificate; he shows how the system managed to install a censor within each citizen. And although the author wrote from exile, his book is still relevant on the Island. Every time someone shuts up out of prudence or fear, disguises his thinking in order to survive or changes his vocabulary so as not to be out of tune, he himself rewrites that report.

“The Revolution has grown old, but its most enduring work is still alive: the Cuban divided between what he says, what he keeps silent -but thinks- and what he seems to say.” That depersonalization triumphed where the five-year plans and the harvest of ten million failed.

‘Report Against Myself’ is not a political allegation, but an inner atonement

Perhaps the only thing left to do, on behalf of all those who unknowingly signed it, is to write the reverse: a report in one’s own favor. A report in favor of freedom. Even so, lucidity and candor do not exonerate. Eliseo Alberto was a victim and participant at the same time, like many of the intellectuals of his generation. The problem — and here is something uncomfortable — is that many, for aesthetic, family or ideological fidelity, kept silent too long. Some did so out of fear; others, believing they could still save the project from within. But when the cultural and moral repression was already evident, staying was also a form of complicity, even if it was passive or sentimental.

This moral ambiguity should be recognized: not to judge it harshly, but to remember that the sensitivity and intelligence with which a pain of conscience is expressed in writing are not enough when a long past silence perpetuates the damage. Eliseo Alberto faced the monster, yes, but he did it late. And he paid for it with a chronic remorse, not with the personal and committed political action that would have been more redemptive. Report Against Myself is not a political allegation, but an inner atonement.

His friend Héctor Abad Faciolince, from Colombia, expressed it with the clarity of someone who did not share this servitude: he admired his talent, but could not forgive him for taking so long to break the “spell.” That remark, more fraternal than cruel, sums up the moral dilemma of a generation that believed that the word — poetry, essay, criticism from within — could redeem a Revolution that had already lost its soul, given itself to the same “devil” … that it itself had created.

Translated by Regina Anavy

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Cuba: Voluntary Work, Compulsory Enthusiasm

How the ideal of the New Man turned into an empty rite that Cubans transformed with humor and resistance

As they used to say, now with resigned insight, voluntary work “builds character.”/ Victoria

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, Malaga, José A. Adrián Torres, October 25, 2025 — As a child in Spain, in the camps of the Catholic Scout Movement, I remember that there was also something called volunteer work. It was carried out on Saturdays and consisted of performing tasks, which although they appeared to be spontaneous, were actually assigned in advance. Everything had to be done “of its own accord” but under the eyes of the “pack leaders,” referring to the The Jungle Book that was a reference for the Cub Scouts movement.

That routine, a mixture of discipline and fervor, was clothed in a mystique: to serve others joyfully under the motto vale quien sirve, We Serve. Over the years I understood that beyond youthful idealism, it was also a form of directed moral learning, an obedience wrapped in enthusiasm.

In Cuba, that spirit of cheerful discipline and youthful symbolism had its own version: a kind of tropical Baden-Powell Scouts Association

The so-called “voluntary work” was never exactly a practice of solidarity, but rather an ideological tool designed to shape the new citizen: austere, loyal, cooperative, obedient. As a Cuban friend commented to me, “Its value was not productive but formative, to transform the young person into a collective being, to go from the self to the collective.” The goal was not the amount of cane cut, but the reformed soul with revolutionary spirit.

The rituals of the socialist utopia, copied from the Soviet model, met with an obstacle in the Caribbean that was impossible to overcome: the Creole and Hispanic idiosyncrasies of Cervantes

That moral training project also had its class bias: the intended to ‘proletarize’ the remnants of the bourgeoisie, discipline the professional and domesticate the peasant farmers, who were clinging to their land like the wealthy kulaks did to theirs, when Lenin wanted to make an example of them. But the dreamed-of New Man ended up wanting to be a foreigner–and many did–or he merely got old.

In a way, the system of pioneers with red bandanas — copied from the USSR and countries like Romania and East Germany — recalled the Scout movement, although under another banner and another creed: that of the Revolution.

