Category: Yoani Sanchez

The city’s portals display objects rescued from trash piles

14ymedio, Yoani Sánchez, Havana, March 19, 2026 / Caruso wakes me up. The rooster in my neighborhood has lost track of time; at three in the morning, he lets out a loud, clear crow that pulls me out of bed. He’s been marking our awakenings for years, and he’s probably the son or grandson of that first Caruso, as my husband and I christened him when we felt his power and richness of tone. We don’t know how he’s managed to survive in a country where chicken soup is the dream of many, but there he is, getting ahead of the sun each day.

This Wednesday I have a complicated mission. I have to go to a market near the Capitol Building in Havana to buy some welding rods and a few meters of Royal Cord cable. In Cuba, anyone who doesn’t know something about masonry, DIY, and electricity is doomed. Most repairs depend on doing them yourself, and the purchase of supplies for any renovation is the responsibility of the person doing it. So, I’ve had to learn the grit numbers of sandpaper for wood or metal, the basics of water pipe thermofusion, and some electrical fundamentals, so they don’t try to sell me 14-gauge wire as if it were 12-gauge.

I don’t take a raincoat even though rain is forecast. If I got caught in yesterday’s downpour… I won’t get caught today, I tell myself. I stand in Rancho Boyeros and hold out my arm. There are two possible signals. Thumb pointing inward means I’m going to Central Havana, index finger pointing outward means I’m heading to Vedado. But no one stops, even though I do both. I walk. I take Ayestarán for a while and turn onto 20 de Mayo. A friend’s daughter is having a birthday, and her mother wants to make her a cold salad with sausages. She’s entrusted me with the task of getting those darn hot dogs, which are scarce these days.

There is a state-run dollar store at Infanta and Santa Marta where I’ve been told I might find it. Since the sale of food and basic goods in foreign currency began, these markets have been at the center of popular discontent. Paying salaries in Cuban pesos and requiring US dollars to buy everyday necessities doesn’t align with what we hear continue reading

The pot-banging protests reach the neighborhoods where military personnel, officials and state journalists, “comuñangas” and “sarampionosos” reside

14ymedio, Yoani Sánchez, Havana, March 20 2026 — “Hold on tight,” the electric tricycle driver manages to say to me before the whole vehicle lurches violently over a pothole. I was lucky, because I managed to board the electric taxi before it started to drizzle again. The young man warns me that this is the last trip he’ll make, that he hasn’t been able to charge the battery due to lack of electricity. “I’m from block five, they don’t give us a break,” he concludes.

The Havana where I grew up used to be divided into municipalities and neighborhoods, but now we’re defined by the blocks the Electric Union has designed for its blackout schedules. I’m no longer from Nuevo Vedado; now I’m from Block 4. When the power goes out, my obsession is to walk as far as I can to get away from the “dark side.” There are days when I take very strange routes, because when I get to a place, the power goes out there too, or I get told the lights have come on back at home, and I decide to return immediately.

My neighbors say we live in the “shit-eaters’ block.” The number of hours without power isn’t the same for all neighborhoods. If there’s a pot-banging protest or a popular demonstration, chances are they’ll restore electricity to that part of the city shortly afterward, and the outages won’t be as long in the following days. My neighborhood has a reputation for being peaceful. When the concrete blocks that characterize it started springing up everywhere, its initial inhabitants were people integrated into the system. For the most part, military personnel, government officials, and state journalists occupied these apartments.

There are no docile areas left in this country. Popular anger knows no postal codes or political-administrative divisions.

But even with an initial proportion of “comuñangas”* and “sarampionosos”* residents, this area has repeatedly erupted in recent days. There are no docile areas left continue reading

Now you can find out who has family abroad and has sent them a rechargeable lamp, who bought a generator that hums when it starts up, and who achieved their dream of owning a solar panel.

14ymedio, Yoani Sánchez, Havana, 17 March 2026 — I leave early. Dawn is my ally because I know Havana wakes up later and later. This Tuesday, there are additional reasons to stay in bed: the city is paralyzed because the National Power System went down yesterday afternoon. Offices have closed, the electric tricycles that transport passengers have run out of battery power, and internet access is a mere whisper, only available on a few very central corners or by climbing to higher ground.

Last night the darkness was profound, but the city no longer looks like it did during the Special Period, when the blackouts would hit and people wouldn’t even have candles. Now you can tell who has family abroad and has sent them a rechargeable lamp, who bought a generator that hums when it starts and fills the building with the smell of burning fuel, and who achieved the dream we all long to fulfill these days: a solar panel.

On the 15th floor of that building, it’s clear they have resources. The whole living room is lit up, and I even notice a television on. Over here, however, the 12-story building on the corner is quite dull. They’ve always been the poorest in the neighborhood because those apartments weren’t given to members of the Ministry of the Armed Forces, nor to pilots, and certainly not to foreign affairs employees. They were workers for an institution with fewer privileges, and even today, they bear more burdens of poverty than the rest of the community.

I go to bed early because there’s not much to do at night without electricity. No one in my neighborhood has parties anymore.

I go to bed early because there’s not much to do on nights without electricity. No one in my neighborhood has parties anymore. Before, there were rumbas on Saturdays, drumming for the saints that lasted for hours, and the get-togethers we used to have in our apartment, even though all the guests had to climb the 14 flights of stairs because of the power outage. But not anymore. Now nobody’s in the mood for celebrations. There’s a feeling of mourning everywhere, but this funeral drags on too long, and it seems like the deceased refuses to be buried.

