“It causes me great pain every time I see people of good faith — because I know they act in good faith — reducing Cuba’s situation to the Cuban Government and Trump, as if the Cuban people did not exist. This has to change not because the United States says so, but because we need it ourselves,” Alina López Hernández says, her words tumbling out before we have even had time to switch on the recorder. This historian, essayist, and left-wing editor has become one of the most respected dissident voices within Cuba. A member of the Academy of History of Cuba (Academia de Historia de Cuba), this sixty-year-old woman has managed to make the repressive character of the Cuban Government visible through an act of non-violent resistance. For three years, on the 18th of every month, she has made her way to Liberty Park (Parque de la Libertad) in Matanzas and stood in silence for an hour before the statue of José Martí. Sometimes she carries a banner calling for the freedom of political prisoners; at other times, a blank sheet of paper. She has only missed those occasions on which she was arrested on the way. On one such occasion, she was accused of assaulting an officer — a charge she denies — and faces four years’ imprisonment as a result.
We speak with her at her home in Matanzas, a flat in the Reparto Armando Mestre, one of the hundreds of housing estates built after the Revolution — in this case by its future residents themselves, with government support — to shelter the tens of thousands of families who had nowhere to live. Between semi-paved streets and rust consuming what remains of the street furniture, dozens of men sit passing the hours with nothing to do on near-empty roads. A trickle of dirty water runs alongside the three-storey residential blocks, and the air is thick with the smell of wood and charcoal: in Cuba, increasing numbers of families are being forced to cook with these fuels because of the energy blockade imposed by the Trump administration. Cuba is enduring a major humanitarian crisis caused by decades of the US blockade, as well as by inefficient local policies that have benefited only a minority of the population. In towns such as Matanzas, the now-notorious power cuts of ten, twelve, and even thirty hours have been routine for years.
Neighbours alert López to the journalists’ arrival before we even manage to get out of the car. We have barely passed a dozen vehicles during the journey from Havana, little more than a hundred kilometres away. Fuel costs over ten dollars (approximately €8.70) a litre, making this trip cost around two hundred dollars (approximately €174).
What is the situation in Cuba?
Cuba looks like a country at war, and not only since Trump arrived. For five or six years it has been mired in constant deterioration. We have been calling for three years to get a pipe repaired and nobody comes. Cuba is in a terminal process — the definitive and irreversible crisis of an economic, political, and social model. This is the worst period in Cuba’s recent history.
Worse than the Special Period?
Yes, because at that time some reserves remained from what we might call the honeymoon period with the socialist bloc. Moreover, the Cuban state was still investing something in agriculture and we had potatoes and eggs. That no longer exists. Today we have shops full of food at astronomical prices that the majority of people cannot afford. In the 1990s the crisis affected everyone more equally and we had hope. Fidel was a skilful politician who set decentralisation in motion and it produced results within four or five years. Now, there are people who can eat well and people who are going hungry. And for six years there have been no signs that this situation will be reversed.
What do you see as the first symptoms of that deterioration?
Cuba has always been an authoritarian model — there has always been a single party, control of public opinion, of the media, of the trade unions. But Fidel had a policy of social responsibility on the part of the state, with major social programmes in health, education, and public safety. And that meant many people did not question their lack of political freedoms, because they lived in a dignified poverty. We were never fully egalitarian, but there was a sense of proportion to equality. Raúl Castro overturned that situation the moment he took power: he shifted from a populist authoritarian model to an anti-popular authoritarian one. He said it in his inaugural address: that the state had granted too many undeserved benefits, that people had lost many values, and that the state could no longer take responsibility for them. He closed 24,000 workplace canteens, raised the retirement age by five years, lowered the legal working age to fifteen, and stripped 61% of the beneficiaries of social security — single mothers, and carers of elderly or disabled people — of their entitlements. He caused poverty to grow exponentially, because in Cuba there are many women raising children alone without support. Since then, investment in health, education, and agriculture has been drastically cut in order to redirect it, above all, towards tourism and property development. This change of model has brought not only poverty but also a sharp rise in civic protest.
What has changed since the social explosion of 2021?
In January 2021 they made their worst mistake: the approval of a neoliberal shock package in the middle of a pandemic, which triggered the uprising of July. And the state did what it had always claimed it would never do, because it was a state of the people for the people: it unleashed repression against the uprising with full force and filled the prisons with political prisoners. Since then, all dissent has been suppressed. I am not even talking about a traditional opposition with a political agenda linked to a party or organisation. I am talking about imprisoning people for ten years for posting critical comments on social media or daubing graffiti. A few days ago, Martín Barroso — a Doctor of Economic Sciences at the University of Sancti Spíritus — was sentenced to ten years’ deprivation of liberty for daubing graffiti asking “How long are you going to keep killing us?” And there are Jorge and Nadir Martín, teachers of computing and languages respectively, who went out in their town on 11 July shouting “The people united will never be defeated.” They were sentenced to six and eight years in separate prisons, in order to punish their families too.
When did you decide to speak out?
