The historian Jorge L. León made a striking statement during a discussion moderated about the transition in Cuba: the country has regressed more than three centuries in its living conditions, to the point that the slaves of the 19th century ate better than millions of Cubans today.
"Our country has gone backward more than three centuries. In the 17th century, people drank coffee with milk. They ate a piece of bread. They had meat. Even plantation slaves in the mid-19th century ate jerky and meat. Even the slaves," León stated on the program hosted by Tania Costa, which also featured historian Omar Sixto and researcher Alejandro González Acosta from the National Autonomous University of Mexico.
The comparison is not merely rhetorical. The historian Manuel Moreno Fraginals documented in his classic work "El Ingenio" that the slaves on Cuban plantations received a daily ration of half a pound of jerked beef or cod, root vegetables, and cornmeal, regulated even by the Cuba Regulation of 1842 to ensure their working capacity.
Today, however, one in three Cuban families experiences hunger at least once in the past 30 days, according to the Food Monitor Program, which also reported that 96.91% of the population lacks adequate access to food.
León rejected the usual comparisons with the post-war period of 1898 and was emphatic: "In the time after the Cuban-Spanish-American War in '98, it is true that there were diseases and yellow fever, but to encompass an entire nation... No, that's not it."
To illustrate the magnitude of the crisis, the historian used a specific and brutal image: "That a family of four or five people has to chop a small piece of tomato into four pieces to make it through the day. Because they have nothing. Because they have no gas, because they have no water, because they have no electricity, because they have no transportation to get to a neighbor's house to eat. This has never been experienced in our country."
The collapse is not limited to food. León described the hospital system with equal bluntness: "A hospital in Cuba is like a cemetery; it's a pass to the cemetery. There's nothing there. There’s no sheet, no light bulb, no bed, no aspirin, nothing. That never happened in Cuba."
The historian also pointed directly at the EU. "Europe doesn't know what is happening in Cuba. Why not? Why doesn't it want to know? Or does it know and wants to maintain its position of ambiguous complicity?"
León left no room for ambiguity regarding what he called an unprecedented tragedy. "The deaths are a daily occurrence. There is no way to soften the tragedy." He added, "They, the tyranny, are willing to do anything. So we must also be prepared to do anything."
80% of Cubans believe the current crisis is worse than the Special Period of the 1990s, according to a survey from March 2026, making the present moment the most severe in the modern history of the island.
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