I wake up, gulp down my unsweetened coffee, and head out. I walk down Ayestarán Street. A man follows me for a few blocks, but I can’t tell if he’s with the political police or a stalker. I speed up and lose him, while I’m inspired by the story of a skinny, hungry, and tenacious marathon runner. His face is not on any banknotes, he doesn’t receive any official tributes, but I remember him every day of my life. My family calls me “Andarina Sánchez” to tease me about our similarities. We’re both adept at the same language: walking; at a way of knowing the world: traversing it on foot.

I love persevering people, and Félix de la Caridad Carvajal y Soto—mailman, billboard man, and athlete—embodies the perseverance I try to emulate every day of my life. So, thinking of Andarín Carvajal, I venture into Los Sitios. A grandmother has taken her grandson to elementary school, and the principal tells her no, she has to take him back home because “there are no classes today; the teachers couldn’t come because they don’t have electricity or water at home.” I see a pout on the little boy’s face, and it saddens me. I’ve always been “punctual”; a canceled school day was a tragedy for me.

I progress on to the ruins of the ISDi. I continue along Belascoaín until I turn onto Zanja. An elderly woman grumbles, annoyed by the lack of electricity, and suddenly bursts into a shout: “But the communists do have electricity!” It’s just the two of us on that stretch of street, but she shouts that phrase again with a rage that makes her hair shake and her chin tremble. It starts to rain. Just what I needed.

They say that when Andarín Carvajal arrived in St. Louis, USA, to compete in the Olympic Games, he showed up at the starting line wearing long pants and the boots he used as a mail carrier. Today I went out without an umbrella and in a dress that has left my legs at the mercy of the mosquitoes. Big mistake. I can’t afford to let dengue fever cross my path again. The last time it almost killed me. I couldn’t sit down for weeks because of the pain. Just remembering it makes me shudder.

People talk about hard, unadulterated politics. There’s no time for everyday conversation; we’re all walking parliaments.

Near Galiano, a pedicab driver is explaining to another that “Marx was a lazy bum and never worked a day in his life.” In a city without electricity and almost no public transportation, I’m constantly surprised by the topics people discuss. And no, it’s no longer the weather or how bad the asphalt is. People talk about hard, unadulterated politics. There’s no time for everyday conversations; we’re all walking parliaments, all of us have graduated as leaders and orators these days.

I’m walking through Fraternity Park when the downpour announces, “Here I am.” I try to catch one of the electric tricycles that make the trip back to my house, but there aren’t any. After waiting a long time, one finally appears in the rain. It’s missing a passenger, and the driver asks me for 300 pesos to Boyeros and Tulipán. I get in, soaked, and apologize to the other passengers, whom I inevitably drench. Andarín Carvajal would have already stripped down completely naked and continued walking along Reina Street and then Carlos III, on his way back. But today I haven’t been a good disciple of the tireless adopted son of San Antonio de los Baños.

As I get off the tricycle, I wish the other passengers a good day—”if that’s even possible under these circumstances,” I add. A chorus of indignation erupts. A young man dressed as a firefighter raises his voice even more, saying, “In this country, I don’t see that happening.”

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Havana Chronicles

What Does Collapse Smell Like?

The Death Throes of ‘Granma’, the Mouthpiece of a Regime Cornered by Crisis

The Anxiety of the Disconnected Cuban

One Mella, Three Mellas, Life in Cuba Is Measured in Thousands of Pesos

It Is Forbidden To Leave Home in Cuba Today Because It Is a “Counter-Revolutionary Day”

Vedado, the Heart of Havana’s Nightlife, Is Now Converted Into a Desert

Havana, in Critical Condition

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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.

The regime is mobilizing all its security forces with the order of “zero impunity” for the demonstrations

14ymedio, Havana, March 15, 2026 — The regime has gone on high alert and increased its deployments following the intensification of protests in Cuba, especially the massive demonstration in Morón. Police are mobilizing operations throughout the country to prevent the demonstrations that have been taking place for more than a week.

This Sunday, Yoani Sánchez, director of 14ymedio, is surrounded by a State Security police operation that prevents her from leaving her home. In a video she recorded herself, an officer, dressed in civilian clothes and with his face completely covered, explains the prohibition to her without giving a concrete reason.

“Tell me right here in front of the camera,” the journalist snaps, to which the man replies, “Is it necessary?” She continues, “Yes, it is necessary, because you’re violating my rights. I’m a citizen who hasn’t committed any crimes, hasn’t been tried in court, doesn’t have a restraining order or house arrest, so why won’t you let me go out? Taking all tha into account, what’s the reason? Why can’t I leave?” The officer, nervous, responds, “All I can tell you is that you can’t leave.”

When Sánchez asks him if he might be a thug or a criminal, the subject affirms, and to the question who is sending him, he answers: “You know who it is.”

When questioned about his identity, the individual refuses to answer, and when Sánchez asks him if he might be a thug or a criminal, the subject affirms, and to question who is sending him, he answers: “You know who he is.”

President Díaz-Canel’s response to the protests has been to label them “vandalism” for which “there will be no impunity.” Today, the National Police clearly illustrate these intimidating words—they do have electricity, fuel, and resources, as their own publications show—with the arrogant display continue reading

Living in this city comes with water anxiety.