But the result was different. The rituals of the socialist utopia, copied from the Soviet model, met with an obstacle in the Caribbean that was impossible to overcome: the Creole and Hispanic spirit of Cervantes.

The tropical culture did not fit with parades, uniforms or doctrinal solemnity. Where communism called for fervor and discipline, the Cuban responded with a story —  a joke, a chiste, we would say in Spain. Where heroism was required, mockery was born.

Popular humor and passive resistance were disguised in Cuba as “revolutionary participation.” Volunteer work was thus transformed into a layperson’s mass in which the faithful feigned devotion while whispering jokes.

Jorge Mañach had accurately described it decades earlier, defining the joking as “a mockery of any non-imperative form of authority, the art of not taking anything seriously. The Spanish chiste had a close relative: the Andalusian guasa, banter, that sarcastic and corrosive irony that — like the choteo — disarms solemnity with a smile, especially in its most popular and festive form: the carnival, with its satirical chirigotas — limericks — and cuplés, couplets.

Voluntary work, conceived as an academy of socialist conscience, turned out to be a masquerade of appearances

Deep down, voluntary work was the apotheosis of that conflict between obedience and humor. It was a faithless liturgy, an obligatory sacrifice to demonstrate ideological purity. And the Cuban, who cannot stand inflated pomp without a nickname or a joke, turned the ideal of the New Man into a tragicomic character: a hero of the sugarcane harvest with a rogue soul of the Golden Age, apparently devoted but a master in the art of escaping with wit.

That attitude, so Cuban, has deeper roots: it is inherited from the Hispanic spirit, that mocking skepticism that runs through Lazarillo and Quixote, where laughter does not destroy but plays down dogma. Cervantes ridiculed chivalrous dreams with the same ingenuity that Cubans parodied revolutionary fervor: both made humor and sarcasm a form of lucidity.

When the communist ideal traveled from the Russian steppes to the Caribbean beaches, it changed its accent and temperature. The parades were filled with music, slogans were made into songs and collectivism became a pretext for excuses, so classic and “evocative” in more than one sense for Cubans in the so-called schools in the countryside.

Communism, when it arrived in Cuba, was tropicalized: it gained rhythm, but lost gravity. And the voluntary work, envisioned as an academy of socialist conscience, ended up being a masquerade of appearances, in which everyone complied so they wouldn’t be reported. They pretended to obey but laughed inside, in order to not surrender.

Perhaps that laugh was the most Cuban of all forms of resistance. It was not epic or head-on, but effective: an intimate resistance, intelligent, like Sancho Panza, against the pomp of power.

As many said — now with resigned lucidity — voluntary work “builds character,” or even that crueler joke, that you would get “a kick in the butt” as a stimulus. In these minimal phrases a whole philosophy was condensed: obey without believing; laugh without ceasing to survive. Voluntary work, in short, did not create the New Man. What it formed was the national vanguard joker, able to feign enthusiasm while mocking, in silence, the solemnity that oppressed him.

Humor has been, for Cubans, their manual of resistance to the bitter drink that the bartender of the country’s history served them… and which history itself will not absolve.

Acknowledmemts:
I would like to thank Jorge Mayor Ríos for his valuable contributions, comments and suggestions to this text, the result of long conversations that over the years helped me better understand the complex contemporary history of revolutionary Cuba and the peculiarities of the Cuban soul. It was also he who, for the first time, put in my hands the essays of Jorge Mañach, the starting point for many of the ideas developed here.

Translated by Regina Anavy

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COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORK: The 14ymedio team is committed to practicing serious journalism that reflects Cuba’s reality in all its depth. Thank you for joining us on this long journey. We invite you to continue supporting us by becoming a member of 14ymedio now. Together we can continue transforming journalism in Cuba.

‘To Resolve’, the Art of Survival in Cuba

The RAE dictionary does not yet recognize the meaning of the verb that defines life on the Island under real socialism.