From 2017, with the opening up of the internet, I began publishing weekly analyses in La joven Cuba aimed at Cubans. For a long time, Cuban blogs had been directed at the outside world, because they could not be read here. I wanted to contribute to the debate in my own country, because until then I had thought the problems could be resolved — that they were a problem of individuals, not of the system. After the uprising of 11 July, I had access to testimonies from people who had been tortured, physically and psychologically, in prison. When the government attributed everything to external funding, I realised that the system was not only not going to reform itself, but was going to use all the violence necessary not to lose power. I then knew that I had not only the ethical duty to use knowledge to dismantle the discourse of power, but also that I had to commit to direct civic participation in change. And that is what I have tried to do. On 18 March 2023, I went out for the first time and positioned myself in Liberty Park in Matanzas in front of the sculpture of José Martí. It is a symbolic date, because on 18 March 1923 the Protest of the Thirteen took place — thirteen intellectuals protested against corruption. Since then, on the 18th of every month I stand there for an hour. Sometimes alone, sometimes with others. Sometimes with a blank placard, sometimes with ones calling for the freedom of political prisoners or for amnesty. My aim is to draw the attention of Cuba’s intelligentsia — unfortunately very servile towards power — so that it commits itself to social protest and to those at the bottom.
And people have been joining you in different provinces.
People have been joining in Camagüey, in Artemisa, in Havana. We need to apply enormous pressure, because the government is not going to change without pressure, and external pressures are of no use to us. External pressures cover up the internal situation because they make everyone start talking about poor, threatened Cuba — and it does not matter whether the threat is from Trump, who has obviously torn up international law, or from Obama, who acknowledged that the blockade had not been effective for what it was created for — change by force — and that they were going to improve relations so that Cubans could decide what we wanted. Obama had barely returned from his visit to Cuba when the Cuban state launched a crusade against centrism — that is, against those people who did not want to use violence for change in Cuba, who thought that through economic opening the Cuban state would be in a position to open itself up to democracy and become less politically exclusionary.
But the US blockade is real.
Yes, since 1962. And the Communist Party as the sole party was created in 1965. And the blockade is not spoken of until the 1990s, when the Soviet bloc could no longer continue supplying us with everything, and when the blockade acquired an extraterritorial dimension — because until then Cuba could trade with North American companies operating in third countries. But then the United States approved the Torricelli Act and above all the Helms-Burton Act. But until then, Cuba had a tremendous capacity for autonomy in carrying out democratising reforms.
The hostility of the United States has given the Cuban state a justification, and also victim status to take to all international bodies and declare that it is not allowed to trade — which is absolutely true — but also to refuse to make the internal changes it has always presented as part of an externally driven agenda. We need a change of regime not because the United States says so, but because it is what anyone with a minimum of ethics and knowledge of what is happening in Cuba ought to support.
The voice of Cuban citizens — desperate because of the conditions in which they live and the repression they suffer — cannot be presented as a manifestation of the enemy agenda of the United States. Cubans have always been invisible to the world because we are reduced to a confrontation between the governments of Cuba and the United States, when the Cuban people are victims of both.
People speak a great deal about how living conditions in Havana have worsened because of the energy blockade imposed by Trump. But in the rest of the country, they had already been like that for years.
In recent years, Cuba has experienced a civilisational regression in living conditions: people are undernourished, hospitals have no medicines. My daughter is a doctor and I know very well that there are no supplies. And the conditions in which prisoners are held are Dantesque. We know from relatives that they are being given minimal food rations, sometimes in poor condition. A few weeks ago, there was a protest inside Canaleta prison because of the hunger there. In Matanzas, there is a tuberculosis outbreak. Since 2023, 122 people have died in prisons as a result of poor conditions.
Moreover, there are now more than a thousand political prisoners, and the government has difficulty negotiating their release, because one of the things that is usually included is compulsory exile — and many of the prisoners have said that they will not leave Cuba. Many have developed a political consciousness that they did not have when they were imprisoned five years ago, and are determined to fight for political change. And there is also someone like Walnier Aguilar, a young man with an intellectual disability diagnosed since childhood, sentenced to twenty-five years for uploading videos of the protest.
When did you begin to suffer repression yourself?
The first time was before I entered the public sphere, at the end of 2022. Counter-intelligence (contrainteligencia) officers came to my house from Havana. I asked them whether I was obliged to answer and whether they were accusing me of any offence; they said no, and I refused to speak. They reported me and I was convicted of disobedience. Thousands of people signed a letter in my support and so I was not deprived of my liberty. Since then, I have been arrested many times and, after keeping me in isolation for hours, they give me a formal warning notice that I never sign.
On another occasion, they confiscated a placard bearing a phrase by Antonio Maceo — one of the heroes of Cuban independence, who gives his name to one of the country’s most important military academies — which read: “To beg for rights is the act of a coward.” They raised a charge against me for illegal propaganda against the constitutional order.
On one occasion when I was travelling to Havana, they beat me and dragged me along the ground to detain me. They accused me of assaulting one of the officers and are seeking four years’ deprivation of liberty on an assault charge. And three years for Jennifer Pantoja, an anthropologist who was accompanying me.