14ymedio, Yoani Sánchez, Havana, March 12, 2026 –  We will have two days without water pumped in Havana. The news, barely announced in the official media, is confirmed by the dry pipes and silent sinks. In my building, most apartments have a storage tank to last when the lack of electricity prevents pumping from the cistern. But this time it’s different. There is a sense of the end and of living through an extreme period in which we may never again hear the roar of the motor that pumps the water up to the rooftop tank.

I don’t remember a single moment in my life in Havana when water wasn’t a concern. Living in this city comes with water anxiety. I, like every Cuban, am obsessed with saving every last drop. Under the kitchen counter, I have all sorts of containers. Bottles, buckets, jugs, and even a basin that always has to be full. If I could, I would turn anything into an artificial reservoir for when the pipes break down, the aqueduct shuts off, and fuel shortages paralyze the pumps. Years ago, we also created a rainwater harvesting system on the terrace of our apartment.

“Be like water,” Bruce Lee, one of my childhood idols, used to say. I was about seven or eight years old and would rush home from pushing a wheelbarrow with a tank from a street corner in Central Havana to sit in front of the television and watch that small man move like a wave, powerful and effective. There he was, silent and clean-shaven, in a world that, for me, was full of authoritarian beards and slogans shouted at the top of one’s lungs. “Take a bath, Yoani, and don’t waste the water you use; we have to flush the toilet,” my grandmother would tell me from the kitchen. “You have the bucket and the little pitcher ready,” she would emphasize.

The smell of burning garbage has returned after a few days’ respite.

Then I went to the school in the countryside and took with me a photo of that martial arts expert. With his narrow waist, he looked at me from the hostel locker as we counted the days when the water didn’t come and the reddish earth accumulated under our fingernails and on our sheets. He, with his gesture, called me to fluidity, and I was stuck in a social experiment where fungus multiplied on my feet and hunger gnawed in my stomach. “Take the shape of what surrounds you,” he seemed to suggest from his jet-black hair, already fading from the sun streaming through the blinds.

“Be like water,” I told myself, when they closed the hostel bathroom, overflowing with filth, because for a whole eleven days the precious liquid hadn’t reached that fourth floor. The day I left, I placed the Bruce Lee poster near my bunk and walked a good stretch along that Alquízar road, surrounded by parched fields where Fidel Castro’s latest folly, the Food Plan, was trying to materialize: the planting of bananas with a microjet system that sucked up the water meant for our showers and the sweet potatoes of the local farmers.

This Thursday in March, I woke up humming a song. “I’ll tell you, I came from a strange world,” I said to myself, the moment my feet touched the floor in the middle of a blackout. The smell of burning garbage has returned after a few days’ respite. Last night, we heard the echoes of a pot-banging protest in the Lawton area. The wind carried the clanging and the sound of continue reading

shouts from a completely dark area. Noise, like water, has strange ways of spreading. Sometimes it arrives intermittently, and other times it seems as if the pot is only a few meters away, even though someone is banging it in another municipality. During the protests of 11 July 2021, those roars of euphoria continued to reach us even in the dead of night.

The water tank in my building is falling apart. When the cistern on the ground floor is full, it can fill the rooftop tank two and a half times. But the imposing structure, which sets this concrete block apart from others in the area and gives it a certain air of an airport control tower, is crumbling. It has supplied water to more than 140 apartments for four decades, and in all that time, it hasn’t received a single repair. Now the steel is exposed on its exterior, and the ship’s ladder that led to its top has lost some of its steps to rust.

The last one to go down that structure was my husband, Reinaldo. As he descended, the steps crumbled beneath his feet. Later, a crew came to assess the damage and estimated that repairing the building’s water tank would cost at least three million pesos. That was a couple of years ago, so it’s surely worth double… or triple that now. In that time, it has continued to leak fragments. A multi-family building has large “no man’s land” areas that the Cuban state long ago abandoned, and the residents can’t afford to maintain them. The plumbing system is one of the most affected in these buildings, which copied Eastern European architecture in this tropical Havana.

My neighbor says it won’t be long now, that we have maybe two weeks left until the whole regime collapses and things “start to get better.” I’m not as optimistic as she is. Sometimes I have nightmares about the rooftop water tank cracking like a pumpkin, and I don’t manage to warn the people walking down below in time. Other times I dream that I’m searching for and can’t find any more jugs, basins, or buckets to fill. An unexpected leak empties all my supplies, and I can only manage to store what fits in the palm of my hand.

“Be like water,” Bruce Lee repeats to me from somewhere deep within my memory. But how can I take shape and adapt to a world as strange as this one we inhabit? How can I endure in this city when the pipes are dry and the hum of the pump that fills the decaying colossus above our heads is no longer audible?

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Chronicles
What Does Collapse Smell Like?

The Death Throes of ‘Granma’, the Mouthpiece of a Regime Cornered by Crisis

The Anxiety of the Disconnected Cuban

One Mella, Three Mellas, Life in Cuba Is Measured in Thousands of Pesos

It Is Forbidden To Leave Home in Cuba Today Because It Is a “Counter-Revolutionary Day”

Vedado, the Heart of Havana’s Nightlife, Is Now Converted Into a Desert

Havana, in Critical Condition

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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.