Admiration does not fall on those who work hard, but on those who solve the best problems. / 14ymedio

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, José A. Adrián Torres, Malaga (Spain), 5 October 2025 — Cuba—like so many other nations—proudly displays its national symbols: the national bird, the tocororo; the national tree, the royal palm; the national flower, the white butterfly. And even a musical group, with the mordacity that comes with Creole humor, dared to add to the list what should be the national mammal: the pig.

But the island also has an emblem that no other country would dare proclaim and that doesn’t appear in civics manuals or on propaganda posters: its national verb. That verb, which isn’t conjugated in the dictionaries of the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE) with the precise meaning it has in Cuba, but which has explained daily life for more than three decades: To resolve.

Because if anything has characterized the average Cuban since the Special Period, it’s the need to solve problems. To resolve is not “solving a problem,” as the Academy in Madrid still insists. Solving problems, in Cuba, is finding what is missing, with ingenuity, connections, or cunning. Solving problems means putting food on the table when the state doesn’t guarantee it; it is getting gasoline in the shadow of the Cupet*; it is finding a spare part for the old Lada; it’s “inventing” whatever comes along. Solving problems isn’t a technique: it is an art of survival.

Before getting to that verb, it is worth remembering that Cuba has given the world much more than official symbols. Its music crosses borders: from Lecuona to Formell, from son to mambo, from danzón to bolero, leading to the omnipresent salsa and reggaeton that resonate on every corner today.

Its literature left universal names: Martí, Carpentier, Lezama, Padura. Even sports were patriotic: baseball, adopted on the island and transformed continue reading

into a continental passion—until the more recent arrival of soccer fans.

And in language, the island and its Caribbean neighbors added treasures that the RAE eventually accepted: huracán from Taíno; guateque for the campesina festival; maraca and bongó for instruments that are now universal; and ñángara, which already sounds like an ideological relic—although some will remain.

The verb crystallized in the 1990s, when the collapse of the Soviet Union left Cuba without subsidies, and with an economic black hole.

But alongside these established contributions, the most “essential” is missing, the most genuine, the one that encapsulates the experience of several generations: To resolve. This verb crystallized in the 1990s, when the collapse of the Soviet Union left Cuba without subsidies and with an economic black hole. Where there was scarcity, nothingness appeared. And with it, the obligation to invent, scrounge, and hustle. The Special Period transformed millions into acrobats of ingenuity and gave them a verb that governs their lives to this day.

An old Cuban friend, who endured those years with resignation and now lives in Miami, summed it up this way: “Cubans don’t steal, my friend; they take what’s coming to them. It’s just that they haven’t gotten it yet.” The phrase encapsulates a twisted but coherent ethic: the State promised, failed to deliver, and the citizen feels entitled to take what they need. They don’t steal: they resolve.

And among the middle-ranking “cadres,” those second-tier leaders and rank-and-file militants, another recurring justification circulated when it came to “interfering” in something: “Cadre, defense is allowed.” It was like saying: ” You can be unfaithful, but not disloyal.” My friend claims to have heard it thousands of times. Phrases like that shaped the socialist morality of the “New Man,” in which to resolve was articulated with egalitarianism and other supposed “values” of the Revolution.

This ethic has disrupted the scale of prestige. In Cuba, true prosperity lies not in a university diploma or an academic degree, but in access to the circuit of the resolvable. The social pyramid is inverted—although perhaps it would be more accurate to say that there is no pyramid, but rather that there are only those at the top and those at the bottom: doctors and engineers survive on symbolic salaries, while the hotel bartender, the taxi driver who charges in dollars, or the person who handles tourism contacts earn more than a doctor in Physics. Medicine is prestigious, but tourism—and remittances and other junk—resolve, at least until recently they did. And everyone knows that.

That’s why on the island the national verb is conjugated like a calling card: “How do you resolve it?”, “Did you resolve it?”, “That guy really resolved it.” The admiration falls not on the one who works hard, but on the one who resolves it the best. It becomes a national championship of cunning, where cheating ceases to be shameful and becomes a social virtue.

