Juan Antonio Fernández Palacios

One important thing must be made clear from the outset: what we call the historical discordance — more than a mere conflict — between Cuba and the United States did not begin with the revolution, nor with the arrival of Fidel Castro, nor even with the triumph of January 1, 1959. Its roots run much deeper. In truth, this is a historical fracture that stretches back centuries, at least to the eighteenth century.

Cuba was Spain’s last colony. Cuba remained under colonial rule even after the great liberating campaigns swept across the continent, well into the twentieth century. Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, the Spanish prime minister of the time, famously declared that Cuba must be held “to the last man and the last peseta.” Cuba was the crown’s most precious jewel.

But to return to the central point, the discordance with the United States predates all of this. It emerged from a long-standing ambition for domination and annexation. The underlying dilemma has always been the same: domination versus sovereignty; annexation versus our right to exist as a nation. That tension has never truly disappeared.

As early as 1783, John Adams — later president of the United States — described Cuba as, and I quote, “a natural extension of the North American continent,” arguing that the continuity of the United States across that continent necessarily implied the annexation of Cuba. The idea was later refined by his son, John Quincy Adams, in his famous “ripe fruit” theory of 1823. At the time, Washington did not even believe war with Spain would be necessary. The penetration of American capital and the growing economic ties between the island and the United States led them to assume that Cuba would eventually fall of its own weight, like ripe fruit from a tree, into the American Union. One suspects similar fantasies circulate today.

That is why historical context matters. It allows us to trace a continuous thread from two centuries ago to the present and to grasp the essence of this discordance. I repeat: it did not originate with the revolution, though the revolution undoubtedly accelerated it for other reasons.

It was precisely in 1823, curiously, that the Monroe Doctrine emerged, and it returns today under another name. Now it appears disguised as the “Donroe Doctrine,” but the substance remains the same: America for the Americans. At the time, the message was directed principally at the European powers — above all Britain and France. Today, however, the logic extends even further, to the point of insult: talk of reaching “all the way to Greenland.” Historically, the imperial gaze was fixed on what they liked to call their “backyard,” from the Río Grande to Tierra del Fuego. Now the horizon expands to include Canada, imagined as a potential fifty-first state, and Greenland, which they openly covet. In other words: the entire western hemisphere. What we see here, once again, is the remarkable continuity of imperial thinking within the dominant classes of the United States.

That, broadly speaking, addresses the first half of the story. The next chapter concerns what followed the Spanish–Cuban–American War of 1898, our second war of independence. By then, Spain was exhausted, practically defeated already, when the United States intervened after the explosion of the USS Maine. The result, however, was not Cuban sovereignty but the defeat of Spain followed by the occupation of the island from 1898 to 1902.

Cuba formally achieved independence in 1902, the last republic in the Americas to do so. Puerto Rico, of course, remains in a colonial condition to this day. But Cuba was the hemisphere’s final independent republic, and this is essential to understanding what followed: the Platt Amendment, whose consequences remain with us even now.

What was the Platt Amendment? In essence, it institutionalized the right of intervention. Whenever the United States considered that its interests or security were at risk — it always invoked security — it reserved for itself the right to intervene militarily in Cuba. And throughout the twentieth century, it did precisely that on several occasions. Alongside this came the Cuban–American Treaty of Naval and Coaling Stations, which explains the continued existence of the Guantánamo Naval Base — today synonymous internationally with torture — and the ongoing occupation of a portion of Cuban national territory. Added to this was a so-called treaty of commercial reciprocity, though reciprocity was a mere euphemism.

Such was republican Cuba, if republic is even the proper word. In reality, it was a neocolonial republic, a protectorate of sorts, shaped through the domination of North American capital over the country’s essential wealth: the sugar industry, banking, land, infrastructure. By 1958, the United States controlled roughly 70 percent of Cuba’s foreign trade. Ownership of vast estates was concentrated in foreign hands. All company names were in English: the Cuban Electric Company, the Cuban Telephone Company. That was the reality of Cuba during the first half of the twentieth century: profound dependency, with external control extending across economic, political, and social life alike.