Burnt garbage, sewage, lack of cleanliness: finding a treat for your nose is a difficult task these days in Cuba

14ymedio, Yoani Sánchez, Havana, March 7, 2026 —  I take a mint leaf from the balcony and squeeze it between my fingers before adding it to the water I am going to drink. On my hands lingers a fresh and hopeful aroma. Entertaining the nose is a difficult task these times we are living in, in Cuba. The country’s collapse smells of burning garbage, sewage water, and a lack of cleanliness. Every pleasant scent is a rare and invaluable reward for the senses

It’s four in the morning and I jump out of bed. The electricity has returned after a blackout that began the previous afternoon. As soon as I get up, I head to the rooftop. My two dogs, the stars, and me. The city sleeps, and I scan the horizon. Havana no longer smells the same. At this hour, I’m hit by the stench of the garbage that piles up everywhere, and from the nearby Zoo on 26th Street, I hear the desperate roar of a lion. It must be hungry.

When I was a girl and would visit my relatives in the small towns of Villa Clara and Cienfuegos, when I returned to the capital the smell would hit me. This city always had a particular aroma. The manufactured gas service installed in many homes, the countless vehicles that traveled its streets, and the waters of the bay mixed with the oil that spilled into it, made the place where I was born and raised smell of industrial oils and tar. I never thought I would miss that stench.

Even the money smells of misery. It has a musty stench, as if it had been stored in a dark, filthy cave.

Havana now has another “olfactory signature.” A doorway I used to pass through when walking along Reina Street in Central Havana has become a public urinal that makes me hold my breath whenever I walk by. from the Ultra store wafts a stench, the foul odor of abandonment. The city is dotted with these places that once closed their doors and began to decay rapidly. Large markets, banks, cinemas, and motels that used to smell of freshly brewed coffee, fried food, and air conditioning now only exude a foul odor.

Even the money smells of misery. It has a musty stench, as if it had been stored in a dark, filthy cave. People line up for hours in front of ATMs to withdraw a little cash. Often the machine breaks down or shuts down continue reading

The print version of the Communist Party newspaper will be published only once a week

14ymedio, Yoani Sánchez, Havana, 2 March 2026 — I leave my house and come across a woman placing food for a stray cat on a page of the Granma newspaper, a scene that will soon disappear in a country where the official organ of the Communist Party is now printed only once a week. With its few pages and triumphalist headlines, the Cuban regime’s main propaganda outlet is the latest victim of the energy crisis hitting the island. But its reduction, more than a loss of information, is a sign of the end of a model of indoctrination

I leave Rancho Boyeros Avenue behind and approach the Havana Printing Plant, one of the main printing facilities for periodicals in Cuba. Several windows are missing from the upper floor, and neglect seems to pervade a place that was once the heart of the country’s information policy. The facade is dirty here and there, and from inside, the sounds of the machines where paper and ink once combined to give shape to official statements, lengthy speeches, and calls to resistance are gone.

For a system that has based its control primarily on repression and propaganda, the current state of its official media represents a rapid loss of social influence. My curiosity leads me to walk around the building, and I don’t see a soul entering or leaving. The nearby institutional parking lot is filled with broken-down cars. Some vehicles have been sitting out in the open for years, never driven on the streets of Havana. The nearby headquarters of the newspaper Juventud Rebelde, which resembles a fish stall, also shows no signs of activity. continue reading

Nothing that depends on internet access is guaranteed on the Island

14ymedio, Yoani Sánchez, Havana, February 28, 2026 – I walk to the corner of the rooftop, raise my arm, and lean forward. A signal bar appears on my phone screen. All the accumulated messages begin to appear, and just as many struggle to come in. The only sound is the hum of a nearby generator in a ministry. The neighborhood falls silent in the blackout, heavier and denser than the peace of the graves.

Nothing that depends on internet access is guaranteed in Cuba. Local mobile apps, which until a few years ago organized food deliveries, passenger transport, or contact with construction workers, are useless most of the time. Only in the early morning hours does web browsing seem to loosen up somewhat and flow, but who would think of ordering a pizza at four in the morning? What’s the point of hiring a plumber shortly after midnight?

There are neighborhoods and then there are neighborhoods. A relative who lives in Vedado tells me I can go to her house anytime to check my email. Hers is a privileged zone. There are hardly any blackouts because it’s connected to a “hospital circuit” that ran out of fuel a while ago to power its generators and must maintain the lights in the surrounding houses, even when all of Havana is in darkness. I do the math: about a forty-minute walk there, another forty minutes to get back. Almost an hour and a half just to download my emails.

Sometimes I miss the days of telegrams. When the postman’s booming voice called out a name in the tenement where I lived, we all knew it was something brief, quick, and probably urgent. People wrote short sentences, without prepositions or compound verbs. Every word cost money, and you couldn’t waste it on embellishments. “Aunt dead, funeral tomorrow”; “Born, eight pounds”; “No wedding, groom left”; or “Send money for the wake.” That’s how we found out about the most important things.

But now, no. Now there are memes to watch, emails loaded with multi-megabyte images sent from all over the world, Valentine’s Day cards that take minutes to download, audio recordings a friend made on the Madrid metro, taking his time, forgetting that we envy the speed at which smoke signals travel. There are reels, heated debates to follow on Facebook, discussions where everyone wants to have the last word, and videos, with faces practically glued to the lens, filmed inside cars parked outside enormous shopping malls in Miami or Tampa.