The cost, of course, is high. To resolve erodes any notion of legality, merit, or professional ethics. It normalizes living on the blurred borders of what is permissible, turning “invention” into a system and precariousness into a culture. To resolve is the verb of lack, but also the shield that justifies everyday deception.

The cost, of course, is high. To resolve erodes any notion of legality, merit, or professional ethics.

The paradox is that a country that enriched Spanish with musical and Taino voices, that contributed poetry, rhythms, and universal symbols, has been reduced to a verb that the Academy doesn’t recognize with the nuance that the Cuban street brings to it. It would be fair to add:

To resolve, in Cuba: refers to the art of surviving under real socialism.

That definition would say more than many official reports. After all, dictionaries capture what people use and experience. And Cubans have been conjugating that verb in the present tense for over thirty years: “I resolve, you resolve, he resolves.” In the plural, it sounds even clearer: “You all resolve.” And those who go into exile continue to carry it with them, as a mark of origin: they resolve in Miami, Madrid, or Cancún.

Meanwhile, the island continues to present its symbols: the tocororo, the royal palm, the white butterfly, the pig as an informal emblem. But more than any other symbol, what defines Cuba today is a verb. And that verb, ironic and sad, is not to sing, not to dance, not to dream: it is to resolve.

*Cupet – for more, see here.
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Electricity in Cuba Is a Prize and Life is Spent Waiting for It

People are grateful for the light bulb that turns on again, even if it goes out tomorrow.

Cubans are trapped in a cycle, veering between anxiety and hope. / 14ymedio

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, José A. Adrián Torres, Malaga, September 7, 2025 — When the lights come back on after an hours-long blackout, it is a cause for celebration in Cuba. The arrival of an oil tanker gives rise to rumors and headlines that provide some relief, if only for a few days. A package of frozen chicken at the corner store can become a neighborhood’s main topic of conversation. Now, there is even a rumor circulating about a supposed “Phase 10,” a ten-year promise that is more fantasy and metaphor than an actual plan. It feels like a sophisticated form of deferred gratification, a dangling carrot that never relieves the hunger of the present, keeping citizens trapped in an endless state of wait-and-see. The “terminal phase” of a spent regime with no exit strategy, disguised using the language of plans, stages, and that reliable catchphrase, “We are taking measures.”

The logic is simple. Complete deprivation leads to disaster but intermittent deprivation keeps hope alive. Cuba’s leaders know this. The behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner knew this when he discovered that pigeons, pecking at a disc without knowing when they would receive food, did so more insistently than when the reward was predictable. Parents who dole out treats in dribs and drabs to encourage desired behaviors know this. So does a regime that turns everyday life into an experiment in behavioral psychology, not giving you what you deserve but offering you — from time to time — a spark, a respite, a promise. Just enough to keep you docile and expectant, and to stave off rebellion

The Cuban people, trapped in this cycle, veer between anxiety and hope. The are grateful to be able to turn on lights again but realize they might not be able to do so tomorrow. They welcome the pound of rice but they still cannot get meat. They latch onto the news of a ten-year economic plan even though they know that none of the previous plans worked. continue reading

How many times do you have to peck at the disc to before you can feel the joy of turning on a lamp, eating regularly or living with a sense of predictability?

Inevitably, the question arises: How many times do you have to peck at the disc before you can feel the joy of turning on a lamp, eating regularly or living with a sense of predictability? I feel it personally while waiting for the next call to see my “foster” nephews — ages ten and three — whom I love as if they were my own. Every encounter with them is a gift to me. But that gift does not always come when I am looking for it. Their mother manages these visits like unexpected rewards. Sometimes she gives me a last-minute heads-up. “If you want to see them,” she warns, “come now because we’re about to leave.”