All of this helps explain, at least in part, the origins of the revolution itself. Cuba passed through successive revolutionary moments: the founding of the first Communist Party in 1925; the Revolution of 1933, which ultimately stalled and was frustrated; the growing decomposition of the political system; Fulgencio Batista’s coup d’état and the installation of an openly brutal dictatorship. It should also be remembered that Latin America at the time was saturated with dictatorships: Marcos Pérez Jiménez, Anastasio Somoza Debayle, François Duvalier, Rafael Trujillo. The regional landscape was overwhelmingly authoritarian. Batista effectively derailed what little pseudodemocratic development the republic had experienced.

And it is important to emphasize this, especially for foreign audiences where confusion often persists: the Cuban Revolution was profoundly authentic and deeply popular. The Red Army did not arrive in Havana. Soviet tanks did not impose socialism upon the island. The revolution emerged from within Cuban society itself — autochthonous, radical, and genuinely people-based. That is the truth.

The revolutionary triumph marked a watershed in national life and inevitably intensified the historical discordance with the United States. Almost immediately came the first retaliatory measures: the beginning of the blockade, the elimination of the sugar quota, the first mechanisms of economic coercion and political pressure — all before the revolution had even formally declared its socialist character. We are speaking here of the Dwight D. Eisenhower years. Then came the preparation of the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, already under John F. Kennedy.

From that moment onward, especially following the declaration of socialism, the revolution embarked upon a sweeping process of nationalization and structural transformation — in other words, the recovery of sovereignty over national resources carried out within the framework of international law. This inaugurated more than six decades of escalating blockade: a dense web of laws, sanctions, decrees, and extraterritorial measures that together form the longest economic siege in modern history. More than sixty-five years.

Declassified American documents from 1960 explicitly state that, given Castro’s popular support, the only viable strategy was to generate economic hardship severe enough to weaken public backing for the government — lowering real wages, provoking scarcity, creating conditions of ungovernability.

Which is why history matters. Because the logic remains essentially unchanged today: economic asphyxiation designed to produce social fatigue, disillusionment, and ultimately regime change. That has always been the aim.

Throughout these decades, the blockade has been the defining feature of bilateral relations, but it has never existed in isolation. It was accompanied by sabotage, infiltration, terrorism, even biological warfare. And when one speaks of terrorism here, one does not speak metaphorically. One need only recall the bombing of the Cubana de Aviación aircraft in 1976. At the time, very few people seemed willing to call that terrorism.

Juan Antonio Fernández Palacios

Exactly, Posada Carriles blew up the plane with the entire Cuban fencing team, winners of the Central American and Caribbean Games at that moment.

The destruction of that aircraft remains among the most repugnant of crimes imaginable: the bombing of a civilian plane. But it did not end there. Afterward came the bombs in hotels, the attacks on Cuban embassies abroad. Only recently, in fact, we commemorated another anniversary of the terrorist attack against our embassy in Portugal, where two comrades, Adriana Corcho and Efrén Monteagudo, lost their lives.

Nor was Portugal an isolated case. There were bombings against our mission to the United Nations in New York and the assassination of Félix García Rodríguez. For decades, Cuba has lived under a permanent state of aggression — a theater of covert operations, sabotage, terrorism, and uninterrupted war by other means.

I say all of this because it is impossible to understand Cuba’s trajectory since the revolution without understanding the conditions under which that process unfolded. After all these years of building socialism, we have not been able to achieve everything we dreamed of achieving. Not every aspiration has been realized. In truth, we have managed to do only what was possible under the conditions of a besieged country.

Cuba possesses no vast energy reserves, no rare earths, none of the strategic riches so obsessively discussed today. And yet Cuba became, in many ways, a symbol of resistance. Our principal resource — as our national coat of arms itself suggests — has always been our geographical position: the key to the Gulf.

Cuba’s position gives it strategic command over the Caribbean basin, from the Gulf of Mexico to the approaches of Panama. That is why the island has always appeared, in the imperial imagination, as the ripe fruit, the coveted apple.

Juan Antonio Fernández Palacios

The arrival of this administration, what one might call Trump 2.0, has meant a clear intensification of the blockade and a deepening of the policy of maximum pressure.

