HAVANA — Yenisey Taboada’s small apartment on the outskirts of Havana is filled with photos of her imprisoned son.
Duannis was 22 and watching soccer at a cafe when he spontaneously joined Cuba’s biggest antigovernment street protest in decades. He was beaten by security forces, arrested and sentenced to 14 years in prison.
His mother’s apartment is also filled with American flags.
Taboada fervently dreams of U.S. intervention to topple Cuba’s Communist Party and free her son, now 26, and an estimated 1,000 other political prisoners. The recent U.S. military operation to overthrow Venezuela’s authoritarian leader, Nicolás Maduro, gave her hope.
“We’re being repressed,” Taboada said. “We can’t do it alone.”
1. Yenisey Taboada’s small apartment in Havana is filled with photos of her imprisoned son, Duannis Tabaoda. 2. The sister of Duannis Taboada has a tattoo recalling July 11, 2021, the day her brother was arrested after joining an anti-government protest. 3. Yenisey Taboada at her small apartment in Havana. (Kate Linthicum / Los Angeles Times)
Other Cubans, though, are furious at the U.S. and President Trump, who said this month after launching war on Iran that he believes he will have “the honor of taking Cuba,” adding, “I can do anything I want with it.”
“They want to make Cuba another colony, like Puerto Rico,” said Rafael García Gómez, 63, who works in a hotel. He blamed the U.S. oil embargo for the island’s deepening energy crisis, and vowed to take up arms if Trump attempted military action.
“We will determine our own destiny,” García said.
But who, exactly, is “we”? Leaders in Havana and Washington say they are in direct talks for the first time in years, but as speculation mounts over what will come next, one thing is becoming abundantly clear: The Cuban people have, so far, been excluded from any deal-making.
“Civil society doesn’t have a seat at the table,” said Manuel Cuesta Morúa, a longtime pro-democracy activist in Havana. “We want dialogues and discussions where the Cubans are the protagonists.”
Men fish as the vessel Maguro, symbolically renamed “Granma 2.0” as a tribute to the yacht used by Fidel Castro’s guerrilla fighters to launch their revolution in 1956, arrives at the port of Havana from Mexico with humanitarian aid as part of the Nuestra America convoy.
(Yamil Lage / AFP/Getty Images)
As the oil blockade quickly exhausts Cuba’s supply of fuel, triggering a series of lengthy, island-wide blackouts, many here are exhausted and are becoming increasingly vocal about their desire for fundamental changes in Cuba.
But what Cubans want is far from uniform.
Many agree that relieving economic distress must be an immediate focus, but while some believe that should entail a gradual, socialist-style liberalization of the economy, others want a total transition to free-market capitalism, including more foreign investment and private enterprise.
Then there’s politics. Many are fed up with the one-party political system, but debate what might replace it.
Decades of poverty and the crumbling of Cuba’s once-idealized healthcare system have sparked widespread disillusionment, said Ted Henken, a professor of Cuban studies at Baruch College in New York.
“You’ve had a really gradual but very clear decline in investment in the boilerplate communist revolutionary ideology over the last 35 years,” Henken said. “Because you can’t eat ideology.
“I rarely meet Cubans who defend that system,” he added, “because they’ve lived in it, and it doesn’t work.”
People walk and ride on a street without power during a nationwide blackout in Havana on March 22. Havana’s once bustling streets are often largely empty.
(Yamil Lage / AFP / Getty Images)
Cuba’s leaders have insisted in recent weeks that their political system is not up for debate.
There are no political public opinion polls in Cuba. Most people are not used to speaking out, afraid that even a social media post criticizing the authoritarian government could land them in jail. The country’s most vocal activists fled the island after Cuba’s repression of the nationwide protest on July 11, 2021 — the ones in which Duannis Taboada marched.
But in interviews across Havana this month, some on condition of anonymity, many people said they were so desperate, any change would be welcome.
“It’s hell,” said a taxi driver named Pedro as he drove past heaps of garbage rotting in the streets because there is not enough gas for trash trucks. “There are people here who have gone years without eating meat or fish.”
He said he wants the U.S. to do to Cuba’s leaders “what they did to Maduro.”
“They should send them to prison and only give them bread once a day, so they know what it means to die of hunger,” he said.
A nationwide power outage darkens a street in Havana on March 21.
(Yamil Lage / AFP / Getty Images)
Critics of the Cuban government say the replication of the U.S. model in Venezuela — which removed Maduro but kept his left-wing Chavista movement intact — would be a disappointment. Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, now governs Venezuela, while the U.S. controls the country’s vast oil reserves. Venezuela’s leading pro-democracy opposition figure, María Corina Machado, remains in exile, and the U.S. has not yet called for new elections.
Cuba, which has been under authoritarian control for decades longer than Venezuela, has a less developed opposition, said Cuesta. Building democratic institutions would take time, which is why he advocates for what he describes as a “tranquil transition,” which would include a calendar for future elections.
There is also a large contingent of Cubans who say the United States should stop meddling altogether, seeing Trump’s actions as the latest in a long history of U.S. interventions.
“These are not negotiations. These are not fair talks,” said Liz Olivia Fernández, 32, a Havana-based journalist with the news outlet Belly of the Beast. “You can’t make a deal with an abuser.”
“If you want to gain my confidence,” García said, “do you hit me with a stick?”
Cuba is coming from a weakened position, as the energy crisis sparks new waves of anger at what many see as mismanagement of the state-controlled economy. “The U.S. is going to put conditions on us, that’s what’s going to happen,” said a doorman who spoke on condition of anonymity.
A man returns from fishing on a makeshift raft in Havana during a national blackout on March 22. The U.S.-imposed oil embargo is forcing Cubans to scramble for energy and food.
(Yamil Lage / AFP / Getty Images)
Back in Taboada’s neighborhood, the electricity had been out for nearly 24 hours. As the sun sank, neighbors began banging spoons on metal pots from inside their homes, the subtle but unmistakable clank of government protests. A recent demonstration in eastern Cuba that began with clanging pots and ended with citizens burning down the local Communist Party headquarters resulted in dozens of arrests.
Still, the sound heartened Taboada.
“It feels as though the Cuban people finally have a sense of hope for freedom,” she said.
She sometimes argues with her neighbors about what that freedom would look like.
“It doesn’t matter what party governs,” a neighbor told her as they stood around on the sidewalk, escaping the darkness of their homes as the blackout stretched on. “What matters to me is how am I going to feed my family.
“What matters is the economy,” he continued. “We need a capitalist economy, I don’t care what the party is.”
A man enters his home next to a mural depicting Argentine-born revolutionary leader, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, after a power outage in Havana on March 5.
(Yamil Lage / AFP / Getty Images)
“We need more than that,” she said. “If communism continues, there will still be political prisoners. People will still be tortured.”
People like her son. “I cannot bear the thought of another mother having to endure what I have,” she said.
She is allowed weekly visits to Duannis, who has staged several hunger strikes. She said he was tortured, and lost vision in one eye.
He has asked her to bring him books by Nelson Mandela, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and José Martí, who fought for Cuba’s independence from Spain.
He is developing his political consciousness, she said, that he will be able to exercise one day, when Cuba is free.
Brazilian activist Thiago Avila waves a Cuban flag on board the vessel Maguro as it arrives from Mexico with humanitarian aid as part of the Nuestra America convoy, docking at the port of Havana on March 24.
(Yuri Cortez / AFP / Getty Images)
