Saying that Cuba is in crisis is hardly news. It has been for decades. Nor is it news that Washington’s sanctions have worsened the health of an economy that is now on life support. Both statements are axioms. But talking about Havana is a high-risk sport.

In that ring, the two truths rarely meet. They exclude one another and push people into the trenches of ideology. Either Cuba is as it is because of the Communist Party — the only legal party in the country — or because of Washington’s sanctions. One is accepted. Never both. But for a group of 14 experts convened by Harvard University, this shouting match must stop. All agree: maintaining the status quo while the country collapses is unsustainable.

This appeal to common sense is based on a dialogue that began in January, when the White House imposed a de facto fuel blockade on Havana. The measure came after another dramatic move that rocked the island: the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. That is how Alejandro de la Fuente, coordinator of Harvard’s Working Group on the Future of Cuba, explains it to EL PAÍS. “President Donald Trump did not create the Cuban crisis, but he certainly made it much worse,” he says over the phone. The result is a 20-page document that examines causes and consequences and suggests a democratic roadmap for the country, without bombast.

The diagnostic data are stark. They come from an unusual mix: official figures combined with those from independent bodies. GDP fell 11% between 2019 and 2024. A third of the population has emigrated over the past decade, an outflow the report compares to that of nations in civil war. The government’s voracious pursuit of hard currency has emptied doctors’ offices and hospitals to export medical personnel. Schools lack teachers. Agriculture collapsed by 60% in that period. Eating congrís — the typical dish of rice and beans — has become a luxury.

Meanwhile, state investment has concentrated on building empty hotels — investment in tourism has been 11 times higher than in health, education, and social care combined; 20-hour daily blackouts are the norm; And those who dare to protest end up behind bars: there are 1,300 political prisoners. In fact, the island ranks second worldwide in incarcerated population per capita, behind only Nayib Bukele’s El Salvador.

Participants in the report include Jeffrey DeLaurentis, the U.S. chargé d’affaires in Havana during the Obama-era thaw; former Mexican ambassador to the island (2002–2005) Roberta Lajous; Cuban opposition figure Manuel Cuesta Morúa; exiled artist Tania Bruguera; and economist Omar Everleny Pérez. “This is a working group with participants who come from very diverse positions. We circulated many documents among everyone; we made calls… This summary we circulated was not going to reflect 100% the individual views of each person,” De la Fuente says. He adds: “We do not want to antagonize the White House, but we do want to steal its initiative.”

Dialogue with the authorities

In the text, published on September 10, the Group — an alliance between the Program on Cuban Studies, the Afro-Latin American Research Institute and Harvard’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies — calls for a negotiated exit from the crisis. An unforgivable heresy among the most radical circles of the Florida exile community. “Cuban authorities must take the initiative in this process and become facilitators. This is not a premise shared by all political actors in Cuba and in the diaspora. Our conviction, however, is that resolving the current crisis requires the participation of everyone,” the document reads.

The experts move away from maximalist positions that call for military intervention or a sudden regime change. As an alternative, they lay out a roadmap that includes amnesty for political prisoners, the dismantling of laws that have enabled repression, the lifting of U.S. sanctions, further economic reforms to empower the nascent private sector, and the country’s reentry into international financial institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank. The publication also advocates establishing a constituent assembly over the long term.

For former Mexican ambassador to the island Roberta Lajous, a hypothetical transition must consider both truths at once — something neither Washington nor Havana has openly admitted in six decades of hostility and propaganda. “The embargo and U.S. sanctions have only served to justify the continued existence of a single political party that, to date, still considers any kind of opposition illegal,” she tells EL PAÍS by phone.

The diplomat argues that U.S. measures have bolstered the Cuban system’s victim narrative — the David anti-imperialist against the U.S. Goliath — and have failed to achieve the White House’s objective: toppling the regime. As a result, ordinary citizens have borne the consequences. “It is not possible to continue with this situation of suffering for the population,” she concludes.

The working group’s document is final but not definitive. In other words, it will serve to “create dialogue” in the coming months, De la Fuente explains. The idea is to listen to everyone, from the hardest-line opposition to the ruling party. “Many maximalist positions are not unreasonable. Those who argue [that it is naïve to expect Cuban authorities to sit down and talk] are not without reason. But it must be tried […] it is the Cuban state’s responsibility to find solutions to this problem. That is not a duty of the White House or the State Department,” the academic stresses.

The Cuban government was quick to respond in its customary tone. Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez said last week that the publication is “propaganda designed by the State Department” to “confuse and manipulate the U.S. and international public.”

The question the report leaves is not whether Cuba needs a transition. It is whether anyone, in Havana or in Washington, is willing to stop shouting.

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“I was only 18 when they kidnapped me, sold me to the United States and took me to one of the CIA’s black sites. They tortured me for months. Then they sent me to Guantánamo, where I spent nearly 15 years without charges or trial. What was done to me was not an aberration. It was orders.” Mansur Adayfi, a former detainee at the U.S. naval base prison in Guantánamo and an activist with the advocacy NGO CAGE International, said this in June at a panel of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) in Vienna.

