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A young Cuban identified as Marlon Joel Martínez, a journalism student, published a text on Facebook titled "I Want to Be a Normal Person," which became a stark portrayal of everyday life under the Cuban dictatorship in 2026.
"In the Island, where night has become a mirror of our waits and silence is not rest, but the forced pause of those who await the return of light, the arrival of water, the appearance of a signal, being normal has become a luxury," he wrote on his profile.
With a striking simplicity, Marlon lists the most fundamental desires that the system denies him: "I want to lie down and feel fresh with a fan and to feel that air isn't a privilege. I want to open the refrigerator without fear that the food has gone bad."
The complaint also covers the collapse of the healthcare system: "I want that, if a family member falls ill, the doctor doesn't look at me with helplessness and tell me that the medication they need is not available."
The boy accurately describes the economic burden of the energy crisis: "I want to use electricity without fear of my equipment getting damaged from the fluctuations, without the collector demanding 1,000 pesos when I've gone more than 35 hours without power."
The water also does not come through the pipes. Marlon points out that he has to pay more than 2,500 pesos for two tanks, in a country where the average salary barely reaches 6,930 pesos per month, equivalent to about 13 dollars at the informal exchange rate.
"I want my mother not to have to light charcoal and burn her hands to feed us," he adds, in an image that summarizes the material regression suffered by the population.
As a journalism student, Marlon also directly addresses the censorship imposed by the regime: "I want no one to tell me that as a journalist I am condemned to censorship."
That claim is supported by the data: Cuba ranks 165th out of 180 countries in the 2025 Press Freedom Index by Reporters Without Borders, the worst in Latin America.
The text also depicts the mental exhaustion of a generation: "I want the night to be for resting, not for doing assignments and tasks because it's the only time I have Internet."
Marlon cites researcher Hans Selye to give a scientific name to what millions of Cubans experience: “Mental tensions, frustrations, insecurity, and lack of direction are some of the most harmful stressors, and psychosomatic studies have demonstrated the frequency with which they cause migraines, ulcers, hypertension, and an incurable unhappiness.”
In the boy's opinion, "that description seems written for us, the Cubans of today, who bear the anguish of the everyday."
It also coincides with a study on the psychological impact of blackouts published in Social Science & Medicine that found "extremely severe" levels of depression and anxiety in Cuban adults exposed to prolonged outages.
The young man concludes his text with a question that encapsulates the struggle of an entire generation: “Being normal, in this land that we love so much, is the most extraordinary dream…. I want to be normal, can I?”
Between 2021 and 2024, more than a million Cubans emigrated to avoid having to answer that question from the Island. Thirty percent of them were between 15 and 34 years old.
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