Already during Trump’s first term, more than 240 measures and executive actions were adopted against Cuba. The blockade evolved into what I have described before: an immense spider’s web, designed not merely to pressure but to suffocate. It was under Trump, for the first time, that Title III of the Helms–Burton Act was activated after having been suspended by every previous administration. The policy of hostility reached unprecedented levels, not only in scale but in precision: a far more surgical strategy aimed directly at Cuba’s principal sources of revenue and economic survival.

There was, on the one hand, an energy siege and systematic persecution of Cuba’s legitimate commercial transactions. And alongside that came financial persecution, above all through Cuba’s reinclusion on the infamous list of state sponsors of terrorism. The consequences of that designation are devastating because it effectively cuts the country off from the international financial system. People often do not grasp what this means in practice. Even here in Belgium, we encounter enormous difficulties with banks — KBC, for example, or Belfius. They deny us accounts or subject us to extraordinary forms of surveillance. They simply deduct €1,100 every month in so-called monitoring fees, without consultation, from accounts with extremely modest balances. That is the concrete reality of being placed on such a list.

And perhaps the most extreme measure of all came with the executive order of January 29, which declared Cuba an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to the national security of the United States — a country of nine million inhabitants. Under that pretext, Washington now threatens public and private actors alike — states, companies, shipping firms — that supply Cuba with oil or fuel.

To understand the magnitude of the crisis, consider this: in the last four months, only a single oil tanker has reached Cuban ports, that of the Russian Federation. Cuba requires, at a minimum, eight tankers per month simply to sustain the basic functioning of the country. Two ships per week, roughly one hundred thousand metric tons, merely to maintain the continuity of economic, social, cultural, and political life.

The situation today is, by any measure, severe — critical, harsh, approaching the contours of a humanitarian emergency. The effects on the health care system and the educational system, two of the revolution’s most important social achievements, have been profound.

Take, for example, the Juan Manuel Márquez Hospital, one of Havana’s principal pediatric hospitals. It treats roughly six hundred children every day. To continue functioning, that hospital alone requires five hundred liters of fuel every eight hours simply to maintain electricity and essential services.

The blackouts have become extreme. In some provinces, they last thirty hours — more than an entire day without power. Even in Havana, outages of twelve, fourteen, or eighteen hours have become common. It is a situation of extraordinary hardship, unlike anything we have experienced before.

You asked what distinguishes this moment from the Special Period. Certainly, there are parallels in the gravity of the crisis. Some of the measures the government has adopted — reductions in working hours, stricter rationing of fuel and resources — mirror those taken in the 1990s.

But there is also an important difference. Cuba today rests on more solid foundations than it did then, and the language that now predominates is not simply one of endurance but of what the government calls creative resistance. Resilience has always been part of the Cuban experience, but the idea now is not merely to survive passively, waiting for conditions to improve. “Creative resistance” means seeking solutions through intelligence, innovation, and collective effort: finding openings where none appear to exist.

The clearest example is the accelerated push toward energy transition. Cuba is attempting, under extraordinarily adverse conditions, to reduce its dependence on imported fossil fuels and move toward renewable energy sources. In barely a year, renewable generation — principally photovoltaic solar energy — has already reached roughly 10 percent of the national matrix.

But one should not romanticize the situation. The reality remains extremely difficult: harsh, critical, exhausting. Cuba continues to live under immense pressure.

Juan Antonio Fernández Palacios

It affects everything. The entire social fabric. The ordinary rhythms of daily life.

Take the example I mentioned earlier, because it connects directly to this idea of creative resistance. What is to be done? Do hospitals simply close? Of course not. The state has reorganized resources so that, in every municipality, at least certain key hospitals and polyclinics can function with a degree of energy autonomy. We prioritize them, protect them, and try to ensure continuity of care.

But then, how does the doctor get to the hospital if there is no public transport? How does the nurse return home afterward? How do families cook if there is no electricity, no gas, and often no running water? Because when electricity collapses, the entire chain collapses with it. More than 80 percent of Cubans receive potable water from the tap, as one might say, but that water must be pumped. Without electricity, the pumps stop working.

Communications are affected as well. So too is cultural life, which in Cuba is extraordinarily vibrant and central to the social experience of the country.

