There are texts one writes hoping they will age quickly. That within a few years they will sound exaggerated, outdated, mercifully obsolete. The one I am republishing today is one of them. And its tragedy — the tragedy of my people — is that five years later it has not aged at all. On the contrary: it fell short.
How These Words Were Born
It was the summer of 2021, and I was visiting Miami. Cuba had just lived through the largest popular protests in more than six decades: hundreds of thousands of people in the streets of dozens of cities, crying out for freedom, exhausted by hunger, by blackouts, and by a COVID pandemic that was ravaging an island without medicine, without painkillers, without so much as vitamins. What came next was repression: mass arrests, summary trials, sentences of twenty years and more for young people whose only crime was shouting what everyone was thinking.
I was then the pastor of Santiago de las Vegas, in the Boyeros municipality of Havana. And I felt, with a clarity that still shakes me, that to remain silent would have been to betray the very Gospel I preach. On August 1, 2021, I published on my Facebook profile a message I wrote in one sitting, with my heart in my hand and without calculating the consequences.
The consequences arrived on their own. The text went viral. Several news agencies and media outlets echoed those words, and even the Washington Examiner mentioned me among the priests who had raised their voices. The regime’s official press, for its part, attacked me by name. But what never made the headlines was the rest: the harassment and persecution by State Security. Several young people from the Cuban Catholic Youth Network living in Havana were summoned and interrogated; they were questioned about me, about my person, about my priestly ministry. The same happened at my parish in Santiago de las Vegas and at what had been my home, the old Convent of La Merced in Old Havana, headquarters of the Congregation of the Mission — the Vincentian Fathers — in Cuba.
To them, to those who were troubled and intimidated because of me, I have owed ever since a gratitude and a debt that words cannot repay. Thank God, none of them was held in prison… Others, I know well, paid infinitely higher prices for saying the same thing. Many are still paying it today behind the regime’s bars.
The Message, in Full
I reproduce it here complete, exactly as I published it on that August 1, 2021. I have not changed a single comma. Let each reader judge whether these words have lost their relevance.
CUBA IS DYING — we cannot close our eyes to the rawness of this reality. People are dying in hospitals and isolation centers for lack of medicine. In Cuba there is not even the most basic essentials, such as painkillers, antibiotics, or vitamins. A malnourished and unvaccinated people grows sicker by the day — a deeply vulnerable population, worn down by hunger and terrible nutrition. The media lie with impunity, keeping to the official script permitted by the Absolute Owner of the nation: the government, the single party, the communist one, the state, the armed forces (all of which are one and the same thing).
There is no concrete support from the international community. Sadly, this bitter cup of misfortune, dragging on since the triumph of the lying, chameleon-like dictator in ’59, is a cup that touches all the children of this beloved Island, whether we are inside or outside of her.
Many ask me if there is hope… I believe there is — that there is always hope. Hope that this whole nightmare will pass, that these 62 years of silence and sheep-like fear came to an end this past #11J. That Cuba now has the opportunity to write a new history, that Cuba now has the opportunity to be brave and change course on this broken road. Cuba has the chance to return to the path it never should have abandoned: that of a democratic Republic, truly free in its political, social, and economic participation.
The armed forces and the police have the chance to join the one they are meant to serve and not repress: the People. The current government has the opportunity to secure a different legacy and future for the new generations, who look on with clarity and disgust at the failure of an ideology of hatred and un-freedom, entrenched in power. Those who hold political, military, and economic power in Cuba now have the opportunity to finish burying this obsolete, absurd, and dark system called Communism, which is kicking its last.
Please, do not prolong any further this fatal lethargy that is annihilating lives, families, and what little remains of values and hope in Cuba. Let us all together become the protagonists of a New Cuba, with real rights, with freedom of enterprise, with economic freedom, with dreams and smiles on our lips and in our hearts. You who govern amid the people’s discontent: admit at last that Marxism is not wanted by the Children of the Homeland, that communism is a disastrous Soviet import that did not even work for the Soviets themselves. Learn to treasure the invaluable legacy of Cuba’s true heroes and founders. There is so much political wisdom to learn from the builders of the Nation and the Republic — and, at the same time, so much energy and talent in the new generations, who are the ones who should be leading the Country we long for.