Anxiety is growing. We’re not aware, nor could we be. The so-called FOMO (fear of missing out ) has people in this city climbing water tanks to see if they can get a 4G signal and those blessed Facebook posts will finally load on their phones. It was one thing when we didn’t know what we were missing, and quite another now, when the abysmal telecommunications service robs us of the internet users we’ve become, that we have constructed through years of social media presence. More than a deficiency, this is an amputation. continue reading

An architect friend has arrived in Cuba after more than a decade living in Europe to bury her mother. Now she has to arrange for someone to care for her father, who has serious mobility issues and is almost 80 years old. But most of her contacts with possible candidates for the position, which she will pay in euros, are through mobile phones and WhatsApp. Having lost all experience dealing with Cuba’s slow internet speeds, my friend curses at her phone screen every time she dials and gets the recording that says “the number you are calling is switched off or out of coverage,” one of the many ways the state monopoly Etecsa masks its inefficiency.

The architect, who emigrated, has to finish and deliver a project she was asked to complete on the other side of the Atlantic. Her employers can’t seem to understand that, by boarding that plane to this island, she’s entered a kind of Faraday cage where communication is either unreliable or impossible. Her finished sketches are stuck in Havana, waiting for the longed-for bars of connectivity to appear on her phone. But my friend has lost the capacity to wait. She says that time is worthless here and that every minute that passes is money lost.

I can’t help her much. The Wi-Fi hotspot closest to our house no longer works. After the initial excitement surrounding these wireless parks, the arrival of mobile internet and the lack of maintenance have little by little shut them down. Mobile internet service began in December 2018, and we thought it was time to abandon the hard benches in public squares where the darkness and the threat of muggers forced us to keep one eye on the screen and the other constantly scanning our surroundings.

This Wednesday I visited several of those Wi-Fi hotspots. Some lost their antennas a while ago, and in others, the limited bandwidth has been absorbed by nearby residents who installed antennas that extend the wireless signal into their living rooms, collapsing the service for everyone else. However, the biggest problem now is getting the recharge cards that allow access to the Nauta portal with a username and password.

“Do you have Wi-Fi access cards?” I ask a telecommunications agent who, until recently, made a living selling mobile phone top-ups and other Etecsa services. “No, those haven’t been available for a while now, except that they’re selling them at some main offices,” he tells me. To offset the drop in sales, the man has set up a makeshift stand where he also sells soft drinks, beer, and cookies. If you can’t get online, at least have a drink and something to eat, seems to be the new motto of his tiny business.

At the Etecsa office on Obispo Street, they tell me they’ve run out of Wi-Fi cards. My relative from Vedado isn’t home so I can sit on her sofa and download my emails, so I decide to go back home. On the stairs, I run into my architect friend who is, quite literally, climbing the walls in despair. She hasn’t been able to check her LinkedIn account for over a week.

I go up to the rooftop. I put my phone in a corner and get to work in my little garden. An hour later, I hear a familiar sound. I’ve just received my first WhatsApp message of the day. Faraday, this time, I’ve beaten you.

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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.

Until we manage to free every last prisoner of conscience remaining behind bars, any dialogue will remain a charade.

14ymedio, Yoani Sánchez, Generation Y, Havana, February 26, 2026 — Rare is the day with no new speculation about supposed negotiations between Washington and Havana. The rumor spreads through digital portals, seeps into conversations at the bodega, and resurfaces, with embellishments, on social medio. On the streets of Cuba, people ask if it’s true that the two governments are talking and that a roadmap for a democratic transition on the island will soon see the light of day. However, the rumors advance on one track while stubborn reality only regresses on another.

We Cubans have learned to be wary. Not out of cynicism, but out of experience. Too many times, a new process of transformation has been announced when that ends up being merely a change of tone, a reversible concession, or a promise that evaporates in a few weeks. If real talks are taking place, if these aren’t just trial balloons floated to gauge reactions, then they should be accompanied by clear, visible signs and, above all, irreversible steps toward freedom.

Rumors advance in one direction, while stubborn reality only retreats in another.

The first of these necessary movements brooks no embellishment or euphemism: the release of all political prisoners. More than a thousand people are currently imprisoned in Cuba for thinking differently, demonstrating peacefully, or publishing an inconvenient text on the internet. This is not about temporary releases, parole, or disguised exile, but about a full amnesty, without threats or subsequent surveillance. Until every last prisoner of conscience remains behind bars, any dialogue will be nothing more than a charade.

Another indispensable proof would be the genuine decriminalization of dissent and the dismantling of the political police apparatus. Cosmetic legal changes are not enough if citizens continue to know that expressing an opinion can cost them their job, career, or freedom. Without this framework of fear, built on summonses, acts of repudiation, and coercive legal proceedings, there is no honest transformation, only a charade. continue reading

Until a couple of years ago, a Cuban thousand peso bill was a rare sight.

14ymedio, Yoani Sánchez, Havana, 24 February 2026 — Until a couple of years ago, a thousand Cuban peso bill was a rare sight. We saw them only a few times, and vendors would shake their heads if they had to give change for such a large sum. But on the island of inflation, handing over the face of Julio Antonio Mella now to buy something no longer surprises, impresses, or much less is synonymous with high purchasing power. Paper is just paper.

This Monday I’m venturing into Calzada del Cerro. I’ve been told that a shop selling ornamental plants also has fertilizer that I can use for the garden I’m preparing on my terrace in anticipation of the “zero option.” It is a row of still-tiny plants that could add some flavor to our food if garlic and onions stop arriving at the market, if life is paralyzed in Havana to the point where a bit of cilantro becomes an unattainable dream, or if people start fighting over a head of lettuce.

