Dany Olazabal, known on TikTok as “El Yoyo,” published a video last Saturday in which he passionately shares his conviction that Cuba will be free in 2026 and admits that he doesn't know how he will react when that moment arrives.
"You know that Cuba is going to be free this year, right? I want you to hold that thought in your mind, and be one hundred percent in agreement with me," Olazabal begins in the one minute and ten second clip.
The creator describes a mix of emotions that he cannot sort out: "The problem is that I don't know how I'm going to react to this. I don't know if I'm going to jump, cry, scream, throw myself into the street, run, grab a Cuban flag."
Behind that uncertainty lies decades of accumulated pain. "It's so many years for so many of us with such a strong desire for this to end, for the regime to leave, to get them out of there already, because those people are murderers," she states bluntly.
"I know it's something like a weight in my chest, that I feel so much pain accumulated from everything that has happened to us. But how beautiful, how beautiful, how beautiful," she adds, alternating anguish with anticipated joy.
The video closes with a festive promise and a date: "We need to throw a party. We need to experience it like never before. This year, twenty-six, free Cuba."
The clip of Olazabal adds to a wave of viral videos from Cubans in the diaspora that since January 2026 express, with tears, flags, and plans for return, the hope for an imminent change on the island.
That optimism is fed by an unprecedented political context. The Trump administration signed a new executive order on May 1 that expands sanctions against Cuba, targeting individuals and entities linked to corruption or human rights violations.
The Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, warned in an interview with NBC: "We do not want a failed state 150 kilometers from our shores."
Congresswoman María Elvira Salazar declared last Thursday that "we are closer than ever" to a free Cuba and supported Washington's maximum pressure strategy.
In parallel, Cuba is experiencing its worst energy crisis in decades. The Cuban Minister of Energy himself acknowledged in May: "We have absolutely no fuel." According to reports from El País, blackouts in Havana reached 22 hours daily, while the country received only one of the eight monthly shipments of crude oil it needs to sustain its electrical system.
The blend of hope and uncertainty conveyed by Olazabal is not exclusive to him. Sociologist Guillermo Grenier described the mood of the Cuban American community in light of the possibility of change with a phrase that captures the collective sentiment: "Wildly optimistic and wildly fearful at the same time."
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