This Cuba we yearn for has already laid its foundations in the hearts of all Cubans who have cried out, anguished and silent, for FREEDOM for more than 60 years — and who have now decided, once and for all, to release from their chests this cry, bitter and sweet at once.
To those who ask me whether there is hope for Cuba… Yes, I answer yes — and it falls to all of us to arm ourselves with this #HOPE to raise the Nation up again. A Cuba “with all and for the good of all,” a Cuba where ideology no longer reigns, where there is room for everyone, where the streets belong to everyone, where power no longer oppresses, represses, or beats. A Cuba where the only limit to freedom is charity and the rights of others, where no one has to hide or lower their voice to say what they think and believe to be right. A Cuba with true political participation, where people can build and undertake in freedom. A Cuba, in short, in the hands of Cubans — and never again of any dictatorship. A Cuba-Mother-House, where all her children can return to her embrace and to the intimacy of her table, without any flesh daring to call his brother “traitor” or “worm” or “scum.” The children of Cuba were not born for such vileness. It is time to acknowledge personally before God our own pettiness, if there was any, and to take back the reins of our history, to set everything in its rightful place and end this exhausting nightmare once and for all. Long live Free Cuba! God, Homeland, Life, and Freedom for Cuba — this is my humble prayer to our Lord Jesus Christ and to His most holy Mother. Amen.
#patriayvida #Cuba #Libertad #Covid19 #SOSCuba
Five Years Later: The Diagnosis Fell Short
I wrote “Cuba is dying” in 2021, and some told me I was exaggerating. I wish I had been wrong. I was not wrong; I fell short.
Look at the Cuba of 2026. Analysts agree that the Island is going through its worst crisis since 1959, deeper even than the Special Period: blackouts no longer measured in hours but in entire days, transportation paralyzed for lack of fuel, international airlines suspending their flights because Cuban airports cannot even refuel a plane, garbage piling up in the streets of Havana, hospitals in collapse, and international organizations openly warning of the risk of a humanitarian catastrophe.
And the figure that pains me most as a pastor: since that 2021, more than one million Cubans — roughly one in ten — have left the Island. It is the greatest exodus in our history. The young are leaving, the doctors are leaving, the very people who should be building the future are leaving. Cuba is emptying out while the regime clings to power. And hundreds of political prisoners remain in its jails, among them young people from 11J serving sentences of twenty years and more for the crime of having shouted “Patria y Vida” and “Freedom” in the street. Some were minors when they were arrested.
In 2021 I wrote that communism was “kicking its last.” Five years later, that death-kicking continues, and every kick costs lives: separated families, elderly people dying alone, children growing up without a homeland or without parents. The regime now announces packages of measures and last-minute reforms, admitting through its actions what it denied in words for sixty-seven years: that its model does not work, that it never worked. But a system is not reformed by backpedaling on the economy while keeping its fist clenched around freedom. Without political liberty, without pluralism, without the release of every prisoner of conscience, any “reform” is nothing but a fresh bandage on the same infected wound.
I Say It Again, With the Same Words and the Same Faith
That is why today, five years after that publication, I do not retract a single letter. I repeat it, I underline it, and I raise it up once more as both prayer and cry:
Cuba is dying, and we cannot close our eyes. It is time for decisive action upon this dictatorship that lies dying while dragging an entire people down with it. To those who hold power, I repeat what I said then: do not prolong this fatal lethargy any further; bury that obsolete system once and for all, and give Cuba back to the Cubans. To the international community: it is not enough to observe and draft reports while a nation goes dark ninety miles from freedom. And to my Cuban brothers and sisters, inside and outside the Island: let us not allow them to steal our hope as well — because hope is the one thing no dictatorship has ever managed to ration.
I still believe in that Cuba “with all and for the good of all.” I still believe in the Cuba-Mother-House where no child calls his brother “worm” or “traitor.” I still pray every day — for the prisoners, for those who left, for those who resist, and even for the oppressors, that God may touch their hearts or shorten their arm.
Five years ago I ended that message with a prayer, and with that same prayer I end today, because it is still mine:
Long live Free Cuba! God, Homeland, Life, and Freedom for Cuba. Amen.
Father Rubén de la Trinidad