And it pains me to say this as a Habanero, as a Cuban: today you walk through Havana and encounter an unsettling stillness. The avenues are empty. Hardly any cars move. Few people walk the streets.

Take, for instance, the Malecón, that great seawall stretching along the coast of Havana. I often call it Cuba’s great sofa, because generations of Cubans have sat there to feel the breeze, escape the heat, talk through the night, share a first kiss, discover a first love. It is one of the great emotional spaces of Cuban life. And today it is almost deserted. Not because people no longer love it, but because they simply cannot reach it. There is no transport, no fuel, no easy movement through the city. That is the reality.

And yet, as I said earlier, Cuba survives above all through its own efforts, through collective endurance. But I would be unfair if I did not also mention the immense solidarity we continue to receive from around the world. Earlier we spoke about the solidarity Cuba has offered other peoples over the decades. In some sense, perhaps, we are now witnessing that solidarity returned.

Juan Antonio Fernández Palacios

You may have seen the recent Nuestra América convoy, invoking José Martí. It was a profoundly moving initiative.

Groups continue arriving in Cuba carrying what, at this moment, is perhaps the most valuable form of support imaginable: practical assistance. Friends of Cuba, solidarity organizations, ordinary people — they are mobilizing through every possible channel, raising funds, sending materials, contributing directly to the energy transition itself.

Some send photovoltaic panels. Others send small solar kits that allow homes, rural clinics, or medical posts to function independently of the electrical grid.

And that matters enormously in Cuba because of the structure of our health care system. You know we have the family doctor model: one doctor and one nurse for roughly every 120 families, including in mountainous and remote regions where there may be no telephone service and sometimes even no electricity. Solar panels are being installed there as well.

In a sense, the sun has become our most reliable ally. They may block ships, fuel, transactions, banking systems — but they cannot blockade sunlight.

Solidarity also arrives in the form of medicines, food, medical supplies, generators. And it comes from everywhere. One opens Cuban media or social networks today and sees donations arriving from Belgium, Cyprus, African countries, Latin America.

Colombia, for instance, recently made a significant contribution through the government of President Gustavo Petro. Mexico, too, has shown extraordinary solidarity, reflecting the historic ties that have always linked Mexico and Cuba. And then there are the countless efforts of social movements, solidarity networks, trade unions, and Cubans living abroad. All of it matters. All of it helps us endure this moment.

Juan Antonio Fernández Palacios

The threat is real. There is a criminal gang in power. This is an aggressive, warmongering, atrocious administration. We have witnessed the events of January 3: the intervention and kidnapping of the constitutional president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Silvia Flores. A military operation in which thirty-two Cubans fell — the closest protection circle — along with other Venezuelans.

The executive order of January 29, which I have already mentioned, and the illegal war in Iran we are seeing. In recent weeks, threats have been reiterated, now explicit, from the president down to the secretary of state, the secretary of war, even politicians from Florida, calling for military intervention in Cuba.

Nothing justifies an intervention in Cuba, nor is there any reason for it. First, we are a country of peace. Latin America and the Caribbean is a zone of peace. Nothing would justify an intervention by the United States, and we have the right to preserve our sovereignty, our independence, our model and political system.

We do not take threats lightly. And we are also preparing. The best way to avoid a war, an intervention we do not desire, is to prepare ourselves.

We have long had our own doctrine: the war of the entire people. The relationship with the United States is absolutely asymmetrical. They are the world’s principal military power. It’s difficult to imagine that small Cuba could militarily defeat the army of the United States. But in modern warfare, in the asymmetrical relationship between one who assumes himself powerful and the weaker party, victory is decided by time and resistance. Iran is demonstrating this to some extent.

We — I repeat — are preparing. Our armed forces as well, with a deterrent character. But our doctrine is the war of the entire people, urban and rural alike. Those bearded men came down from the mountains, and we know how to fight. That is how the revolution was made: guerrilla warfare from the mountains and, also in urban areas, the action of revolutionary movements. We have learned to fight and to defend the most sacred thing, which is the homeland. Our national anthem — incidentally, the motto “Homeland or Death, We Shall Overcome” — only captures that tremendous sense of independence and vocation of Cubans, which comes from our nineteenth-century national anthem: to die for the homeland is to live.

