Two young Spanish women who traveled to Cuba for a month posted a correction video last Tuesday in which they acknowledged that the island suffers from repression and misery.
His statements come after the controversy sparked by an initial video in which they labeled the news about the Cuban crisis as "ultracatastrophist".
The first video, published on Monday, April 21 by the Instagram account of Marina Moreno, garnered over 25,000 views and sparked a wave of criticism. In it, the two travelers claimed to have been in Havana since March 11 and stated that the media was manipulating public opinion to discourage tourism.
In response to the criticism, on Tuesday, April 22, they published a second video in which they drastically changed the tone.
"Cuba is going through a critical moment not only due to the United States blockade but also because of the blockade imposed by the Cuban government on its people," stated Marina Moreno in her clarification.
The two young women explicitly described themselves as "two leftists who are against the communist dictatorship that represses its society," and clarified that their original intention was to highlight the Cuban reality to promote ethical tourism, not to whitewash the regime.
Unlike many tourists, the Spanish women did not stay in a hotel but in a rental house in Centro Habana, one of the most affected areas of the city.
"We have lived with daily power outages, water shortages, trash in the streets, and a lack of food in the stores," described Moreno in the correction video.
In the first video, however, they had downplayed that very reality. "We are being manipulated by extremely catastrophic news," they said at the time, while encouraging tourists to visit the island to support the local economy.
That first video also presented data illustrating the severity of the situation: a worker from a five-star hotel in Havana revealed that at that time they only had 68 customers, 5% of total capacity. Tourism in Cuba fell by 17.2% in 2025. The monthly salary of a Cuban doctor is around 7,000 to 8,000 Cuban pesos, equivalent to between 12 and 14 euros.
The episode fits into a recurring pattern of leftist Western visitors who downplay the Cuban crisis.
In March 2026, Pablo Iglesias traveled to the island with the flotilla "Nuestra América" and claimed that the situation "is difficult, but not as it is described from the outside," which sparked a wave of outrage among Cubans both inside and outside the island.
The response from many Cubans to such declarations has been emphatic: "Yes, there is poverty there, but there is also freedom. Here we have misery and repression," they said in October 2025 in response to Iglesias.
The two Spanish women announced that they will be releasing upcoming videos about power outages, the lack of fuel, the scarcity of medicines, and the so-called tourist siege law, aiming, they said, to "raise awareness from our perspective" and "offer a helping hand" to the Cuban people.
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