Trump’s pressure on Havana stirs hope among Cuban diaspora in Spain
By Pau Mosquera, CNN
(CNN) — The café is spacious and softly buzzing, with quiet conversations carrying over from distant tables. Reflections flicker in the large mirrors lining the walls of the Lavapiés café where we meet.
Seated near the entrance is activist and playwright Yúnior García, who speaks about memories and longings tied to his native Cuba. “I’m a chronic Cuban,” he says. “I can’t get it out of my head that I’m Cuban and that my home is there. My dreams, for the most part, are there.”
García left the island more than four years ago, in November 2021, after facing harassment from the Cuban government and its supporters for organizing protests demanding greater political freedoms. Madrid became his refuge.
“I’ve spent all this time without seeing my mother, without seeing my son,” he tells CNN. “I left my son when he was about a meter and a half tall – my little boy. Now he’s nearly 6 feet 1. My father died in Cuba and I couldn’t even say goodbye.”
The distance is painful, but García has not abandoned hope of returning – especially now, as he sees what he considers a glimmer of possibility emerging from renewed pressure by Washington on Havana.
That pressure was recently articulated by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: “I think we would like to see the regime there change.” He added, however, “That doesn’t mean we’re going to provoke a change.”
“We can criticize many things about (US President Donald Trump’s) administration,” García says, “but on Venezuela and Cuba, it’s doing what Venezuelans and Cubans have been shouting for years.”
Still, García warns, Trump faces a delicate balancing act. “He’ll have to apply enough pressure to generate change within the Cuban system, without triggering chaos,” he says – chaos that could lead, for instance, to “a massive migration crisis.”
For García, timing is critical. “If the change we dream of doesn’t happen,” he says, “Cuba could be condemned to becoming a failed state – and possibly an irreversible one.”
A hope that endures
Just a few streets away, the air fills with the smell of garlic, cumin and cilantro. It’s nearly 2 p.m. – lunchtime in Madrid – and the aromas drifting from Havana Blues, a Cuban restaurant in the Arganzuela district, do their work.
The source is chef Daimé Hernando, who runs the kitchen her father opened in 2012 with one goal: to make customers feel “like they’re eating their grandmother’s cooking.”
Squid, moros y cristianos (rice and beans), and meat dishes crowd the stoves. Photos of iconic Cuban landmarks cover the walls. For Hernando, these sights and smells once belonged to everyday life.
The first few years after leaving her native Guantánamo, in southeastern Cuba, “there was an overwhelming sense of longing. Every vacation you want to go back, see your friends, your family.” Eventually, she adds, “you go through a painful grieving process – accepting that maybe you’ll never return.”
Her last trip to Cuba was in 2019. “That’s when I told myself: I’m not going back.”
But something has shifted in recent weeks.
“Lately, I’ve started to feel a little hope,” she says. “Hope that things might change, that the situation could improve, that I might return and show my daughter where I was born, where I grew up, our family home.”
Like García, Hernando points to increased US pressure – particularly following a US military operation in Caracas aimed at capturing Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro – as the source of her cautious optimism.
She knows change won’t come easily. But if it does, she says, it must translate into concrete improvements for ordinary Cubans: “Better healthcare, safer streets, real prosperity, access to basic goods – and wages that actually cover people’s basic needs.”
Bringing civil society into the process
Three kilometers (1.8 miles) away, Massiel Rubio is inside her semi-basement apartment, editing manuscripts for publishing houses. Originally from Jaruco, about 25 miles east of Havana, she left Cuba nearly nine years ago.
“Living in Cuba had become unsustainable,” she says. Rubio recalls facing professional obstacles after working for a publishing house that printed authors banned on the island – a history that, she says, followed her and limited job opportunities.
Her nostalgia is muted. “I miss an island that maybe doesn’t exist anymore,” she says. “I miss something that’s gone – something I wish could exist again.”
Like the others, she closely follows events in Cuba, often through friends and colleagues who remain there. But her outlook is more cautious. “After so many years involved in activist groups, in efforts to create change, I feel exhausted,” she admits.
Still, she acknowledges that something may be stirring. “We can’t talk about positive change yet – we don’t know what will happen. But at least there’s the possibility that something moves.”
If change does come, Rubio insists, it must include civil society. “There has to be representation from those who will actually live with the consequences of that change – and from those who have been working toward it for years.”
Only then, she says, will Cuba’s future truly benefit the people who remain on the island.
The-CNN-Wire
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