That is what I would like to say. May this not happen. No one desires it. Latin America and the Caribbean do not need it. The world does not need it. But yes, we are preparing — in keeping with everything I have said. May this not happen.

Juan Antonio Fernández Palacios

Yes, there are preliminary contacts. But we are very far from what one would call formal negotiations. There is no negotiating table, no structured process of that kind at this stage. What exists are initial channels of communication — exploratory conversations, exchanges intended to identify the principal differences, the urgent issues, the areas where dialogue may or may not be possible.

But we are still in a very early phase. It would be premature to speak of negotiations in the proper sense of the word.

That said, Cuba has always maintained the same position, and this is nothing new: we are willing to resolve differences through peaceful means, through dialogue, through negotiation, provided there is respect for sovereignty and political independence. What is not negotiable is Cuba’s political system, just as no sovereign country would place its own system up for external negotiation. Regime change is not, and will never be, a topic on the table.

What we aspire to is something much simpler and more reasonable: to live, as the United Nations Charter says, in peace as good neighbors. After all, we are separated by barely ninety miles. That is nothing. Geography obliges coexistence. We must learn to live with our differences, peacefully, because peace is what everyone ultimately needs.

Juan Antonio Fernández Palacios

Yes. Though I should begin by clarifying something regarding the 2022 referendum, because internationally it was often reduced simply to the issue of same-sex marriage.

In reality, the referendum concerned the new Family Code, which was something much broader and, in many respects, deeply revolutionary. And I say revolutionary quite consciously, because Cuba remains, in important ways, a profoundly patriarchal and machista society despite all the social transformations the revolution has produced over the decades. Changing institutions is one thing; changing mentalities is another.

Now, regarding referenda more generally: yes, they are part of our constitutional framework. The National Assembly may decide to submit questions of major national importance directly to the population. We did so with the Constitution in 2019 and with the Family Code afterward.

But it is not an instrument used routinely. This is not Switzerland, where one organizes referenda over whether to open a street or change a traffic sign. Referenda are politically significant and materially costly. In Cuba, they are reserved for constitutional reforms or laws considered fundamental to national life.

So yes, I imagine they will continue to be used when circumstances require them. The mechanism exists and remains available. But our political system functions through other forms of participation on a local level.

The Cuban model is profoundly local in structure. At its foundation lies the neighborhood and the election of delegates at the community level. Candidates are proposed directly by neighbors within local constituencies. Voting is secret, direct, and the law requires multiple candidates. The counting itself is public.

From there, the system moves upward: municipal assemblies, provincial structures, and finally the National Assembly. But the most immediate and representative level, in many ways, is the neighborhood delegate.

And importantly, delegates can also be revoked. The same neighbors who elect them may organize and remove them if they believe they are not fulfilling their responsibilities.

That is why referenda occupy a more exceptional role within the Cuban system. Many issues are resolved through these more immediate and local structures of what Cuba calls popular power, rather than through constant national plebiscites.

Juan Antonio Fernández Palacios

No, no. To begin with, I’ll adopt the term or concept of “liberalization” that you use, which is commonly employed in the media, because I understand that it may be better understood by the Western public or those unfamiliar with distinct and different realities such as ours.

We are advancing an update of our economic and social model. The revolution is legitimate and is in a state of permanent change. Fidel said it when he gave his concept of revolution: we must change everything that needs to be changed. We are adjusting, updating the economic model. In the 2019 Constitution, for the first time, the private sector is recognized — as we had not done before — as one of the forms of property. Not only cooperative property, state property, but also private property. It is an example of what I am saying. Following this process of greater openness, small and medium-sized enterprises, SMEs, have reemerged as complementary actors. New laws have been approved to foster greater association and synergy between the state and private sectors, both working toward the country’s development. It is a normal dialectical process within the doctrine.

Now, I do not see why there must be a parallel — to use the term again — with political liberalism. I do not see the necessity for regime change, nor do I believe it is the desire of the majority of Cubans. Or if by political liberalism one means changing the system, I do not see it. Deepening our democracy to make it increasingly participatory, involving more of the people and workers in decisions: yes, we need that. Yes, it is necessary. And I believe we are also on that path.