But the trial is convened and then postponed without explanation. It is a sword of Damocles that allows them to extend precautionary measures — house arrest — for two years now. I am not permitted to travel to Havana, to attend meetings of the Academy of History, to do research in the National Library, or to travel abroad. In fact, that ban was already in place before I was even aware of it. In 2023, I went to get my passport to attend a scientific congress in the United States, and was told I could not because I was on the “regulated” list. When I asked the reason, I was told they had evidence that I was going to meet with the CIA in order to return to Cuba and lead a coup d’état. Imagine the telenovela script. I asked them to show me the evidence, but they had none. Five months later, that same lieutenant colonel of State Security (Seguridad del Estado), Rogelio Cuesta Aragón, told me that if I changed my attitude — that is, if I fell silent — they would return my passport, which demonstrates that the whole CIA story is false.
If I told them tomorrow that I was leaving Cuba, they would roll out the red carpet all the way to the airport. But I am not going to do that: I want change from within, and intellectuals and citizens have to take responsibility. I have turned down fellowships for academics at risk because it would be ethically wrong of me to leave. And I do not criticise those who have left, because it is very hard to hold on here.
Has the United States ever tried to contact you to offer help of any kind?
In this house I have met with diplomats from the European Union, from Norway, from Canada, and from the United States too. I do not have two different discourses — I have a single position that I put to anyone. In the case of the US ambassador, Mike Hammer, he also came when he took up his post to ask me about the situation on the island. Brazilian trade unionists have come, left-wing Argentine members of parliament, representatives of the Marxist International.
In Cuba, the dilemma is not between left and right, because many times the left positions itself in favour of the Cuban Government when it is not left-wing at all, but pursues an anti-popular policy. In Cuba, the dilemma is between dictatorship and democracy. Without democracy, you cannot fight for the rights of working people.
I come from a working-class family in a very poor neighbourhood of Matanzas. I am left-wing; I believe no process of change in Cuba can be achieved by leaving the great social majority aside, without social justice, without state responsibility. No system that has proclaimed itself socialist without democracy has ever produced results — they are simply dictatorships dressed in populist rather than popular clothing. And in Cuba, even the populist costume no longer exists.
Is there really great inequality between a privileged minority and a very poor social majority?
No — in Cuba, unlike other countries where an engineer, an academic, or a doctor belongs to the middle class, here everyone forms part of one great conglomerate of poor working class. And then there is a kind of bourgeoisie, tied to new forms of property, owners of small businesses — also not very prosperous, like grocery shops. And finally another privileged layer, with more successful businesses connected through clientelist relations with the political regime.
In Cuba there are people dying of hunger surrounded by abandoned fertile land and shops full of products that can only be bought in dollars. So Cuba needs major international support.
What do you think will happen in the coming weeks?
I am not going to speculate, but if the government does not open a dialogue — at a minimum, to grant amnesty to political prisoners and open a process of participation from below — it will have nothing left but repression, because I believe there could be a social explosion larger or more anarchic than that of 2021. Here there is no fuel for ambulances but there is for police patrols to go to protests and to intimidate dissidents in their homes.
As for negotiations with the United States, if Trump’s government creates the possibility of economic opening, they will accept it, because they are desperate to exchange their state capitalism for a more open version. They cannot do it alone because, having ruined the nation, they need foreign capital. What they will not do is any democratic transformation — but they will open Cuba economically, even if they have to sell it off piece by piece to the United States. Whatever it takes to stay in power.
And what would you like to see happen?
An internal change that puts an end to oppression and leads to a process of democratic transition. And not only the United States needs to help with that process — so do the European Union and Latin America, because Cuba is a country with everything destroyed: roads, tracks, pipes, telephone networks, electricity generation. And we have an ageing population living on pensions that leave them in the most absolute precarity.
In 2010, Trump sent his lawyer to Cuba to register his trademark there, and had it registered until 2016 because he was interested in the golf course business. And Toni Castro, Fidel’s son, is the king of golf courses in that new aristocracy that reigns in Cuba. In 2010, Cuba was a dictatorship as it is today, and Trump had no qualms about coming to try to invest. What is going to make me believe that Trump will not ally himself in some way with these people to open a Cuba to foreign capital — but without democracy? Trump is a despicable figure who does not care about democracy either in his own country or here. My fear is that the European Union, because it is at odds with Trump and has good reason to be, will end up supporting the Cuban government and continuing to make the people invisible.
I just want to ask the world to look at Cuba beyond Trump and the Cuban state — to look at its people and the drama they are living through, the political prisoners, the poor and abandoned. Stop seeing Cuba as a myth. Demystify Cuba and help us.
Alina López Hernández is a historian, essayist, and left-wing intellectual from Matanzas, and a member of Cuba’s Academy of History. Since March 2023, she has held monthly silent vigils at Matanzas’ Liberty Park calling for the release of political prisoners, and has been placed under house arrest and a travel ban.
The Spanish original of this interview, conducted by Patricia Simón and Alex Zapico, first appeared in El Salto. This English translation, by Adam Novak, first appeared on the website of Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières.
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