The American youtuber Nick Shirley, 24 years old, revealed this Thursday on the PBD Podcast the details of his trip to Cuba, where he spent just 24 hours before fleeing after learning he was being monitored by the regime's intelligence and being confronted by a two-star general in the lobby of his hotel.
Shirley traveled to Havana on April 30 with a visa for journalistic activities (the regime claims her entry was on a tourist visa) and two Spanish-speaking bodyguards, with the aim of documenting the humanitarian crisis on the island.
Upon landing, Cuban authorities confiscated his GoPro cameras, the stabilizer, and his Meta glasses. He only kept his iPhone and a small microphone that the agents did not detect at the bottom of his backpack.
The young man described empty streets, buildings reduced to rubble, garbage burned in the streets due to a lack of means to collect it, and a population steeped in despair. "I didn't expect to see Latinos so depressed... there was no life in the eyes of many of those people," he stated.
Furthermore, the YouTuber reported that the informal fuel market in Cuba has reached unsustainable extremes: a taxi driver told him that his number in the line to get government gasoline was 1,200, while in the black market a liter costs 10 dollars, approximately 40 dollars per gallon.
"The monthly salaries are 14 dollars a month. One person said they haven't eaten eggs in a year," he noted.
The energy crisis worsened following the capture of Nicolás Maduro, which interrupted Venezuela's oil supply to Cuba. Cuba needs eight fuel ships per month but has received only one since December 2025, and the lines at the few gas stations that are operating often exceed 15 hours.
That night, at the government-managed hotel, a woman recorded Shirley interviewing a citizen about communism and alerted the authorities.
When attempting to leave at three in the morning, he found a two-star general waiting for him in the lobby. One of his bodyguards received a direct message from the regime: "The president knows you are here; we have been monitoring you."
"We were fleeing from Cuba on a tricycle at 10 miles per hour," Shirley recounted, describing the escape to the airport. Her bodyguards, veterans of operations in Haiti and Mexico, described the situation as "one of the riskiest they have ever been in."
The regime responded through its counter-information medium "Razones de Cuba", linked to State Security, labeling Shirley's account as "purely an anti-communist script" and claiming that she entered on a tourist visa.
Furthermore, an individual traveled to the same hotel in Havana to record a video claiming that Shirley was not there and that there were no spies, accusing him of being a pretext for a U.S. invasion.
Shirley replied that in her own video she had warned that the material would be published once she had left Cuba, so that man knew perfectly well that she was no longer there.
"I came alone. I was supposed to be there for about 60 hours. It turned into 24 because they surrounded us at the hotel," summarized Shirley, who is still working on editing the full video of his visit, erasing the faces of the Cubans who spoke with him to protect them from reprisals.
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