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The Cuban Catholic priest Alberto Reyes Pías published a new one of his reflections "I've been thinking" this Friday, in which he denounces the generational damage that the regime has inflicted on Cuban society and urges parents to break the cycle of fear, pretense, and forced obedience.
In the text published on his Facebook profile, Reyes uses San José as a spiritual reference for the Cuban people, drawing a parallel between the life of the saint and today's Cuba.
"San José lived in a time marked by poverty and need, by insecurity and despotic power, by a lack of rights and justice, because the country was in the hands of an authority that knew no limits and created an atmosphere of insecurity and fear," he recalled.
The core of the message is a direct denunciation of the moral legacy of Castroism: "For generations, we have lived in lies, in double morals, in pretense, and in fear. And this needs to heal."
Reyes identifies three specific behaviors through which Cuban parents, often unwittingly, perpetuate that legacy.
The first: telling a child not to express what they think. "When we tell a child: 'be careful, don't say what you think, don't say what you believe, say what everyone else says…', we are teaching them to be a slave," the priest writes.
The second: to tolerate or promote their participation in the regime's repressive mechanisms. "When we allow our children to participate in an act of repudiation, or we let them join the rapid response brigades, we are teaching them to be intolerant and violent."
The third: preventing them from attending church out of fear. "When, out of fear, we stop our children from going to church, we are taking away the greatest strength they can have."
The Camagüey parish priest warns that the result of these three behaviors is a sick generation: "We are raising our children to be ill."
And it outlines the likely outcome: the children will grow up submissive or will emigrate. "We will grow old watching our children grow up submissive, unless our children say: 'I’m leaving here,' and go seek elsewhere what we did not offer them."
In light of that diagnosis, Reyes proposes an active construction: "Just as for years a society of lies, injustice, fear, and submission was built here, today it is our turn to construct a new, different, free, and above all, healthy society."
Reyes Pías, born in Camagüey in 1967, is a parish priest of the Diocese of Camagüey. He has faced censorship, interrogations, and acts of repudiation due to his homilies and writings, and is regarded by the regime as a controversial figure within the Catholic Church.
So far in 2026, the priest has intensified his public activities: in January, he expressed hope that it would be the year of freedom and change, and in February he urged the international left to recognize that the Cuban model has been a failure.
Last week, in an interview with the Spanish newspaper El Mundo, he explained that in Cuba there is a shared feeling that something is going to happen, but that change has yet to materialize. At the same time, protests against the regime are increasing, reflecting internal pressure.
Cuba is a pressure cooker that can explode at any moment," he warned.
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