A professor from the University of Miami published an opinion article this Monday in the New York Times warning that Cuba has run out of time and that the Cuban people can no longer wait while Washington and Havana are caught in a never-ending standoff.
The text, signed by Michael J. Bustamante, a specialist in Cuban and Cuban-American studies, describes the situation on the island as a "slow suffocation" that no energy improvisation or the "creative resistance" preached by Miguel Díaz-Canel can conceal anymore.
Bustamante depicts a Cuba where electricity returns for only one or two hours a day, where food and medicine depend on shipments from relatives abroad, and where the summer heat keeps children from sleeping.
The situation, worsened since January by the de facto oil blockade imposed by the Trump administration, has brought the Cuban people "to the limit of what they can endure," according to the academic.
The article comes at a time when social unrest in Cuba has reached record levels: nightly protests with pots and pans, burning barricades made of garbage, and power outages of up to 24 hours have become almost daily occurrences.
The Cuban Observatory of Conflicts recorded 107 in-person street protests in June, a monthly record. And a slide mistakenly shown during a televised government meeting revealed that the regime’s own officials fear a "social outburst."
This accumulated tension is also reflected in public opinion. A survey by El Toque published in May, with over 42,000 valid responses, showed that 60.9% of participants supported direct military intervention by the U.S. in Cuba and 64.9% favored the overthrow of the government "by any necessary means, including armed action."
Bustamante reconstructs the diplomatic sequence of recent months: during the spring, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and CIA Director John Ratcliffe held direct contacts with the grandson of Raúl Castro and members of the Cuban security apparatus, exploring an agreement that would allow some communist authorities to remain in power in exchange for economic liberalization, the release of political prisoners, and the severing of ties with Washington's adversaries.
Since May, that route has been closed: the regime rejected the demands for a change in leadership, and the United States responded with secondary sanctions that forced many foreign companies to leave the island.
Neither the economic liberalization package announced in June nor the release of the artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara —who stated he was "expelled from Cuba" upon arriving in Miami— succeeded in persuading the Trump administration to relent in its demands.
The author analyzes the scenarios considered by various actors: a collapse reminiscent of Eastern Europe in 1989, a negotiated transition, or military action leading to a U.S. protectorate similar to what followed Maduro’s capture in Venezuela.
The activist Rosa María Payá has described the Cuban government as the “Berlin Wall of our times.” However, Bustamante warns that the increasing instability does not guarantee the collapse of the regime: the repressive apparatus remains intact, the opposition is weakened, and up to two million Cubans have left the island since 2020, replacing political mobilization with emigration.
The regime, for its part, has been criminally charged in the United States—Raúl Castro faces charges for the downing of planes from Hermanos al Rescate in 1996—and shows little willingness to concede. For Bustamante, accepting Washington's conditions would mean "negotiating the regime's own end."
Governments can afford to continue playing tug-of-war. Ordinary Cubans cannot, concludes the academic, emphasizing that the people of the island cannot indefinitely postpone their meals, medical treatments, or the most important decisions of their lives.
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