Rafael Bordeo – Translating Cuba

Castro’s Mistrust of Havana Politicians

The Castro brothers consolidated their power through purges that eliminated key figures of the Revolution, many of them born in the capital.

Fidel Castro entering Havana in 1959, flanked by Camilo Cienfuegos and Huber Matos. / Venceremos

14ymedio, Rafael Bordao, Miami, November 12, 2025 — It is striking that, for the past 73 years, Cuba’s main heads of government have shared a common origin: a rural background. From Batista, Fidel, and Raúl, born in the province of Holguín, an agricultural region in eastern Cuba, to Miguel Díaz-Canel, also from a province outside the capital, political leadership has been marked by figures formed in environments far removed from Havana’s cosmopolitanism. This campesino root profoundly influenced their vision of the country, favoring a revolutionary narrative centered on the countryside, the fight against urban elitism, and the redistribution of wealth, although often with contradictory and catastrophic consequences.

When Fidel Castro seized power in 1959, a considerable portion of Havana’s population—especially from the middle and upper classes—emigrated into exile, primarily to Florida. In their place, Havana was repopulated by campesinos brought from the interior of the country, many of whom were housed in the former mansions confiscated from the bourgeoisie. This forced relocation generated a culture shock: the new inhabitants, unfamiliar with the codes of urban life, felt uncomfortable in spaces they didn’t fully understand; some didn’t even know what a bidet was for. The revolution, by appropriating properties without compensation, unleashed a wave of resentment and social upheaval. The country, in its attempt to reinvent itself, saw its traditional structures dismantled, giving way to a chaos that, for many, was both a punishment and the consequence of a historical vendetta.

The history of the Castro regime is marked by a liturgy of silences and defenestrations

The Castro brothers consolidated their power through a series of political purges that systematically eliminated key figures of the Revolution, many of them Havana natives, such as Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada, who had the potential to succeed them. The history of the Castro regime is marked by a liturgy of silences and defenestrations. From the removal of President Manuel Urrutia in July 1959, the mysterious disappearance of Camilo Cienfuegos, and the arbitrary arrest of Commander Huber Matos, the continue reading

Castros initiated a strategy of absolute control, which involved marginalizing fellow revolutionaries who posed a threat to their one-man rule.

Over the decades, leaders such as Carlos Lage, Felipe Pérez Roque, and José Abrantes (all from Havana), and Carlos Aldana were removed from power without credible public explanations, victims of a system that punishes autonomy and popularity. Even Eusebio Leal Spengler, the cultured and revered historian of Havana, was quietly sidelined, and although he died—according to the authorities—of a painful illness, his Catholic faith and his cosmopolitan and cultural vision of the country not only contrasted with the military stubbornness of Castroism, but also distanced him from socialist dogma, which probably prevented him from rising to positions of greater influence.

These purges were not merely a response to political errors, but rather to a logic of structural distrust. Power in Cuba is not shared: it is inherited, monitored, and purified. The fall of each figure (the most recent being that of economist Alejandro Gil Fernández) is accompanied by a eulogy that sounds like an epitaph, and the ensuing silence is as eloquent as the accusation. In this context, the Revolution has become a closed space, where absolute loyalty to the Castro leadership is the only guarantee of permanence.

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Silent Hostility: The Price of Anti-Castro Exile

Immigration policy has oscillated between privilege and punishment

Hostility toward the anti-Castro exile isn’t always expressed through shouting. / Pedro Pan Group Archive

14ymedio, Rafael Bordao, Miami, 27 October 2025 — There is no exile without loss, but the anti-Castro Cuban exile has also carried a more subtle and corrosive form of loss: that of recognition. From the first days after the triumph of the Revolution, those who dared to dissent and leave the island were marked not only by the pain of separation, but by a persistent hostility disguised as indifference, suspicion, and silence.

Castro’s skillful and tenacious propaganda has managed to infiltrate the most intimate fabric of cultural and academic life in the United States, Latin America, and Europe. In universities, at film festivals, in publishing houses, and in the media, the official narrative has been repeated so effectively that the anti-Castro exile appears as an uncomfortable, almost anachronistic figure: the “worm,” the reactionary, those nostalgic for a past that, we are told, deserved to die.

In Spain, where the cultural left has embraced a romantic vision of the Cuban Revolution for decades, exiles have been received coldly, if not with outright animosity. They have been denied the right to complexity, to contradiction, to plural memory. But something is changing. The growing presence of Cubans in Spanish territory has begun to erode this monolithic narrative. Direct experience, human closeness, and the voice of those who have experienced repression and scarcity are opening cracks in the wall of propaganda.

