"If Trump brought down the Cuban regime, would you be happy?": the apparently contradictory feelings of the drama in Cuba

Barcelona"If Trump finally brought down the Cuban regime, would you be happy?" 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 into me by possibly 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 —octogenarian, who is living her last years— and my uncles. My five-year-old son remembers the country through 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 made me choose: prison or exile.

But I have a very strong conviction: the future of Cuba belongs to the Cubans. I am against any foreign intervention or that the island ends up being an American protectorateIn this way they managed the country through ideological intransigence, focusing 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 imprisoned them or expelled them from the country. If it arrives, 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 has the world upside down.

But I have a very strong conviction: the future of Cuba belongs to the Cubans. I am against any foreign intervention or that the island ends up being an American protectorate, as it was in the past, a path that Venezuela seems to be following. But for the 1,214 political prisoners who are rotting in inhumane conditions, for the people who have nothing to eat, who live without electricity, without water, without gas, without food, without medicine, for 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's excellent that European intellectuals sign letters of support for the Cuban people and condemn Trump's imperial attitude, and that they try to form a flotilla of ships to bring food to the island. We must always be on the side of our neighbor and condemn imperialist ambitions, but where were all these intellectuals, this global civil society, when the Cuban regime locked up 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 streets 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 deadlock: on one hand, 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 United States protectorate, I will proceed to denounce this new circumstance out of conviction. This is what life and journalism are about: shooting truthfully at those who usurp power.