I recognize this routine from my academic training as a psychologist as an example of variable-contingency reinforcement. I do not know how many times I will have to follow its rules, or when I will be rewarded with a visit with the children. While this uncertainty causes anxiety, it also makes me eager as I await the next call.

My mother used to describe something similar during her childhood in Spain in the 1940s, when a system of rationing similar to that in Cuba was in force. She would be given a doll as a Christmas present but, after playing with it for awhile, it was put away until the following year “so it would not get damaged.” The gift did actually exist but it was a thing denied her, a mixture of fantasy and frustration.

This is what an entire country is feeling today, transformed into a laboratory of intermittent reinforcement, where life is reduced to waiting for the next “prize,” which is simply the desire to live with dignity.

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When the Cocktail Gets Cold: The Decline of the Art of Serving in a Cuba Without Tourism

Bartenders and maître d’s trained in schools such as the Hotel Sevilla or La Ferminia return to oblivion or exile, dragging with them the lost legacy of Cuban cocktail making and hospitality.

Constante Ribalaigua preparing his famous daiquiri frappé at El Floridita, circa 1935. / Historic photograph in the public domain

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, José A. Adrián Torres, Malaga (Spain), 21 June 2025 — In Cuba, there was a time when serving well was an art. Not a mechanical gesture or a hollow formula, but a form of dignity: serving with elegance, speaking with restraint, presenting a cocktail with precision and courtesy. That art was gradually lost after the 1959 Revolution, marginalized by ideological prejudices that associated professional hospitality with the bourgeois and the foreign.

Decades later, with the rise of tourism in the 1990s, the island attempted to recover this invisible heritage. Hospitality schools retrained service professionals, historic bars were restored, and, with discretion, many anonymous workers restored Cuba to an international standard of hospitality. But today, this rebirth is in danger: the crisis, the exodus, and the lack of succession once again jeopardize the art of serving.

This is a story of loss, recovery, and perhaps, new forgetting.

A shared history: from Ribalaigua and Chicote to the Creole soul of the cocktail

The art of serving—like the art of mixing rum and lime with precision—didn’t come to Cuba through tourism or foreign investment. It was part of its tradition. In the 1920s and 1930s, Havana was one of the world’s epicenters of cocktail making. At El Floridita, a Spanish immigrant with a Cuban heart named Constante Ribalaigua perfected the daiquiri as if it were a work of liquid engineering, creating the famous daiquiri frappé. In Madrid, Perico Chicote founded the bar that would bear his name and which would eventually be considered the world’s first “cocktail museum.”

The two met. They shared ideas, recipes, and even a trip to Varadero in the 1950s to visit the Arechabala distillery, the birthplace of Havana Club rum. The friendship between Chicote and Ribalaigua was more than a professional gesture: it symbolized a brotherhood between two mutually admired bartending cultures. In his recipe books — My 500 Cocktails and The Wet Law — Chicote included versions of the mojito and the daiquiri, helping to preserve Cuban recipes even when ingredients and bartenders — in plain English, or cantineros, in Spanish — became scarce on the island.

This hybrid tradition—Creole in its roots, Spanish in its method—survived for decades in manuals, in technical gestures, in the way of twisting a lemon peel or presenting a wine list. It was this imprint that inspired, in the 1990s, an attempt to recover lost excellence: recovering cocktails wasn’t about importing a foreign fad, but rather about rediscovering the best of themselves.

The rebirth of good service: Hotel Sevilla, La Ferminia, and the discreet masters

When tourism returned to Cuba in the 1990s, it wasn’t enough to restore facades and fill menus with rum and lobster. Something more difficult was needed: recovering the dignity of service, the art of providing good continue reading

service, lost after decades of neglect and official disdain. It was then that hospitality schools re-emerged—with state support, international agreements, and a great deal of individual commitment—especially those at the Sevilla Hotel and La Ferminia in Havana.