I will have what I can grow. Which is very little, given that apart from the schools-in-the-countryside I attended and the pre-university course I took in a dilapidated building in the middle of the fields of Alquízar, now in the province of Artemisa, my agricultural knowledge is very limited. I know how to weed and pull up the plants when they’re ready to be harvested. All that training to become the “New Man,” who could be self-sufficient, was nothing more than a caricature of education. We pretended we could survive on our own two feet, and we couldn’t even survive without the Soviet Union.

On the corner of Rancho Boyeros and Calzada del Cerro, there is a broken electric tricycle. Just because these vehicles don’t need gasoline doesn’t mean they’re immune to the constant potholes and uneven surfaces of Havana’s streets. The man tells me his name is Roly, and that he delivers packages for one of those agencies that brings goods from Miami. He says that due to a lack of fuel, they’ve lost almost their entire fleet of cars continue reading

“It is the day of the execution (sic) of the Brothers to the Rescue planes,” the State Security agent justifies himself.

14ymedio, Yoani Sánchez, Havana, February 24, 2026 – A man in the basement of our building says that today is a “counterrevolutionary day,” and that’s why we can’t go out. Wearing a hat, dark glasses, and a thick coat, the State Security agent briefly shows us his ID to warn us that he’s there to prevent us from passing through the door of this concrete block. There are likely others deployed around the block and a police patrol car parked nearby. It is bitterly cold, with dry gusts of wind, and sewage is dripping from the roof above the entrance, very close to the security guard. The atmosphere couldn’t be more hostile today for the disciplined repressor.

In the last month, this is the third operation around our building. Although one might think we’ve integrated it into our daily routine, we continue to be surprised that resources are being spent on two peaceful journalists, with no weapon other than words. Just a few meters from where the political police agent is standing stretches one of the four enormous garbage dumps that surround our building. Symbolically, the mountain of waste rises in front of a sculpture that recreates the Cuban flag. Blue stripes here, filth there. A red triangle on this side, stinking garbage on the other.

When the agent approached Reinaldo Escobar around eight in the morning, he asked him if he knew what day it was. “An important date in our wars of independence,” replied this sharp-tongued man with whom I’ve lived for 33 years. “No, no, today is the day of the Brothers to the Rescue planes being shot down,” the seguroso [security guard] pointed out with an air of authority . The fear that activists and independent journalists will take to the streets and commemorate the events of 24 February 1996, is the reason we’re forbidden to set foot outside. They’ve spent resources, gasoline, and manpower to corner two citizens in the middle of a city paralyzed by state neglect and fuel shortages.

My neighbors aren’t accustomed to it either. When we have a police operation downstairs, the informal street vendors can barely offer continue reading

Without transportation and without gasoline, La Rampa, 23rd Street, Coppelia and other iconic places suffer from the crisis affecting the entire country

14ymedio, Yoani Sánchez, Havana, Februay 22, 2016 — It’s Saturday and I’m heading out to Vedado. Just a few years ago, the combination of this day of the week with La Rampa, 23rd Street, and the area around the Hotel Habana Libre and the Coppelia ice cream parlor, for years mean fun, meeting up with friends and ending the night enjoying some shot. But this city no lonver exists. Now, the avenues are almost deserted, the clubs remain closed, and the familiar faces and names that once defined every corner have left. The only ones who remain are those who couldn’t leave.

I head through the La Timba neighborhood until I reach the edge of Revolution Square. Forget about catching a ride to the vicinity of avenida de los Presidentes. I’ll do the whole trip on foot. Paseo Street is deserted at ten in the morning. On a lamppost, someone has dared to hang a sign that says “Gasoline” and a cell phone number. I imagine that if I call, they’ll tell me the price of that liquid which, right now, monopolizes the dreams and anxieties of the entire country. Yesterday, a neighbor told me he had a liter of premium for 4,000 pesos, but it must have gone up by now. I imagine that if I call they’ll tell me the price of that liquid which, right now, monopolizes the dreams and anxieties of the entire country.

On one corner, several gaudy pink convertibles participate in the filming of a music video. The contrast is brutal. The passengers smile at the camera from the peculiar row of gleaming vehicles just a few meters from a vast garbage dump. As I watch the spectacle, a mosquito bites my ankle, a patch of skin I forgot to treat with repellent. Insecticides have become an inseparable part of our “war kit” before leaving home. We’re in a constant battle to avoid catching one of the arboviruses that are plaguing us.

My husband has been suffering for months from the aftereffects of chikungunya. Swollen hands, joint pain, weakness, and a slow gait that has become the hallmark of those who have had the disease. Ahead of me continue reading

, on D Street, a woman walks with that robotic gait the illness has left her with. I can’t help but recall scenes from the film Juan de los muertos [Juan of the Dead], with a city full of zombies attacking those who are still breathing. But in Havana, there are no living people left to attack; we are all, in one way or another, already cadavers.

I am standing in front of Cuba’s tallest building. One would expect the areas around the Iberostar Selection Hotel, also known as Torre K, would be bustling with the comings and goings of taxis, tourists, and tour guides, but there’s nothing. The completely empty entrance lends an air of abandonment to this ugly block of concrete and glass. Only one man, delirious and shouting incoherent phrases, disturbs the lethargy that stretches along this stretch of sidewalk to what was once Havana’s most vibrant corner: 23rd and L.