Adayfi was released without charge three decades after his capture. Fifteen other detainees remain behind bars. The prison — synonymous with the most sinister abuses and torture carried out in the U.S. war on terror after the September 11, 2001, attacks, which took place 25 years ago — remains open with no sign of closing despite numerous past attempts. The future of the inmates still held is equally uncertain. Meanwhile, justice for the victims of 9/11 has not arrived: in August a date was finally set — June 5, 2028 — for the trial of the prison’s most famous inmate, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, known as KSM, the alleged mastermind of the attacks who has been held there since 2006, but there is still no certainty that the deadline will be met.

The Guantánamo prison and the abuses carried out there were born of haste, anger and fear. The United States had just discovered, in a state of panic, that it could be the target of unthinkable terrorist massacres; it feared further imminent strikes as devastating, or worse, than those in New York, Washington, and a field in Pennsylvania, and it was hungry for revenge. Then‑president George W. Bush ordered the creation of a detention facility to hold so‑called “enemy combatants,” without the obligation to grant them the protections of the Geneva Conventions afforded to captured soldiers or the rights they would have as prisoners on U.S. soil (a dubious legal theory the Supreme Court later rejected). The peculiar status of the naval base — on Cuban sovereign territory but under U.S. military control, foreign and isolated yet close enough to allow rapid transfers from the U.S. — led to the decision to locate the prison there.

Up to 779 Muslim men of varied nationalities were secretly captured, hooded and shackled, and brought to the prison. The vast majority of the inmates had nothing to do with 9/11, Al Qaeda, or Islamist terrorism. Many had been sold for a few dollars to the CIA, which handed out leaflets in the border area between Afghanistan and Pakistan promising “wealth and power like you have never imagined” to those who turned in alleged Al Qaeda or Taliban members. Few checks were carried out: there was a rush to find supposed criminals and to show the public progress in the war on terror.

“They will be treated humanely,” Bush had promised. That did not happen. According to the 2023 report by the UN special rapporteur on human rights regarding the Guantánamo prison — and as Adayfi corroborated at the OSCE session — each detainee “has lived or lives with their own indelible experiences of psychological and physical trauma after enduring severe abuses of their human rights.”

The first prisoners began arriving in 2002. Their initial housing was the hastily erected Camp X‑Ray in a corner of the base: a series of two‑by‑two‑meter cages outdoors, furnished only with two buckets — one for water, the other for bodily needs — that were used for four months until the prison facilities were completed. Interrogators, poorly trained for such tasks and under enormous pressure to uncover and dismantle possible plots — and furious over the deaths of their fellow citizens — were put in charge of the detainees.

The result was widespread use of torture: simulated drownings, beatings, extreme sleep deprivation, anal rape. By the summer of 2002 a culture of mistreatment was widespread, including the use of dogs to intimidate, forced painful positions, and sleep disruption. As far as is known, it served no useful purpose.

In 2014, Senator and former Republican presidential candidate John McCain — himself a tortured prisoner of war during Vietnam — said of those methods: “They stained our national honor, did much harm and little practical good […] I know from personal experience that the abuse of prisoners will produce more bad than good intelligence. I know that victims of torture will offer intentionally misleading information if they think their captors will believe it. I know they will say whatever they think their torturers want them to say if they believe it will stop their suffering.”

The allegations about what was happening in those cells accelerated promises to close the facility. Then‑presidential candidate Barack Obama announced in 2008 that shuttering it would be the first act of his administration. He never succeeded. Neither did the next Democratic president, Joe Biden. The great majority of detainees have been released after years behind bars without being charged in military commissions, the specially created tribunals to try Guantánamo inmates.

Today, 800 military and civilian staff work at what is considered the most expensive prison in the world, at a ratio of about 50 employees for each one of the roughly 15 inmates, who are aged between 46 and 54 and remain in various forms of legal limbo. Two detainees have been convicted and are serving sentences at the base. Three are listed as “enemy combatants” and nicknamed “the forever prisoners”: they will not be taken to trial and the United States does not want to release them, although their status is subject to periodic review. Three have been cleared for transfer to a third country; the Trump administration, which signed several agreements to deport irregular migrants to distant locations, did not show much interest in finding a government willing to accept the three Guantánamo detainees.

The remaining seven, formerly categorized as high‑value detainees and accused of some of the worst attacks in history, await trials for charges — over the 9/11 attacks, the 2000 bombing of the destroyer USS Cole, the bombing of a nightclub in Bali — that have been tangled in appeal after appeal and never reach a judge. The consequences of torture are one of the factors complicating their cases.

One of the five accused of participating in the 9/11 attacks, Ramzi bin al‑Shibh, has been declared too mentally damaged by torture to stand trial. Regarding the other four — Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Walid bin Attash, Mustafa al‑Hawsawi and Ammar al‑Baluchi — prosecutors concluded that, because of the abuses they suffered, it would be impossible to successfully try them and negotiated a deal, announced in August 2024, to withdraw death‑penalty requests in exchange for guilty pleas and detailed accounts of their roles in the attacks and life at Guantánamo. Then‑secretary of defense Lloyd Austin overturned that deal: the case returned to square one.

Last month, just days before the anniversary of 9/11, a judge finally set a date for KSM’s trial: June 2028, two years away. But there are no expectations the hearing will take place even then. The judge has ruled that a key piece of evidence cannot be used in the trial: a confession Mohammed gave to a “clean” team (one that did not use torture) of FBI agents after his arrival at Guantánamo. It was determined that that confession had been influenced by the effects of the torture the suspect had suffered in CIA black sites before reaching the base.

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