The Sevilla Hotel’s Tourism Training School (Formatur), active since 1969, had quietly survived, training generations of waiters and bartenders for formal events, embassies, and official events. Its classrooms taught much more than techniques: they taught a code of composure, precision, and courtesy that contrasted with the neglect prevailing in many sectors. There, service was spoken of as a culture, not as servitude.

Something similar happened at La Ferminia, a former mansion belonging to the wealthy Montalvo family, converted into a state culinary school under the name “Sergio Pérez.” It trained chefs, waiters, and maîtres d’s who would later work at the Council of State, the Convention Center, or in restaurants designated by the government to serve heads of state and distinguished visitors. The standard was high. Many former students still remember with respect the meticulousness of their instructors, their careful presentation, their mastery of languages, and their attention to detail.

From these centers emerged the professionals who would restore Cuba to an international standard of hospitality, especially in emblematic establishments such as El Floridita, La Bodeguita del Medio, the bar at the Hotel Nacional, and the now legendary Café del Oriente, a symbol of the restoration of Havana’s historic center.

And among all these professionals, maître d’ Dionisio Hernández holds a special place. Since arriving in Havana in the 1960s, he worked in numerous iconic restaurants and cabarets—from El Encanto and the Paradise Club to the 1830 and the Tropicana—where he rose from clerk to maître d’. In 1972, he joined the Sevilla Hotel School as a trainer and later joined La Ferminia, where he also served as assistant director of Gastronomic Services. A key figure in the Café del Oriente protocol team, he was responsible for serving state figures—including monarchs, such as the former King of Spain—with quiet, unpretentious elegance. He wasn’t celebrated, nor did he receive any revolutionary merit, but those who trained under his guidance remember him as a true master: for what he taught without raising his voice. Even after his retirement in 2005, he continued to teach at Café del Oriente until 2018.

Like him, many anonymous professionals silently maintained what the system failed to appreciate: the art of attention to detail, of the proper greeting, of a well-poured glass, of a well-explained dish or dessert, of respect for the customer as a guest. Without them, the rebirth of the 1990s would have been a mere facade.

A new blackout: apathy, exodus, and the loss of a legacy

That renaissance of the 1990s, so labored over by discreet figures and institutions that revived the tradition of good service, is beginning to fade again today, the victim of a bitter cocktail: the economic crisis, the collapse of tourism, and the disenchantment of those who professionally sustained it for decades.

It is enough to walk through the rooms of yesteryear to notice the difference. At Café del Oriente—once a beacon of elegance, impeccable service, and the setting for official receptions—today, both customers and trained professionals are scarce. The schools no longer retain the best. Iconic bars survive more out of nostalgia than excellence. And the bartenders and maîtres d’s who once learned to serve kings now wait in lines at consulates or dream of Yuma.

The term is popular on the island: to go to Yuma means to leave the country, to seek one’s fortune in the United States or any other place where the craft has value. Many self-employed workers in the restaurant sector, who once opened small private restaurants, signature bars, or cafes with carefully crafted cocktails, have had to close or reinvent themselves with the bare minimum. Others haven’t even had that option: they emigrated. The dignity of service cannot be eaten, especially when everything else is missing.

In Cuba, serving with care is no longer taught as it once was. Or it is taught, but with resignation, knowing that those who know how to do it well are probably already thinking of leaving. And what was once a symbol of national culture—the impeccable bartender, the elegant waiter, the invisible and efficient maître d’— is once again left out of the official narrative. As if it didn’t matter.

And yet, it matters. It matters because the art of serving is also a form of mutual respect, of civility, of memory. Because Cuba was great not only for its cocktails or its flavors, but for the way it presented them. Because attentive service is also a cultural heritage, and losing it—once again—is letting a country die that could still have proudly served its best drink.

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Cuba’s Embassy in Mexico Led the Fight Against Central American Dictatorships

Mexico has made public the 411 files on the espionage carried out of Fidel Castro by Mexican security forces. (Luz Escobar)

14ymedio biggerEFE (via 14ymedio), José Antonio Torres, Mexico City, 28 March2019 —  In the 1960s Cuba used its embassy in Mexico to direct movements against those they considered dictatorships in Latin America, according to espionage archives declassified by the Mexican government.