I cross to the other side of the left atrium of the heart of Vedado, even though the pedestrian light is still red. It doesn’t matter. I could dance for a while in the middle of the popular intersection and I wouldn’t be in any danger of being run over. Two teenagers pass by on their scooters , and another lunatic waves his arms like the blades of a fan in front of the Yara movie theater. Losing your mind is easy in a reality that challenges us with new absurdities every day. The friends who haven’t left live on pills that anesthetize them. “I don’t want to go crazy,” a neighbor repeats to me while showing me the blister pack of tiny pills she carries in her wallet.

I reach Infanta Street. It smells of urine. I sit down in a doorway across from Radio Progreso. Within minutes, several elderly people file past, begging for money. A nearby business has hired two burly security guards who prevent the beggars from interacting with their customers. A family of tourists, the first I’ve seen on my journey, approaches to read the restaurant menu. The woman asks the employee if he can help her get internet access because the SIM card she bought from Etecsa “isn’t working.” The man explains that the service is unreliable and there are times of day when it doesn’t work. Her face is a poem: she doesn’t understand why she was charged for something that doesn’t work.

A gleaming yellow excavator drives past me. It’s the first vehicle I’ve seen in several minutes of sitting here. Five men are riding on the bucket. I’m going to have to ask my neighbor for one of those little pills to keep from going crazy.

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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.

The Cuban capital is living through its worst moments: trash on every corner, empty markets, sky-high prices, streets deserted because of the fuel crisis.

14ymedio, Yoani Sanchez, Havana, 20 February 2026 —  When a cyclone is approaching, the streets of Havana take on another velocity. The pace accelerates, vendors offer their merchandise with more urgency, and the small businesses rush to close before the winds start blowing. This Friday there is no hurricane expected, but the city I’m walking through feels like it is waiting for a monster greater than anything on the Saffir-Simpson scale. The fear isn’t from possible gusts, but from the total paralysis of a country run out of fuel.

At the Tulipán Street market, several stalls are already shut down because of the energy crisis. “Tomorrow I won’t come, we are in critical state,” a vendor shouts into his cellphone, his stand overflowing with goods imported just a few days ago. People prefer food that doesn’t need  refrigeration in fear that the blackouts, which have already multiplied in the last few hours, will keep getting worse until the whole city goes dark.

I put two packages of peanuts in the shell into my bag. They don’t need to stay cold, they’re pretty nutritious and, in case the gas service doesn’t work, it won’t be a great sacrifice to eat them raw. I leave the eggs even though I need them. They’re only selling them by the carton, 30 for 3,200 pesos, and I’m afraid they’ll spoil if the power outages drag on. I add some onions and a bunch of cilantro. The little I’ve bought costs me over 4,000 pesos, more than an average monthly pension.

A young guy jokes that soon we’ll have to come to the market with a wheelbarrow because the Cuban peso keeps losing value while prices keep climbing. I imagine myself pushing bills in one of those improvised carts that I used when I was a girl to help carry  water to my house in Centro Habana. Life has this way of bringing us back to a point we thought we’d left behind, and doing so in a way that makes us feel nostalgia for the days when we were carrying water instead of useless paper to nearly empty markets.

Every area I pass through gives the impression that a hand, from the sky, has dumped an enormous trash bin. The trash that accumulates on the street corners, forming mountains of cardboard, bags, and plastic, is added to the debris scattered everywhere. I can’t find a single square meter without some filth, break, or pothole. I feel a bit shattered myself. My calves ache from climbing up and down 14 flights of stairs because there is no electricity to power the elevator. I hurt my elbow lifting bags of soil to plant some herbs on my terrace, facing the “zero option,” and I sleep little at night because of the constant power outages, generating buzzing, clicking, and shouts that echo through the neighborhood.

Now, on the outskirts of the market, the rush is palpable. “Grab your last garlic here before I leave,” shouts a shirtless man, accompanied by a teenage girl. It is barely nine in the morning, so his threat to leave has nothing to do with the market’s opening hours. “I’m not coming back, take advantage now,” he emphasizes, in case anyone didn’t get that this is the last day he has transportation to make it to Estancia street, full of potholes and where, traditionally, if inspectors don’t raid it, the stalls sprawl out, selling everything from Chinese ointments to disposable razors to liquefied gas cylinders.

But today the movie is playing even faster. It is like those scenes shot in early movies filmed at fewer frames per second that when played back in our time give the idea of wind-up puppets frantically jerking from one side to the other. Now my neighbors and I seem to be “out of revolutions,” never better said. The scene could not be more starkly contrasting. Above, a picture-postcard blue sky invites calm, while below, we move nervously amidst squalor and despair.

A motorcycle zooms right by me because I’m walking in the street. The sidewalks are devastated and dangerous for your ankles. But the driver doesn’t yell an insult or ask sarcastically if I maybe have a license plate. A strange understanding of others, a willingness to empathize with each other in the face of the collapse we’re experiencing, seems to have spread around the market. In my dirty neighborhood, at least these days, “the noble and the villain, the great man and the worm dance and shake hands,” or more accurately: we all suffer together and try not to step on each other.

An old lady sidles up to me while I’m buying some tiny carnations with more leaves than petals. “Give me something to eat,” she says in a low voice. Her facial skin is so tight to the bone you can make out every tendon, every muscle underneath. You don’t even know anymore what counts as a decent handout. If I give her 50 pesos, will she feel insulted because it won’t even buy an egg? A hundred still too little for this old woman to eat something? Even being generous in these chaotic money times is difficult. You don’t know if you’re helping or humiliating someone with these worthless colored scraps that make up our national currency.

