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The Cuban Prime Minister Manuel Marrero Cruz resorted this Wednesday to a quote from the dictator Fidel Castro to respond to the growing external pressures on the island, in a message published on his X account that acknowledges "increasing challenges" but does not announce any structural reforms.
"The tightened blockade and energy siege are joined by new suffocating measures, which pose increasing challenges to the implementation of the Government Program. But Cuba does not relent in the fidelista commitment to 'emancipate ourselves through our own efforts,'" wrote Marrero.
The message arrived days after President Donald Trump signed an Executive Order titled "Imposing Sanctions on Those Responsible for Repression in Cuba" last Thursday, which blocks assets and interests linked to the regime in U.S. territory and threatens to close accounts on Wall Street for foreign banks that facilitate transactions with sanctioned entities.
The order affects strategic sectors such as energy, defense, mining, and financial services, and took effect immediately.
The chancellor Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla described the new sanctions as "illegal, abusive, reprehensible, curious, and ridiculous," while Miguel Díaz-Canel labeled them as evidence of the "moral poverty" of the United States.
The phrase invoked by Marrero comes from the "Concept of Revolution" proclaimed by Castro on May 1, 2000, in which he defined revolution as "liberating ourselves through our own efforts; it is to challenge powerful dominating forces both within and outside the social and national sphere."
This is not the first time that the Prime Minister has referred to that quote in 2026: he already used it in January during the Extraordinary Provincial Council in Santiago de Cuba —where he stated that “Cubans always rise to the occasion”— and also at the VIII Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba, always as a rhetorical response to the crisis without announcing specific measures.
The tweet was accompanied by a cartoon by the illustrator Lacoster that depicts a mechanical press with the inscription "MADE IN USA" crushing the royal palm and the Cuban flag, a recurring image in the official discourse about the embargo.
The reality facing the island, however, goes beyond external sanctions. The main problems in Cuba today include blackouts lasting between 20 and 25 hours daily across multiple provinces, with a power generation deficit of up to 2,025 MW during peak hours.
Since January 9, the capture of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela has interrupted shipments of between 25,000 and 30,000 barrels of oil per day, and on January 27, Mexico suspended supplies that accounted for 44% of Cuba's imports under pressure from Washington.
Russian oil barely covers 10% of the country's energy needs, and the reserves from the last shipment were exhausted by the end of April with no confirmed supplies for May.
The Secretary of State Marco Rubio debunked the official Cuban narrative by indicating that there is no "naval blockade" or total embargo on oil, but rather a combination of failures in external subsidies and selective restrictions, and he anticipated new actions against the regime.
Marrero himself admitted last Sunday that the modular housing program “is not progressing at the desired pace,” in one of the few public acknowledgments of the scale of the failure, while insisting on a plan against the plan that independent economists deem insufficient in the face of Cuba’s worst economic crisis in decades, with a projected GDP contraction of between 6.5% and 7.2% for 2026.
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