Darkness has become a test of physical and mental endurance for Cubans. Trash piles up in the streets, water is scarce and there is a shortage of medicines. Finding fresh meat, milk or eggs is impossible, and getting around a country without fuel is an epic endeavor. With two full blackouts this week, there have now been seven complete power outages on the island so far this year. The situation of systemic breakdown is unlike anything Cubans have experienced since the arrival of Castroism six decades ago. The population—whose patience and resilience have been strained by official inertia—sees that those who should guarantee a minimum of welfare remain entrenched in an outdated rhetoric, without taking real measures to ease the misery that is hitting the island. The word desperation stopped being adequate a long time ago.

In a dictatorship, the absence of protests should not be mistaken for acceptance. Cubans still vividly remember the regime’s repression after the 2021 mobilizations, which ended with hundreds detained for banging pots and pans. Miguel Díaz-Canel and his government cling to a policy of terror to maintain a fictitious stability. The president continues to blame everything on the U.S. embargo, an archaic and cruel blockade that should end, but which cannot be used as a shield to cover up negligence, incompetence and abandonment. Cuba is falling apart while a regime incapable of undertaking reforms remains passive.

There is no room left for more slogans. Amid the collapse of the thermoelectric plants’ engines, the island needs its government to acknowledge its incapacity, stop digging in behind external blame and work on real reforms. Cuba urgently needs a pragmatic turn that will allow economic and political freedom. That can only be a domestic decision, and an urgent one, since Donald Trump’s Washington has already made its ambitions to control the island clear, as it has with Venezuela.

Only a democratic future—whose first steps cannot wait any longer—offers any chance of averting the shameless U.S. plan for the island. The Cuban government must open spaces of freedom before its people throw themselves into Trump’s arms out of sheer desperation. That means freeing political prisoners, stopping the harassment of dissidents, guaranteeing basic civil liberties, dismantling the surveillance apparatus that paralyzes citizens and, inevitably, allowing Cubans the possibility to decide their future.

Hunger and misery are a time bomb. The trench of dogma only guarantees more darkness, more exodus and more discontent. Cuban leadership cannot continue governing the ruins of a country that is wasting away in the dark.

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