The Cuban economist Miguel Alejandro Hayes published an article this Friday in the magazine El Estornudo that challenges the dominant narratives about political change in Cuba with an uncomfortable statistical conclusion: three out of four times when a single-party leader loses power, it is not the regime that falls, but the individual.
The analysis, titled "No one knows how to bring down a dictatorship" and published in his column "It's not the economy," is based on the study of 716 exits of autocrats recorded worldwide between 1950 and 2025 to question the Cuban political debate, both in exile and in the opposition, for operating as if there were a simple formula for achieving change.
“Nobody knows how to bring down a dictatorship. Above all, because there is no clear and universal way to do it,” wrote Hayes, who pointed out that the Cuban debate has been caught for decades in what he calls a "future paralysis": “For 50 years, that point B has been approaching, stuck in the I-95 of liberation. Many words, few actions.”
The data presented is compelling. 60% of the autocrat departures between 1950 and 2025 occurred due to internal rules of the regime itself, meaning negotiated transitions from within.
The 18% was due to the natural death of the leader. Almost 13% was attributed to coups or military insurgencies. And only 2.4% resulted from a popular uprising.
With that foundation, Hayes dismantles three narratives that he argues dominate the Cuban debate without real strategic backing.
The first is the fantasy of a U.S. military intervention. According to the analysis, foreign invasions account for only 2.5% of the falls of autocrats over 75 years, "and none since 2016."
The second is the pressure strategy through sanctions and economic reconcentration, which Hayes describes straightforwardly: "It's not a strategy, but identity and culture. Marches of the fighting Miami people to demand the closure of remittance agencies to Cuba."
The economist depicts the exile as being trapped in its own foundational myth, convinced that Washington will one day overthrow Castroism.
The third narrative is the call for a military coup from within Cuba, which Hayes ironically summarizes as: “It fades into a couch appeal for the Cuban military to rise up.”
The implicit conclusion of Hayes' analysis is that without understanding how dictatorships actually fall according to historical evidence, the Cuban debate will continue to be, in his own words, "many words, few actions."
The article is part of an analytical line that Hayes has maintained throughout 2026.
In June, he warned that dismantling GAESA would not be enough to dismantle the power of the regime, because it can recreate equivalent structures in less than 24 hours, as it did when it created Orbit S.A. after OFAC sanctioned FINCIMEX.
"As a Cuban, even as an economist, I am not interested in dismantling GAESA. I am interested in dismantling the regime," he stated.
That same month, following the approval of a package of 176 economic measures by the National Assembly, Hayes described them as a political survival maneuver: “The regime seeks to reconstruct the social and political pact that sustains Castroism by creating economic opportunities designed to buy complicities in exchange for political loyalty.”
This Friday's article expands that framework to the comparative political arena and arrives at a time of intense debate about the transition in Cuba.
The opposition in exile has articulated the Liberation Agreement, signed in Miami in March and ratified in Madrid in June, which brings together more than 30 organizations and proposes a three-phase roadmap towards democratization.
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