The external context has hardened just as the internal legitimacy of the system appears to be most eroded
14ymedio, Yoani Sánchez, Generation Y, Havana, 25 January 2026 — I have lost count of the times the Cuban regime has been “on the verge of collapse.” I’ve heard it in diplomats’ after-dinner conversations, in expert analyses, and in the predictions of soothsayers who change their tune as easily as they change their shirts. One day it was the physical disappearance of the “supreme leader”; another, the supposed “imminent” fracture within the Armed Forces; then, the definitive economic collapse that, this time for sure, Castroism could not withstand. And yet, the country continued to wake up to its long lines, its managed fear, and its political inertia.
However, now, unlike in other times, those oracles might be right. The discontent is no longer a whisper; it is street corner conversation, arguments in the ration store, and exasperation in the bus line. Records of social conflict and protests reported by independent observatories paint a picture of 2025 with increasing numbers of public complaints, a barometer pointing to widespread and persistent unrest.
Is this the highest level of discontent since January 1959? No one has a scientific instrument to measure and compare decades of enforced silence, but I am convinced that three circumstances have never coincided so visibly: sustained material precariousness, the loss of fear in growing segments of the population, and the breakdown of the official epic narrative that for years served as anesthesia and a gag.
The scenario is unprecedented and fragile, because social unrest has ceased to be an exception and has become an everyday occurrence.
To this internal situation is now added a harsher international environment for the authorities. The capture of Nicolás Maduro on January 3rd has put the Havana leadership up against the ropes and reactivated pressure from Washington.
That is why, when people ask me if the regime is in its final moments, I don’t respond with unbridled optimism or fireworks about an imminent end. I say that the situation is unprecedented and fragile, because social unrest has ceased to be the exception and has become commonplace; because the economy no longer offers a margin to buy loyalties through perks; and because the external context has hardened just as the system’s internal legitimacy seems most eroded.
Endings, however, rarely happen as experts or prophets imagine. Sometimes they are not a sudden blow, but a drip by drip, a slow erosion that leads to extinction. In Cuba, the question is not only when the regime will fall, but what kind of country will remain standing when the dictatorship finally collapses upon us.
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