"If Trump overthrew the Cuban regime, would you be happy?": the seemingly contradictory sentiments of the drama in Cuba
Barcelona"Would you be happy if Trump finally brought down the Cuban regime?" was the last question a journalist asked me in an interview for TV3. A totally legitimate concern that I have had to answer several times to my progressive friends in Barcelona. In summary, my answer is always the same: of course, I would be happy, even if this emotion is injected by arguably the worst person in the world today.
I have been living in Barcelona for four years and five months, an ocean away from my home, against my will. And I cannot return to Havana, where my family lives: my sick father, my mother, my two sisters, my three nephews —I don’t know one because he was born when I was already in exile—, my grandmother —an octogenarian, who is living her final years—, and my uncles. My five-year-old son remembers the country from what his mother and I tell him. He left the island at a year and a half old. This circumstance is the fault of the Cuban government, which in 2022 forced me to choose: prison or exile.
But I have a very strong conviction: the future of Cuba belongs to Cubans. I am against any foreign intervention or the island ending up as a US protectorate.In this way, they have taken over the country through ideological intransigence, fixated on a supposed communist purity: all the people who during these almost seven decades have dared to think differently or have a critical vision have become their enemies. And they have been imprisoned or thrown out of the country. If it comes, the end of Castroism would be a relief for all the millions of Cubans who have suffered it. A feeling that, unfortunately, will be subject, symbolically and politically, to the imperial and senseless attitude of Donald Trump, the man who turns the world upside down.
But I have a very strong conviction: the future of Cuba belongs to Cubans. I am against any foreign intervention or the island ending up as an American protectorate, as it was in the past, a path that Venezuela seems to be following. But to the 1,214 political prisoners who are rotting in inhuman conditions, to the people who have nothing to eat, who live without electricity, without water, without gas, without food, without medicine, to all these people who are in a serious situation, even before Trump's latest measures, my convictions and those of Europeans, who, from their comfort, judge and dare to issue moral lessons, matter little.
I think it is excellent that European intellectuals sign letters of support for the Cuban people and condemn Trump's imperial attitude, and try to form a flotilla of ships to bring food to the island. One should always be on the side of one's neighbor and condemn imperialist ambitions, but where was all this intellectual community, this global civil society, when the Cuban regime closed homosexuals in labor camps, when it caused the drowning of 41 people by sinking a tugboat at sea, when it imprisoned more than a thousand people in 2021 for going out into the street to express themselves —more than 50 minors—, when every day it persecutes opponents, artists, and journalists?
The Cuban drama is complex. It is not black or white. It has nuances. Because the nation is trapped in a dead end: on one side, Trump, and on the other, the Cuban regime. And we Cubans have our hands tied: we can only witness the course of events. If the dictatorship falls, I will celebrate it. And when I can walk the streets of my country again with my son by the hand, if my country becomes a protectorate of the United States, I will proceed to denounce this new circumstance out of conviction. That's what life and journalism are about: shooting with sincerity against whoever usurps power.