You mentioned unions. We have a single central organization, the Cuban Workers’ Central. But it has more than seventeen independent branch unions. The question is: are we the only country with a single central? No. In Uruguay, there is the PIT-CNT [Plenario Intersindical de Trabajadores – Convención Nacional de Trabajadores], a single trade union center. In our case, it responds to a tradition within the labor movement. The Cuban Workers’ Central is prerevolutionary; it was not created with the revolution. It comes from much earlier.

Unity has always been a vocation of the Cuban labor movement. They have accustomed us to dividing ourselves. When I understand division in terms of democracy, the discussion becomes infinite. But Martí, to seek Cuba’s independence, founded a single party: the Cuban Revolutionary Party, the unity of all revolutionary forces. If we want to win . . .  in our history, which is rich and also painful, we have lost wars and battles when we have not been united. We lost the Ten Years’ War, the first war of independence. Division in the revolutionary ranks, in the ranks of the Liberation Army, led to the frustration of that war and the Pact of Zanjón, a pact without independence, a surrender to the colonial authorities. That teaching of Martí was later brought by Fidel: the unity of forces. The same happens in the labor movement. But I insist: it is a single central with seventeen or eighteen branch unions.

The other typical and well-known freedoms are all protected by the Constitution and its complementary laws. Truly, those who insist that there is no freedom of expression do not know us. Simply walk the streets of Cuba to hear the enormous diversity of opinions. I myself am critical of certain things I do not like, and I am not ashamed to say that they need to be changed. In fact, I have commented: yes, I believe we need to deepen the democratic system, more popular participation, more representativeness, more involvement of workers in economic decisions, even at the enterprise level. That is lacking; we need to achieve it.

But all these well-known freedoms are protected by the Constitution. In Cuba, there are more than two thousand nongovernmental associations and organizations. Law 54 protects freedom of association, assembly, and expression. Now, note — because these are interesting debates: freedom of expression, like freedom of association, both have legitimate limits that international law recognizes.

After all, every European country — Belgium included — has filed amendments and reservations to the UN Convention on Racial Discrimination and the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. A racist expression is not freedom of opinion. It is racism. Do you see? There are legitimate limits: public morality, security, and the human values we recognize.

A xenophobic far-right party is legitimate in Europe. I do not see that in Cuba. Simply not. Someone who hates his fellow human being, who calls for exclusion — I do not see that he has a democratic right or space. Because what he preaches is antidemocracy. It is exclusion. For me, that is not freedom of expression. That is their business, and I don’t intend to interfere, but I do not like it and I don’t believe it is legitimate. Europe is infested with far-right, racist, xenophobic, and even fascist parties. Those are freedoms, but I do not want them for myself.

I’m not saying our system is perfect. I believe we need to advance. The pursuit of social justice, of the fullest freedoms, is always an almost infinite path, ever growing. And in that, I do believe.

Juan Antonio Fernández Palacios

Fidel Castro, a great man among the Cubans of the twentieth century, a paradigm of the nation, is the one who placed us on the map. That prerevolutionary Cuba was the brothel and gaming room of the United States and of the mafia groups that also controlled the island. Fidel simply made the most profound and authentically popular revolution, with the merit of achieving the unity of the revolutionary forces, of the progressive forces, and of leading the triumphant revolution that endures to this day. It was a stroke of luck to have him for a great part of this journey, this long march, preserving our independence and our values.

Fidel is a necessary point of reference, and his legacy is enormous. His influence on international politics, on the world, his long-range vision — almost as if he were able to look into the future, return, and tell us what he saw. We are in the year of his centenary, which inspires us to move forward and seek his teachings. We always return to him even to understand the problems of the present.

Fidel also stood for nobility, for not kneeling, for keeping the forehead high. This was central to his anti-imperialist and internationalist vision.

As a human being, he was not perfect. But his virtues were greater. Martí said, “Only the ungrateful see the spots on the sun. The grateful prefer to see the light, which is always greater.” We continue walking along the path of his ideas in this unpredictable and threatening world.