“Cubans are being pushed to the limit”

Interview by Jess Smee

In November 2021, Yunior García Aguilera, an actor and playwright from Havana, was placed under house arrest without trial. His telephone line was blocked, his internet connection disconnected, and the windows of his flat were covered from the outside with large Cuban flags. The reason: Aguilera was in the process of organising a demonstration, a peaceful protest march, the first major one in Cuba for at least fifty years. However, officials banned the demonstration and it never took place. Shortly afterwards, Aguilera fled to Madrid, where he now lives. In this interview, he talks about the humanitarian crisis in Cuba and what needs to happen now to set social change in motion.

Mr Aguilera, shortages of food and fuel abound in Cuba right now. From your work as a human rights advocate, how would you describe the situation on the island?

The country simply can’t keep going as things are. If nothing changes, people will die – and they are dying already. Cuban hospitals have almost no medicines or blood for transfusions, energy blackouts last up to 20 hours and operations and other treatments are basically on hold. My father died a year ago, and I am convinced he could have been saved if he’d lived elsewhere. My wife's father also died in Cuba this past year and we have lost many friends — young, healthy people who died for lack of medical attention.

“In Havana, people are chopping up their front doors and furniture to use for cooking”

And what are the effects of the Trump administration’s oil blockade imposed in late January 2026?

Cuba is a tropical country, so having electricity blackouts doesn't just mean darkness, it also means mosquitoes and life-threatening illnesses. There have been serious outbreaks of chikungunya and dengue fever. Without fuel, there are no rubbish vans collecting refuse, meaning that there are mountains of waste on every street corner. That is a tremendous risk to public health.

How is this weighing on Cubans' day-to-day lives?

Many people have to get up at two or three in the morning on the rare occasion they have an hour of electricity — just to cook something for the family. Without electricity or gas, people often cook with firewood. In Havana, people are smashing down their doors and breaking their furniture just to get wood to cook with. Some are even stealing the wooden sleepers from railway lines to make charcoal. That can even cause derailments and shows the desperation. People are being pushed to the absolute limit.

And are Cubans protesting or is their energy taken up with the daily struggle to survive?

Protests are spontaneous, erupting when people can no longer bear things. That makes them hard to predict. Right now we are seeing cacerolazos, pot-banging protests. And recently in Morón, in Ciego de Ávila in central Cuba, people set fire to the local headquarters of the Communist Party. People have reached that level of desperation.

Viewed from exile, what do you think people on the island want to happen next?

I think the vast majority want change. They dream of it being peaceful — but realistically most know that is almost impossible. There is a sense that real change will only come through external pressure from a country with genuine leverage, like the United States. They fantasise about something swift and clean, like what happened in Caracas, Venezuela (where the Trump administration illegally captured the leader Maduro at the start of the year). But it is risky. My fear — and I have a son still living in Havana — is how vulnerable everyone would be if things escalate. The buildings in Havana are already in such a state of decay that some of them collapse every time there is a heavy downpour of rain. The crumbling colonial buildings have not been maintained for decades, so imagine if a bomb would land: half the city could come tumbling down.

“Trump’s biggest fear about Cuba is migration”

And even in Venezuela the removal of Maduro has not sparked a more democratic political change. Does this raise a question mark about outside intervention?

Yes, it is a moral quandary. On one hand, Cuba needs change, and we know that change will only come if there is real pressure exerted on those who hold power. On the other hand, we cannot accept a single innocent person losing their life. Looking at Iran, we have seen just how high the cost of U.S. intervention for civilians can be.

Trump famously said he would have the “honour of taking Cuba” and now Washington indicted former leader Raúl Castro on murder charges.​​​​ What factors weigh heavily on how the American president views Cuba?

Right now, what really concerns Trump about Cuba is migration. He is deeply afraid of a new Mariel — the 1980 exodus, or the balseros of the 1990s, (Cuban refugees who emigrated illegally, primarily to the United States (Florida) on precarious hand-made rafts) or the last great wave of migrants under Biden. Mexico shares that anxiety: many migrant boats are now heading to Yucatán. What both countries fear most is a Cuban collapse that unleashes an uncontrollable wave of migration. That is the real driver behind his actions. At the same time, Trump is under pressure from the Cuban-American community in Miami that has long supported him. He is caught between J.D. Vance — who probably says Cuba is not his problem — and Marco Rubio, who is of Cuban descent and has a vested, personal connection to the island.

And how does Cuba react to the US?

The US embargo is a convenient scapegoat. The truth is that Cuba’s economy has long been propped up partly by the United States: remittances from Miami are the single largest source of hard currency entering the country. Che Guevara himself admitted in an interview in 1964 that the embargo caused no real damage — he said it strengthened the spirit of sacrifice, attracted international solidarity, and above all, gave the regime someone else to blame for everything that went wrong! And in the meantime, the Cuban economy is broken. Corruption is rampant. Salaries are so absurdly low that nobody takes a state job thinking about the pay — you take a new post thinking about what you can steal. A month's wages would only buy you a carton of eggs and a bottle of cooking oil if you're lucky.

More and more people are leaving the island – an estimated 1.5 million over the last five years. Young, well-educated Cubans in particular have left. What does this exodus mean for the country’s future?

Cuba will need a large part of the diaspora to return. The country is not just economically ruined — it is physically destroyed, as if it had been bombed. It needs to be rebuilt from zero. And there is another problem: we have not lived in democracy since the 1940s. There is no democratic memory in Cuba, no civic culture for it. There is still a lot of “caudillo” (strong-man) thinking, a Messiah complex — the hope that someone will come and rescue everything. That is dangerous. But I prefer a thousand times the complexity of building democracy to the prospect of Cuba resigning itself to living in dictatorship forever. The stark fact is: if the country continues at this pace, in three, four, five years it may be beyond saving. Cuba could become like Haiti — a permanently failed state with no solution in sight.

“Never in my life have I experienced a time in Cuba where you could eat well, live well, and feel free”

What would a realistic path to change look like?

Negotiations alone will achieve nothing. The Cuban regime is still there because many of those in power will face criminal prosecution the moment things change. We are dealing with a group of criminals defending their own survival. Real change would need three forces to converge: First, social protest from within, growing until the regime can no longer contain it; second, genuine external pressure — not just from the United States, but from the European Union and Latin America; and lastly and crucially, a fracture within the inner circle itself. Some group inside the power structure with clean hands — people who are not carrying the weight of old crimes and old blood — who say: we do not have to go down with you. I believe that could happen once Raúl Castro is gone. He is over ninety, but he is still the figure who keeps the whole thing tied together from behind the scenes.

As you work to keep Cuba’s humanitarian crisis on the agenda in Europe, do you think that old stereotypes linger. For example, how many on the left have long romanticised the Cuban Revolution?

Here in Madrid, we have spent years trying to help people inside: collecting medicines, sending over what we can. In Europe there is a very infantile and somewhat hypocritical romanticism about Cuban reality in certain European circles — this idea that Cuba must remain a symbol or a bastion of something, and that Cubans must sacrifice themselves and die on the cross to preserve a myth that never truly existed. Never in my life have I experienced a moment in Cuba where you could eat well, live well, and feel free. We lurched from one crisis to the next. I was born in 1982 — supposedly the best period, the late Soviet years. But my childhood memories are of scarcity. I physically remember what hunger feels like.

Would you go back to the country?
I want to go back — perhaps not to live there permanently, but to bring back my work, my theatre, and to be part of rebuilding something. But there are streets in Havana I am not sure I could walk down again. There is grief there that does not go away.