Jose Martí defined love for one’s country as a bifurcation of angers. / 14ymedio

The moral dilemma facing those of us who aspire to democratic change on the Island.

By Yunior Garcia Aguilera (14ymedio)

HAVANA TIMES — A good part of the world looks at Cuba without fully understanding what is happening on the Island or the moral tensions that run through its citizens. Some are scandalized that there are Cubans who come to wish for foreign intervention to escape the regime. Others do not understand how there are still people willing to defend, even with their lives, a system that has ruined the country and can only offer misery, surveillance, and combat orders. There are also those who view Cuba as an abstract symbol, a stage of sacrifice useful for feeding other people’s ideological nostalgias.

In Abdala, written when he was barely 15, Jose Marti defined love for one’s country as a bifurcation of angers: “the invincible hatred toward those who oppress it” and “the eternal resentment toward those who attack it.” More than a century and a half later, the Cuban drama remains trapped in that same emotional logic, though distorted by history.

A part of Cubans who long for a free Cuba concentrates their moral energy on invincible hatred toward the dictatorship—that is, toward the apparatus of control, fear, and servitude that Castroism turned into a system. Another part, made up of regime loyalists or those still trapped in its imaginary, clings to eternal resentment toward the United States, its threats, its real or imagined grievances, and the ever-invoked hypothesis of intervention. Between hatred and resentment, Cuba risks never becoming a true project of freedom, but merely an endless battlefield of grievances.

It should be said plainly: I do not want bombs to fall on the land where I was born. But neither do I wish for a regime that has destroyed the nation and represses its inhabitants to remain in power, condemning us to slow extinction. That is my moral dilemma.

From consolidated democracies, it may be difficult to understand. In countries where free elections, alternation of power, and institutional channels exist, it would be absurd to wish for a foreign army to overthrow the government. But Cubans have been stripped precisely of that elementary possibility.

In Cuba, the electoral system is hijacked by Communist Party Candidate Commissions and State Security. There is not a single legislator who represents the opposition, even though its weight in society is now undeniable. The ballot used by the National Assembly in 2023 to “elect” the president contained a single name: Miguel Diaz-Canel. Calling such a procedure an election is a mockery. If Cubans cannot organize politically, compete at the ballot box, demonstrate in the streets, or express themselves freely on social media without risk, then the question becomes inevitable: what real options remain to remove the tyrants from power?

Cuban civil society has even attempted the most peaceful and civic routes imaginable within a dictatorship. Opponents like Oswaldo Paya died under circumstances never clarified. Others were exiled. Many are imprisoned or subjected to constant harassment. It should therefore not be surprising that ideas once considered marginal—such as foreign intervention or annexation—have gained ground. Those of us who oppose these outcomes must at least recognize that they are a direct consequence of the Revolution’s failure as a national project. When a regime shuts down every internal avenue for change, the temptation of an external solution stops seeming like an extravagance and becomes a symptom of disaster.

Meanwhile, part of the international left celebrates our misery as if it were a badge of dignity. From their comfortable platforms, scarcity, repression, and immobility are exalted as proof of resistance against the Empire. We are asked to preserve an authoritarian system intact to satisfy the nostalgia or ideological voyeurism of those who would never have to endure its consequences.

Many of these admirers only know Cuba from hotels, ruins turned into scenery, or the screens of their phones. Almost no one can seriously defend the “achievements of the Revolution” anymore, because little remains of them but rubble. Yet the embargo continues to be invoked as a universal alibi. It is forgotten that when Cuba received almost unlimited resources from the Soviet Union, it did not use them to modernize the country, but for military and ideological ventures abroad. It is also forgotten that Venezuelan subsidies likewise failed to correct the model’s structural flaws. The problem was never only a lack of resources. The problem has been, above all, the system.

That is why the metaphor of Cuba as a “new Numantia,” used to praise its supposed resistance, is so perverse. Numantia does not symbolize abstract dignity, but siege, hunger, degradation, and extermination. Presenting Cuba as Numantia amounts to suggesting that its greatness lies in indefinitely enduring suffering.

Speaking of solutions requires abandoning both naive epic narratives and fated superstition. It is unlikely that Cuban civil society, on its own and without fractures within the power apparatus, will be able to defeat the regime through open rebellion. Asking an unarmed, impoverished, and surveillance society to overthrow a police state willing to fire on its people resembles an invitation to sacrifice. That does not make civil society irrelevant. Without active citizenship there is no real transition. But almost no recent transition from authoritarianism has occurred without a combination of internal resistance, fractures within the elite, and external pressure.

History shows that authoritarian regimes do not usually yield to moral persuasion alone. They do so when the cost of remaining in power becomes unbearable. In Cuba, moreover, those in power seem more willing to negotiate with external actors capable of pressuring them than with their own citizens, whom they treat as subjects. Recognizing the possible role of external factors is not the same as calling for occupation or renouncing sovereignty. It means accepting that when all internal channels have been closed, international pressure can open space for a transition.

But that transition should not repeat the worst vices of our history. Cuba carries a traumatic legacy of coups, armed exits, and messianic leadership. We have already paid too high a price for the temptation to replace politics with epic gestures, law with exception, and citizenship with obedience to a savior. The goal must not be to replace one command with another, nor to move from one form of tutelage to another. The goal must be to rebuild the republic on civil, pluralistic, and legal foundations.

Cuba does not need the miserable immortality of a symbol. It needs the concrete life of a country. It does not want to be admired for enduring. It wants to stop enduring. It does not want to remain an emblem of sacrifice for others. It wants, like any adult nation, the elementary right to live in freedom.

First published in Spanish by 14ymedio and translated and posted in English by Havana Times.

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