Is Cuba Next? | The New Yorker
The state of emergency in Cuba only truly abated after the election of Hugo Chávez as president of Venezuela in 1998. Chávez and Castro signed a pact in which Venezuela agreed to supply oil to Cuba in exchange for thousands of Cuban doctors, teachers, sports instructors and security agents. Chávez once described Castro to me as “a beacon,” a father figure who convinced him that socialism was the way forward for humanity. The alliance became so close that people joked that Venezuela and Cuba had merged into a new revolutionary entity, “Cubazuela.” After Maduro succeeded Chávez, who died of cancer, in 2013, falling global oil prices devastated Venezuela’s economy. Maduro continued to send oil, but in much smaller quantities – by 2025, about a third of what Cuba imported, with Mexico supplying much of the rest. Since Maduro’s capture in January, Cuba has once again been left to its own devices. This time, there is no charismatic leader to appease the angry citizens.
On January 27, Díaz-Canel joined several thousand loyalist students, soldiers and senior leaders at La Escalinata, a grand stone staircase that leads to the entrance to the University of Havana. They were present for the Torchlight March, an annual tribute to José Martí, the Cuban nationalist hero par excellence. Martí, a journalist and poet, was a key figure in the 19th century War of Independence, during which Cuban elites revolted against Spanish colonists. As the fighting dragged on for decades, Martí helped rally his peers. “How beautiful it is to die when you die fighting in defense of the homeland,” he once wrote. In 1895, he participated in a cavalry charge against the Spanish and was killed on his first day of battle.
Spain was finally driven out of the country in 1898, when the United States sided with the Cubans – only to then deny them sovereignty, making Cuba a de facto US protectorate and then repeatedly intervening to support friendly autocrats. But the legend of Martí endured; he became Cuba’s “apostle” and a bust of him took pride of place in schoolyards across the island. Cuban politicians always take care to present themselves as faithful to Martí and sacrifice themselves for the homeland is a consecrated ideal. In 1953, six months before Fidel Castro launched his insurrection against U.S.-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista, he led a torchlight procession in Havana to commemorate the centenary of Martí’s birth. It has since been reproduced.
“It’s a scourge, don’t think about it too much. Just take a frog and throw it.”
Cartoon by Daniel Kanhai
This year’s march – dubbed the Anti-Imperialist Centennial Torch March, because 2026 is the hundredth anniversary of Castro’s birth – had an air of defiance. Flags were flying. A young crooner sang a patriotic ballad and the crowd went wild. Litza Elena González Desdín, president of the government-aligned student federation, delivered an impassioned speech from the top of the stairs, rallying what remained of the Revolution’s true believers. “Compatriots, we live in very turbulent times, in which the empire and its emperor, Donald Trump, want to impose an order of bombs, kidnappings, persecutions, destruction and death, and intend to return us to destructive fascism,” she said. She denounced “the cowardly military aggression of the United States against Venezuela” and “the kidnapping of the president of this sister nation.” She reminded protesters that their country had also paid a blood sacrifice: Dozens of Cuban bodyguards, secretly tasked with protecting Maduro, had been killed. “We will never forget that on January 3, in the darkest hours of the early morning, Cubans physically lost thirty-two of our bravest sons,” she said.