In a version of 411 files Mexico has made public on the espionage carried out of Fidel Castro by Mexican security forces, both when he was in Mexico and in power in Cuba, it is noted that the Cuban embassy served as its focal point for these activities in the region.

“The Cuban Embassy in Mexico is in charge of directing in Latin America the various movements, both against the so-called Central American dictatorships and against the United States of America,” Mexico’s Federal Security Directorate (DFS) states in a report dated 1960 to which Efe had access. continue reading

In those years the first target of these activities was the Nicaraguan Government, when the Somoza clan was already in power, “and as a concrete case we can cite the armed incursion in the Segovias in the month of March in which nine people died,” the file emphasizes.

The reports about the activity that Cuban diplomats carried out from Mexico were always part Mexican intelligence’s surveillance of Castro, inlcuding when he was in power, as they considered him a factor of influence in social movements in Latin America.

“As a result of his coming to power, the various groups of political asylees distributed in Latin American countries tried to follow his example,” highlighted the offices of the DFS, an entity that disappeared in 1985 amid accusations of corruption.

However, the Mexican espionage noted in their reports, now housed in the National General Archive, that the Mexican communist groups had no links with the group headed by Fidel Castro, a situation that continued after his conquest of power and in the following years.

Mexican security prepared a detailed report of it first encounter with Castro, capturing him on June 21, 1956, in a car with license plates from Miami in the neighborhood of Polanco, after a year of following him through reports from Cuba that warned that he was preparing a coup against the Batista government.

Castro was arrested with several men, including his bodyguard identified as Universe Sanchez, by Mexican Captain Fernando Gutiérrez Barrios, whom Fidel always treated as a friend, and who became Secretary of the Interior in the presidency of Carlos Salinas (1988- 1994).

Even then, Mexican spies warned of Castro’s links with “political exiles of different nationalities,” mainly those of Nicaragua and Costa Rica, led by Manuel Flores Gómez, and those of Peru, headed by César Pardo Acosta.

In another report, Gutiérrez Barrios affirms that Castro was last seen in Ciudad Victoria, in the northeastern state of Tamaulipas, and confirms reports that he had already embarked on the yacht Granma.

The triumph of the Cuban Revolution, on January 1, 1959, revived the Mexico’s interest into maintaining espionage over Castro, with reports on the state of his health, his trip to the former Soviet Union, and a speech where he talked about the rumors related to the “disappearance” of Che Guevara.

The resignation of Castro from the position of prime minister to serve as Commander of the Armed Forces was highlighted in a report dated July 17, 1959, in which Mexican security already warns that an external aggression against the Cuban regime was being prepared (at a time when Castro was still in Mexico).

“There are three groups ready to attack Cuba,” the report in the Mexican archives detailed.

The first group was in the Dominican Republic with the Cuban general José Pedraza; another was in Miami with Rolando Masferrer, and the third was elsewhere in the United States with Batista’s brother-in-law, General Roberto Fernández.

Castro’s speech of 15 January 1966 at the close of the First Tricontinental Conference of Solidarity of the Peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America, and a letter to the Secretary General of the United Nations, occupy a good part of the Mexican files on Castro.

The Mexican authorities determined in 2002 to allow the public disclosure of the confidential files of the Mexican espionage services from 1920 and 1985, and the new administration of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and has extended it to the documents of the Center of Investigation and National Security (Cisen).

The current archives of Mexican political espionage originated with the governments emanating from the Mexican Revolution (1910-1921) with organizations such as the First Section and the National Directorate of Intelligence, which were followed by the DFS and the CISEN, now replaced by a new entity in the current government.

In 1985, the AGN received 3,091 cases with files generated by the Office of Political and Social Research and the DFS in the period from 1920 to 1975; in 2002, it added 4,223 boxes with 58,302 Cisen files.

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