Also, there is a gray dust covering everything. It falls on our heads. It’s from the trash piles they’ve set on fire. If I look out from the balcony, I see them smoking here and there, dotting Havana’s landscape. The city smells like a medieval village where flames try to do what modern sanitation services are supposed to handle. A neighbor tells me her asthma attacks have multiplied, her eyes water all the time, and she locks herself in her room under the sheet hoping, the stench and smoke don’t reach her.

I hurry past the nearest mountain of trash closest to our building. Dominating the scene, on the sign over the Ministry of Transportation, it reads “hasta la victoria siempre.” A young guy is digging through the garbage. I wait for him to finish so I can take a photo. If poverty used to be more starkly visible among the elderly, now there’s a whole sector of Cuban children and teenagers whose faces bear the marks of hunger. They have that extreme thinness and yellowish complexion of someone who only eats small portions of poor-quality food every now and then.

I head home and pass a mipyme*-run shop. We’re in a blackout. The old garage converted into a little bodega looks like a dark cave. A customer complains he can’t pay electronically because there’s no power or data connection. The employee shrugs and says: “We’re lucky we’re even open, because who knows if we can be tomorrow.” An atmosphere of goodbye hangs over everything. No one knows for sure if the neighborhood store will open next week, if the guy with the electric tricycle hauling goods will have charged his battery, if the chronic patient in the nearby house will make it without transport to the emergency room. We’re all saying goodbye to each other, too, in fast-forward.

I get to the bottom of my concrete block. I joke with a neighbor who points out it is the third time today he’s seen me climbing the stairs. “I’m training for a marathon,” I tell him. Yes, I’m prepping for a long-distance run, though for the stretch ahead we need more inner strength than steady knees. Finally I make it upstairs. I look out. Smoke from another trash fire has emerged on the horizon. I think it’s coming from over there, from the neighborhood where I used to haul water as a girl.

*Micro, Small, Medium Enterprises [MSME in English; mipyme in Spanish]

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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.

There is another operation by the political police in the basement of our building to prevent us from leaving our homes.

14ymedio, Havana, Yoani Sánchez, 3 February 2026 — The cold is the talk of the town in Havana. But dictatorships don’t understand low temperatures or freezing winds. This Tuesday, there’s a political police operation in the basement of our building to prevent us from leaving our homes. What’s the reason for this blockade that restricts our freedom of movement and condemns us to not being able to buy food or take out the trash? We don’t know. It is not a significant date on the official calendar, we are not invited to any diplomatic reception, and in our neighborhood, no visitors are expected other than the battalion of flies and mosquitoes that buzzes around the mountains of garbage.

A neighbor told us it might be the Cuban regime’s nervousness in the face of pressure from Washington and the events that have been unfolding in Venezuela for the past month. However, I struggle to define what danger my husband and I could pose on this international political chessboard where we are, at best, tiny, defenseless presences. Is some official coming to inaugurate a project amidst the dirty, dilapidated streets of this area? Is a military exercise about to take place in the trenches formed by the potholes in the sidewalks that surround us? Is the stench emanating from the garbage piled up on the street corners about to multiply in the coming hours?

With the thread of internet we have, we confirm that other journalists and activists suffer the same harassment at their homes.

We have no answer, because Cuban State Security behaves with impunity, failing to explain to citizens the reasons for violating their rights. continue reading

The numerical disproportion between those who cling to the current model and those who want political openness is overwhelmingly in favor of the latter.

14ymedio, Yoani Sánchez, Generation Y, Havana, 11 February 2026 — Next to me in the shared taxi, a young man is listening to a YouTube video at full volume on his cell phone. The video harshly describes Alejandro Castro Espín, mentions the word “dictatorship” several times, and denounces the repression of the Cuban regime. No one bats an eye. No one tells him to turn off the device. No one confronts him ideologically. A few minutes later, in a long line outside an office of the Etecsa monopoly, a woman is listening to a song by Los Aldeanos that criticizes Castroism. The state employees aren’t even bothered, and some people in line are even singing along to the chorus

When I get home, a neighbor who for years has been an obvious informant for the political police approaches me to say that “something has to happen, because this can’t go on.” On the stairs to the 14th floor, without electricity and with the elevators out of service, another neighbor jokes that the fictional character Cuco Mendieta, a Cuban supposedly a member of the U.S. Delta Force who participated in the capture of Nicolás Maduro, is about to arrive in Havana on a mission very similar to the one in Caracas. We laugh, and the climb becomes easier.

Never before has the Cuban government been criticized so openly. I don’t recall a single moment in our recent history when criticism of the Communist Party was so widespread, so corrosive, or so loud. “Gusanear,” that verb borrowed from official insults, is the daily practice of millions of people on this island. They “gusanear” at bus stops, at workplaces, and in lines to deposit a few dollars onto that Clásica card that allows them to buy what little gasoline remains in the country. They “gusanear” at the rationed bodega, at school meetings where they announce the suspension of in-person classes, and on the bus terminal platform, empty of vehicles and hope.

‘Gusanear’, that verb taken from official insults, is the daily practice of millions of people on this Island.

Defenders of the system are at a significant disadvantage in Cuba. Nothing remains of the ideological fervor they once displayed. Many are silent, scanning the horizon for the change that is inevitably approaching, while others continue reading