An essay published this Friday by Cuban academic Lorenzo Vega-Montoto on the platform CubaxCuba raises one of the most uncomfortable questions a Cuban aged between sixty and eighty years can ask: what exactly have they built throughout their lives, and why this question, like all dangerous ones in Cuba, continues to be asked in silence.
Vega-Montoto, Doctor of Chemical Sciences and Principal Researcher at Idaho National Laboratory, dedicated the text to his parents and to "a generation that sang, believed, and was abandoned." The essay, titled "The Glory That No One Gave Back," is a devastating analysis of the betrayal that the regime perpetrated against those who built it.
"There is a way to lose your life that does not appear in any obituary," the author writes. "It is the slow, accumulated loss of the years given to something that turned out not to be what it promised. It is waking up at seventy years old in a country without electric light, without medications, without the children who left by raft, by plane, or much worse, who are imprisoned."
The analysis centers on the music of the Nueva Trova —Silvio Rodríguez, Pablo Milanés, and Noel Nicola— as the emotional vehicle that sealed the pact between that generation and the revolution. The songs, he argues, were not mere entertainment but a form of liturgy: they established an implicit contract whose central clause was that if the individual dedicated their life to the collective, the collective would support them. "That assumption was the most expensive lie that generation paid," he concludes.
The academic cites Silvio's line in "Playa Girón" —"if someone steals food and then gives their life, what should we do?"— as "the most honest question that can be asked of a revolution," posed in 1975 and never answered by those in power. He also recalls Pablo Milanés's verse in "Cuando te encontré": "It would be better to drown in the sea than to betray the glory that has been lived." For Vega-Montoto, that line is not poetry but the emotional signature of a generation that bound itself out of love and that the regime exploited for decades.
"This is the most refined scam produced by 20th century Latin America," he writes. "Fidel Castro was not a leader who served his people. He was an extraordinary individual—one must grant him that adjective to grasp the magnitude of the theft—who made his people believe that serving him was the same as serving themselves." All that collective sacrifice, he concludes, "was paid as tribute to the symbolic and historical capital of a man who died surrounded by the decorations of ninety-some states and left his country without soap."
That generation that educated, cultivated, and fought wars on other continents receives today a minimum pension of 4,000 Cuban pesos, less than nine dollars at the informal exchange rate, while the basic food basket requires at least 30,000 pesos monthly. A survey by the Independent Trade Union Association of Cuba of 506 retirees revealed that 99% claim their pension does not cover food, housing, or medicine. The country is suffering power outages of up to twenty hours a day, with a generation deficit that reached 1,881 megawatts in March 2026.
For Vega-Montoto, this abandonment is not accidental. "A system that cannot produce real wealth needs its oldest members to die quickly and quietly," he writes. "These elders have memory. They remember what was promised and what was delivered. And that gap, if articulated, if spoken out loud, is politically devastating." Therefore, he concludes, "the system prefers that this generation consumes its nostalgia in private. That they sing old songs to themselves. That they die before their testimony becomes inconvenient."
The essay also discusses whether that generation can come to terms with what they experienced. The scholar differentiates between those who cannot accept the betrayal—because doing so would dismantle the only meaningful structure that supports their personal history—and those who have indeed processed that grief. Among the latter, he mentions those who saw Pablo Milanés break away from the regime and understood that this was not a betrayal of his work, but rather its most logical consequence. Milanés supported the protests on July 11, 2021, and passed away in Madrid in November 2022.
More than a million Cubans have left the island since 2021, leaving the elderly alone. The foreign press has highlighted the abandonment of seniors in Cuba as one of the most visible symptoms of the humanitarian collapse the island is experiencing after 67 years of dictatorship.
"The possible reconciliation, the only honest one, is not with the Revolution. It is with oneself," writes Vega-Montoto in closing. He concludes with the phrase that encapsulates the entire argument: "That generation was not defeated by imperialism. It was robbed by its own Revolution. And that is still waiting to be said out loud."
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