Are we ready to be free?

For 67 years, the Cuban people have not just lived under a government, but within a system that infiltrated every aspect of life. It not only determined who was in charge, but also how to speak, what could be said, what could be expected, and even what it was permissible to dream. People learned to ask for permission for everything, to avoid standing out, to silence what was bothersome, and to resolve issues "outside" what didn't exist "inside." It became clear that the law did not protect but punished, that the State did not serve the citizen but monitored him, and that surviving was more important than building. Repeated over generations, this does not create citizens: it shapes individuals trained to adapt to fear and scarcity.

That is why freedom, when it arrives, will not just be a celebration. It will be a jolt. Because alongside the right to speak, to travel, to undertake, and to vote, there will come something that has been denied for decades: the responsibility to participate, to uphold, to care for what belongs to everyone. There will be institutions to hold accountable, laws to respect, taxes to pay, contracts to fulfill, and differences to tolerate. And there will be, for the first time, a real space for criticism to be not a crime, but a tool.

A dictatorship not only impoverishes the economy; it impoverishes civic character. It teaches survival, not coexistence; evasion, not acceptance; silence, not debate. And those wounds do not disappear on the day a regime falls. They linger in habits, in distrust, in the temptation to seek shortcuts. That's why freedom will not be easy. It will be uncomfortable. It will be demanding. It will ask for more than it gives.

There will be mistakes. There will be chaos. There will be people who confuse freedom with disorder and rules with oppression. There will be nostalgia for the misery we know, because at least it was predictable. All of that will happen. Because that’s what always occurs when a people emerges from a cage that has held them for too long.

But none of those difficulties is an argument to remain confined.

A people does not need to be ready to stop being oppressed. It needs to stop being oppressed to begin to be ready.

One does not learn to be free under surveillance. One does not learn to be a citizen in fear.

Dignity cannot be built on forced obedience.

And yes: we will have to learn. We will have to fail. We will have to correct. We will have to rebuild what has been distorted for decades. We will have to stumble, rise, and try again. But none of that is more cruel than an entire life unable to choose, unable to speak, unable to decide one’s own destiny. So, even if freedom arrives with vertigo, with conflict, and with responsibility, let it come. Let it come at last. Because no people become worthy of freedom by waiting in a cage, but by living outside of it.

And because, in the end, above all fears and uncertainties, the only truly unbearable thing is continuing without her.