Exile is not just a wound: it is also a form of resistance.

In the United States, paradoxically, where many exiles found refuge, they have also faced the weight of suspicion. Immigration policy has oscillated between privilege and punishment, and new exiles, especially those who continue reading

arrive after denouncing the regime, face a system that demands proof of suffering while denying them empathy.

Hostility toward the anti-Castro exile isn’t always expressed in shouts. Sometimes it is omission from textbooks, exclusion from academic panels, mockery in intellectual circles. It is the silence surrounding their testimonies, the discomfort their presence provokes.

But exile is not just a wound: it is also a form of resistance. Every voice that rises against the single narrative, every story told from a fractured perspective, every gesture of memory that defies propaganda, is an act of dignity. And that dignity, though often ignored, is what sustains the truth in the face of oblivion.

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“The Hippies’ Gathering,” that Fateful 25th of September 1968 in Havana

The experience of being treated like criminals for the simple fact of living freely crudely revealed to us the true face of tyranny.

Act of repudiation in Havana in 1980, against the Mariel exiles. The sign reads: “Out With the Scum!” / Cubadebate

14ymedio, Rafael Bordeo, Miami, 25 September 2025 — This September 25th marks the 57th anniversary of the incident in which thousands of young people were rounded up from the streets and restaurants while enjoying Havana’s nightlife. We were all arrested without committing any crime. We were taken directly to State Security, booked without charges or explanation, and after three days of uncertainty, we were dispersed among prisons and farms in the province of Pinar del Río.

We were accused—in this ideological hunt disguised as public order—of “improper conduct,” a law that didn’t exist and of which not even the lawyers were aware of. And all of this happened in Havana’s Vedado area: La Rampa, the Capri Hotel, the Coppelia ice cream parlor, the Rivero Funeral Home cafeteria, and in nearby cafes, places that until then had been refuges of freedom and expression.

Castro took advantage of the fact that the United States was reeling from the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, that Paris was burning with student strikes, and that Russian tanks—with Havana’s approval—had invaded Czechoslovakia. All these international events, in addition to the Tlatelolco massacre—which shook Mexico on October 2, a week after the raids in Havana—meant that very few outside of Cuba were aware of this human rights violation committed (like so many others) by the Castro dictatorship, which was beginning to radicalize with the USSR.

I was imprisoned for a year and 16 days for standing on the corner of 21st and O (on the Capri sidewalk, across from the Los Andes restaurant) watching the happy passersby strolling along. The reason for this unexpected arrest was our youth: our love of American music, foreign fashion, free love, and our growing hair. We wanted to reclaim what had been taken from us: freedom, chewing gum, Pall-Mall cigars, Dunhills, Chesterfields, Levi’s Strauss blue jeans, Paul Anka and Sonny & Cheer records. And they forbade us (although we never obeyed them) from listening to the music that all the young people of the world were listening to: The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Beach Boys, The Doors, continue reading

The Byrds, The Supremes, The Mamas and the Papas, Stevie Wonder, Simon and Garfunkel, etc. They abolished all Hollywood films to show Russian films full of depressing misery. Then came Japanese, French, and Italian films to ease the pressure on the capital’s rebellious youth.

When the events at the Peruvian Embassy in Havana broke out in 1980, followed by the Mariel boatlift, we didn’t hesitate. We jumped at the possibility of another destination.

That mass arrest on September 25, 1968, failed to tame our attitude; on the contrary, it inflamed it even more strongly. For many of us, the experience of being treated like criminals for the simple fact of living freely—of listening to forbidden music, dressing as we pleased, or thinking without commands—crudely revealed the true face of tyranny. What was intended to be a lesson in obedience became a school of resistance. The humiliation, the confinement, the legal arbitrariness made us understand that there was no place for us in that social experiment, which called us “the new man” while denying us the right to be simply human.

So when the events at the Peruvian Embassy in Havana erupted in 1980, followed by the Mariel boatlift, we didn’t hesitate. We leapt at the possibility of another destiny, escaping from that hellish laboratory where we’d been used as ideological guinea pigs. The revolution that promised redemption had turned us into suspects for our love of freedom, and our only way out was to flee toward it.

In the country that welcomed us, we were finally able to breathe without fear, rebuild our lives, and recover the dreams they had tried to steal from us. We weren’t traitors or deserters: we were survivors of a utopia that had become a prison. And although exile brought its own wounds, it also gave us the opportunity to recount what we had experienced, to turn pain into memory and memory into testimony. Because if we learned anything during those years of repression, it was that freedom is not begged for: it is won, defended, and honored by telling the truth.

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