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The Cuban activist and analyst Omar López Montenegro published an essay this week on the platform Cuba x Cuba, which presents a central paradox: the so-called "new man" that the revolution promised to forge for decades is, precisely, the one who now expresses himself most forcefully and directly against the system that created him.
The text begins with the death of Juan Carlos González Marcos, known as Pánfilo, who passed away in Havana on March 26. Pánfilo became a popular symbol in 2009 when he interrupted a street recording and shouted, "What we really need is jama!", a truth that López Montenegro describes as "the backbone of any human arrangement."
For López Montegro, who also presides over the Latin American Center for Nonviolence, that scene was "more than picturesque; it was symptomatic; a kind of allegory of Cuban society under Castroism": an everyday Cuban who, with a burst of spontaneous sincerity, shattered a staged performance that "recurs at all levels."
The essay dismantles the official narrative of popular support with statistics. President Miguel Díaz-Canel presented 6,230,973 signatures in his "commitment to peace" campaign, a figure that represents only 64% of the Cuban population according to the National Office of Statistics and Information, far from the historic 99.9% approval rate that the regime used to proclaim. Moreover, multiple irregularities have been documented: individuals who signed two or three times, and signatures with incomplete identification numbers.
The data from the Cuban Observatory of Conflicts supports the argument. In 2025, the organization recorded 11,268 protests, complaints, and critical statements on the island, more than 25% above the 8,443 compiled in 2024. In just the first quarter of 2026, 3,383 actions of this kind were counted, showing a sustained upward trend.
Among the most recent examples, López Montenegro cites the protests in Morón, where hundreds of people took to the streets with pot banging and slogans of "Freedom" and "Homeland and Life," causing regime representatives to flee in the face of public anger. He also mentions the six-day protest by the so-called "Cuban Spiderman" and the incident in which the First Secretary of the Party in Santiago de Cuba had to climb onto a rooftop to escape the crowd.
In the vast majority of analyses about Cuba, the political scientist warns, "the 'people' option is often regarded, as one would say in mathematics, as a null or empty set." The cries in the streets—for "power," "food," and "freedom"—prove the opposite: "The people know what they want, and they are shouting it out loud."
To illustrate the underlying dynamics of communist systems, the essay references a quote from Václav Havel: "Communist systems present the appearance of a frozen lake, but beneath the uniformity of the ice, there is a whole life in progress, with fish moving around."
López Montenegro draws a historical parallel with the collapse of the European communist bloc: the Solidarity movement in Poland, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and the downfall of Nicolae Ceaușescu in Romania, who was re-elected on November 24, 1989—the same day communism ended in Czechoslovakia—and a month later was booed by more than 100,000 people in Bucharest before his escape and execution. He emphasizes that none of these changes were the result of elite machinations or foreign powers.
The concept of the "new man" was formulated by Ernesto "Che" Guevara in his essay "Socialism and Man in Cuba" (1965), where he proposed that the revolution should create an individual who acts out of solidarity and collective duty, rather than personal interest. This ideal served for decades to justify the material sacrifice of the Cuban population.
"The great paradox of the 'new man' lies in the fact that it is precisely he who expresses himself most directly against the regime of political exclusion," concludes López Montenegro, whose central argument is that there is no real change without concrete civic action: the voice of the Cuban people has been speaking for some time, and it only requires listening.
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