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The program «Cuadrando la Caja» from Cuban television aired a special episode on May First in which an American activist claimed that only 5% of the American population is unionized, attributed this decline to Ronald Reagan, and called for leaders "like Malcolm X or Fidel" to rescue the labor movement in the United States.
The statement came from Brenda López, co-founder of the committee "Hands Off Cuba" and a resident of Oakland, who participated as a guest in the space alongside Sebastián Viscuso, a member of the General Confederation of French Workers.
The program, hosted by Marxenin Pérez, was part of the events of the May 1st, 2026 in Cuba, celebrated under the slogan "The Homeland is Defended" and dedicated to the centennial of Fidel Castro's birth.
"A right now, only 5% of the American population is in unions, and 3% of those are government unions. So, it's very, very little," López stated in front of the cameras of the Cuban state channel.
To explain that decline, López directly pointed to Reagan's presidency: "Because if you look at the history of the United States, the governments decimated, when Reagan came in, they decimated all the unions and since then it has been very difficult to overcome, to organize again."
That argument has a partial historical basis: in August 1981, Reagan fired about 11,000 air traffic controllers from the PATCO union after an illegal strike, in an episode that accelerated the decline of the labor movement.
The membership rate fell from 20.1% in 1983 to the current 10%, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
However, the figures that López presented on Cuban TV are not entirely accurate. The 5% figure corresponds approximately to the rate in the private sector —which the official agency projected at 5.9% in 2025— not to "the American population" as a whole.
The overall union membership rate in the United States is 10%, and in 2025 approximately 16.5 million workers were represented by a union, the highest number in 16 years.
Beyond the data, López went further in his political diagnosis: "Right now we are in a leadership crisis."
"People lack direction, and until we can forge leaders like Malcolm X or Fidel, people are lost; they are waiting for someone to save them, and that is not going to happen."
The "Hands Off Cuba" committee, which López co-founded, is an activist organization in support of the regime based in the United States.
In March 2026, he participated in the Convoy Nuestra América, which brought between 500 and 650 activists from 33 countries to the island while it was experiencing blackouts lasting up to 20 hours a day.
"Cuadrando la Caja" is produced by the Informative System of Cuban Television in collaboration with Cubadebate and La Pupila Insomne, and has served as an ideological showcase for the regime.
In July 2025, an economist from the University of Havana admitted on that same program that "Cuba is not a socialist country."
The May Day episode aired in the context of a deep internal crisis: for the first time, the central event was not held in the Plaza de la Revolución but at the Anti-Imperialist Tribune in front of the United States Embassy, with scarce attendance according to independent reports, under the official justification of "austerity".
The program closed with a statement from its host: "It is not enough to interpret, to describe; together we must participate to transform our reality. Workers of all countries, unite."
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