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The Cuban academic and dissident Alina Bárbara López accused the regime of Miguel Díaz-Canel of using the Cuban people as a "human shield" against the pressures from the Trump administration, in an interview published by the Spanish newspaper El Mundo on Saturday, in which she described the government's warlike strategy as "irresponsible and stupid."
López, 60 years old, a doctor in Philosophical Sciences and a specialist in Marxism, spoke from Matanzas, where she is under house arrest, amid constant blackouts and with her phone line intervened by the regime since late 2022.
"They are practically using the Cuban people as a kind of human shield to see if the U.S. reconsiders," he stated, noting that the government is mirroring Fidel Castro's old tactic: "challenge against challenge, bravado against bravado, and they can't do that now because it is absolutely irresponsible."
The dissident dismantled the doctrine of the "War of All the People" that the regime reactivated following Trump's statements in March 2026 regarding the potential use of military force. The regime has been rehearsing this doctrine every Saturday for months, but López warns that the comparison with the war against Batista lacks foundation: "A guerrilla focus would be extinguished by hunger. What farmers would give you food if the state's policy towards the peasantry has contributed to leaving the Cuban countryside to its fate?"
He also questioned the alleged 6.2 million signatures from the campaign "My Signature for the Homeland" that Raúl Castro showcased on May Day. "It is not possible to have gathered more than six million signatures in Cuba, considering we should be around eight million inhabitants," he argued, recalling that between one and a half to two million Cubans have left the island since 2021. "That list is impossible," he concluded.
Regarding everyday reality, López described a country on the brink: “You only have to wait in line to see what is being said, with elderly people lying around trying to receive their meager pension, for days on end because there is no connection, because the banking system has collapsed, because there is no electricity or there is no money in the ATM.” He added, “No one has confidence that change can come from the government, nobody.”
The academic noted that some Cubans have come to prefer foreign intervention rather than continuing under the current government: "That these people reach the point of desiring or seeing foreign intervention as preferable to continuing under the current government reflects the extent of the horrors they are experiencing."
Regarding the political exit, López rejects any partial reform and proposes a Constituent Assembly: "It's not about removing some and putting others in whom I trust, and that's it. It's about dismantling institutions." He points out that Cuba fell from 51st to 91st place in the human development index during Raúl Castro's years in power, after wasting two historic opportunities for reform.
López, who was arrested in April while attempting to protest at the Parque de la Libertad in Matanzas, described her situation as a "legal limbo." The prosecution requested four years of correctional labor without detention for her, but her trial was indefinitely suspended without explanations.
Regarded alongside Rosa María Payá as one of the major figures of Cuban dissent, López was never a member of the Communist Party of Cuba, despite working in a teaching department for Marxism-Leninism. She is unequivocal about the current moment: "In Cuba, right now, the struggle is not between left and right; the struggle is between this dictatorship and democracy. And in democracy, we all must fit."
The context is of maximum tension: economist Pedro Monreal warns of a possible decline in the Cuban GDP of up to 15% in 2026, comparable to the worst year of the Special Period, while Cuba records a historic high of 1,250 political prisoners according to Prisoners Defenders, many of whom participated in the historic protests of July 11, 2021. Other independent organizations place that figure at over 750 incarcerated individuals.
"I am truly outraged by what I am seeing, because it is an irresponsibility and a stupidity...", concluded López regarding the regime's strategy in response to U.S. pressure.
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