The Cuban Catholic priest Alberto Reyes Pías published on Friday the 170th installment of his weekly column "I Have Been Thinking," with a message directed specifically at the military, police, State Security agents, paramilitaries, and informants who uphold the control system in Cuba, warning them that "a people cannot be chained forever".
The parish priest of Esmeralda, in Camagüey, begins his reflection with a thesis on the nature of power on the Island: "It is evident that control in a country is not maintained by a power elite, no matter how large it may be, and even less so in Cuba, where real power is concentrated in a single family."
From that premise, it describes the architecture of control: "For a country to remain under control, a whole system of 'intermediaries' is necessary, a multitude of individuals ranging from military personnel to Party officials, along with the vast network of paramilitaries or 'civil agents', watchdogs, spies, informers..."
The priest acknowledges the limits of what can be understood from the outside: "We do not know how the central power manages to keep them in its service, whether indoctrination still works, or if it is through fear, whether real or imagined." He also does not know, he says, what orders they have or what criteria define what is permitted and what is suppressed.
In the face of that uncertainty, the text constructs a list of shared certainties. Reyes tells those who uphold the system that they share the same exhaustion with the people: "We know that both you and we are tired, tired of living amidst so much scarcity and misery, wearing ourselves out just to obtain what is necessary for each day, anguished by the absence of medicine, tired of watching the only life we have dwindle away in the struggle for survival."
The enumeration includes the wound of emigration: “We know that both you and we suffer the separation from our children, who have chosen to emigrate and leave forever far from their homeland and the home that bore them.” This statement carries significant weight: according to the National Office of Statistics and Information, Cuba lost 245,264 residents due to emigration alone in 2025.
Reyes also identifies fear as a common denominator: "We know that both you and we want to live without fear: without fear of speaking your minds, without fear of being watched, without fear of 'falling from grace' if you say or do something that is not 'politically correct'." He adds that there are families and friends who tell them, in secret, "I don't want this for my children."
The priest acknowledges that breaking free from the system is not simple: "We know that it’s not easy to 'break away from the system' once you are part of the machinery. That’s why we must pray for you, because we understand that finding alternatives is not easy, although the search for options is a personal matter and, perhaps today, necessary."
The text concludes with a statement that serves as a historical warning: "[...] both you and we know that the future of Cuba does not belong to socialism, that a people cannot be chained forever, and that it is most likely that there will be nothing left of this system."
This delivery is part of an ongoing series of critical columns. Last July, Reyes described Cuba as a country "at war" against its own people and argued that the system is sustained more by fear of change than by ideological conviction. In April, he accused the government of committing crimes against humanity, and in March he warned that people do not usually forgive abuses. None of this silenced his voice, not even the summons that State Security issued to him in January along with another priest in Camagüey.
The context in which column 170 appears is that of documented and sustained repression. According to the Cuban Human Rights Observatory, the regime executed 1,949 repressive actions in the first half of 2026. As of the end of June, Prisoners Defenders had counted more than 1,300 political prisoners active on the Island.
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